Agents, Agents, Everywhere Agents - Informatica World 2025

What would you expect from the vendor who has one of the richest sets of metadata, the most complete set of data engineering capabilities in a single platform, and a commitment to innovation and modernization that eclipses most of their competitors? I expected nothing less than the Agentic Future; and that is exactly what was unveiled at Informatica World 2025.

Amit Walia, CEO at Informatica, kicked things off with a keynote highlighting the fact that everything changes with AI, but some things stay the same. No matter how much technology morphs, there is always a requirement for quality data. Walia made it clear that the need for high caliber data is even greater considering the speed at which change is occurring. For example, it took five days for Chat GPT to get a million users; and in March 2025, they had 5.6 billion unique users. What is at stake? The potential value being created by AI is around $15.7 trillion. With the groundwork set, Informatica plans to take full advantage of the opportunity that lies ahead; first, with the introduction of automated data engineering, then with the deployment and orchestration of AI agents.

My favorite part of the keynote was toward the end, when Walia was drilling into what is new with their core platform, IDMC. But instead of launching into all of the integration and data engineering functions, it was all about CLAIRE^®, the rich layer of metadata that lies beneath the surface of IDMC. CLAIRE had always been under the covers, quietly gluing together all the pieces of the platform, silently running billions of automations behind the scenes. But on this day, CLAIRE emerged as the star of the show. She is no longer underneath; she becomes the new front end. She rises to the most prominent position because she is the driver of agentic AI both within and outside the platform. CLAIRE was the system of record, but now she becomes the system of intelligence. It is on this subtle shift that all of the other announcements hang. The active use of a rich set of technical, business, usage, and operational metadata is what drives the AI future. CLAIRE becomes the UX for IDMC, the agentic UX where English becomes the way we work. The metadata system of intelligence becomes the heart of the application.

At the event, Informatica announced the availability of CLAIRE GPT, the preview of several CLAIRE AI Agents, the preview of an AI Agent Engineering platform, updates to their strategic partnerships, and a number of new features being rolled out in IDMC, their integrated data management cloud. These announcements are no surprise since Informatica has been unifying data engineering and automating repetitive tasks across their platform for many years. Their active metadata warehouse, CLAIRE, has a rich set of metadata, both business and technical, to drive complete AI enablement, and possibly to drive the agentic future.

AI Agent Engineering

AI Agent Engineering is a new service within Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform™ that enables organizations to build, connect, manage, and govern multi-agent environments. Because agents are probabilistic, as opposed to former rule-based automations, they require a unique approach with access to a broad spectrum of data, analytics, AI models, and the metadata that brings all of these elements together. AI Agent Engineering is expected to be available globally in fall of 2025.

Because AI Agent Engineering is part of an integrated data management platform built on a metadata system of intelligence, users will be able to deploy AI agents on trusted, well-defined data. This is something that every organization is striving to achieve. The integrated platform should also make it easier for users to build AI pipelines that separate data used in LLMs and data used for analytics in a way that creates more accurate, more valuable results.

CLAIRE AI Agents

CLAIRE Agents are a suite of autonomous digital assistants designed to augment enterprise data management. They utilize reasoning and planning models to move beyond the automation of repetitive tasks, to the automation of complex data operations. Built on open standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP), the agents are ready for interaction with other agents and applications, opening the IDMC platform to play a central role in the transformation of the application world into an agentic world.

The initial set of agents should be available for preview in the fall of 2025.

• Data Quality Agent: Continuously monitors and remediates data quality across cloud warehouses, master data management (MDM) systems and third-party repositories.

• Data Discovery Agent: Rapidly identifies relevant, trusted and compliant data assets for analytics and AI.
• Data Lineage Agent: Automatically generates granular data lineage across diverse coding environments.
• Data Ingestion Agent: Simplifies building complex ingestion and replication pipelines.
• ELT Agent: Automates optimized ELT jobs for Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Microsoft Fabric.
• Modernization Agent: Automates data engineering and integration workflows to Informatica’s AI-powered cloud data management platform.
• Product Experience Agent: Enrich product data attributes from a hierarchy/taxonomy in Informatica MDM.
• Data Exploration Agent: Automates goal-based data exploration of structured enterprise datasets in cloud data warehouses and data lakes.

“As the world of AI agents proliferates, the winners will be those who can connect, govern and manage agents at scale while providing enterprise-wide access to trusted data,” said Amit Walia, CEO at Informatica. “With the launch of CLAIRE® Agents and AI Agent Engineering, we are redefining what is possible in data management and AI orchestration. By combining the deep intelligence of our CLAIRE Agents with a no-code, enterprise-grade foundation, Informatica empowers businesses to turn autonomous agents into a strategic advantage, securely and confidently. With AI Agent Engineering, we’re enabling organizations to rapidly build, connect and orchestrate intelligent agent workflows across complex hybrid ecosystems, all without writing a single line of code.”

Informatica Partnership Advancement

Informatica also announced expanded partnerships with AWS, Databricks, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and Salesforce.

• AWS: GenAI Competency certification along with new product capabilities including AI agents with Amazon Bedrock, SQL ELT for Amazon Redshift and new connector for Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse.
• Databricks: An expanded partnership to help customers migrate to its AI-powered cloud data management platform to provide a complete data foundation for future analytics and AI workloads.
• Microsoft: A new strategic agreement and deeper product integrations.
• NVIDIA: Integration of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform with NVIDIA AI Enterprise. NVIDIA AI Enterprise will deliver a pathway for building production-grade AI agents leveraging NVIDIA’s inferencing model.
• Oracle – MDM SaaS on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enabling customers to use Informatica MDM natively in the OCI environment.
• Salesforce – Plans to deliver AI-driven customer intelligence with new Agentforce integration.

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)

This coverage does not include all of the many detailed additions and advancements that were made in every aspect of Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud. Informatica continues to listen to customers, add new features, and make sure that IDMC continues to grow toward inclusion of everything that is part of on-premises products; and Informatica is committed to “cloud-first” for any new features and capabilities.

Ferraro Consulting POV

Since Informatica World 2025, pending regulatory review, Salesforce announced their intention to acquire Informatica, changing the importance and perspective of the announcements made at the event. However, understanding the significance of the announcements apart from the acquisition is vital to making sense of the acquisition.

The Ferraro Consulting POV is that Informatica continues to hold on to its leadership position as a unified data engineering platform, bringing together the sum of 8-10 different data engineering platforms as part of a single offering.

Informatica’s investment in a metadata-driven approach to integrated data management is paying off. What began as a very technical solution to bring together Informatica’s varied assets, became the core of their cloud offering, and now sits ready to bring together the worlds of applications, data, and AI for the agentic future.

Informatica’s rate of innovation is impressive. It is rare for a company to be able to transform digitally, and then to go on to continue to innovate; and all the while maintaining profitable execution. The company continues to deliver on its promises. When they say something is coming, it arrives, not always on time, but usually as expected by customers.

Especially for customers wanting to move to a unified data engineering platform, Informatica is a solid choice. Customers would do well to see this, not as a consolidation opportunity, but instead as a unification opportunity. Unification will streamline data engineering, speed time to value for applications, analytics, and AI, and open the door for new AI-driven products, services, and solutions.

Regarding Salesforce’s planned acquisition of Informatica, this is big news! The Informatica World 2025 announcements already positioned Informatica to become the deployer and orchestrator of the agentic future. This acquisition, once closed, will speed the path forward to multi-agent orchestration. While many have described the acquisition around the themes of data management, data integration, iPaas, API integration, master data management, and governance, this acquisition is about positioning Salesforce in the running to be at the center of agentic AI.

The deployment, orchestration, and optimization of AI agents requires a metadata layer, an application layer, an analytical layer, an agentic layer, and a way to bring all the layers together. The way to bring them together is metadata, business and technical. Informatica has what is perhaps the richest set of metadata at the center of the data management universe, and the value of that must have become obvious to Salesforce. CLAIRE gets center stage in this 8 billion acquisition. Informatica has significant capabilities for the integration of data, applications, analytics, and agents. Salesforce has customer-centric applications, a strong background in AI (think Einstein), and a strong vision for AI agents. It will be interesting to see what will happen when CLAIRE meets Einstein. The surprise? The expectation was that Informatica would make more acquisitions, not that Informatica would be acquired. But, as we now know, it is time for the private equity investors to cash out.

For more information check out www.ferraroconsulting.com, or connect with @John Santaferraro on LinkedIn.