The 2026 Magic Quadrant reveals a market “bifurcating into platformization and agentification”
Gartner has released its 2026 Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms, and Salesforce is the definitive Leader — positioned furthest right on both Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. But the ranking itself isn’t the story. The story is about what Gartner now expects this category to deliver.
In its evaluation, Gartner describes Salesforce Data Cloud (recently renamed to Data 360 in October 2025 at Dreamforce) as demonstrating “an innovative vision for a context engine for unifying structured and unstructured data to serve as a foundation for agents and automation.” That phrase — context engine — signals a fundamental shift in how the analyst firm views this market. This isn’t a marketing technology evaluation anymore. It’s an assessment of which vendors can provide the foundation for enterprise AI.
The Market Bifurcation
Gartner’s opening line sets the frame: “The customer data platform market is bifurcating into platformization and agentification.” The firm advises buyers to “assess their needs for orchestration or autonomy, prioritize warehouse-native and composable architectures, evaluate cost-to-value and invest in agentic AI and automation.”
This represents a decisive break from historical CDP evaluations focused on marketing data unification and campaign activation. Gartner now describes CDP technology as “an enterprise data strategy and technology decision” where “enterprise IT organizations view the investment as an essential component for both upstream technical users and downstream business users.”
The implications are significant. Leaders in this market, according to Gartner, “support the expanded, enterprise-wide scope of the CDP, which now serves as an intelligent data fabric and context engine.” The category has evolved from marketing tools to enterprise data foundation.
Why Salesforce Won
Gartner’s evaluation highlighted several capabilities that drove Salesforce’s positioning.
On vision, the report states Salesforce “has a broad product strategy, delivering an emerging set of agent orchestration capabilities, inclusive of agentic AI that can autonomously make decisions and take actions across Marketing, Sales, Service, Commerce, Analytics and Industry Clouds.” This cross-functional scope distinguishes platform leaders from vendors still focused on marketing activation.
On execution, the numbers are substantial. Gartner reports Data 360 “has been deployed by more than 25,000 organizations, with over 60 trillion records unified and more than 4 trillion activations in 2024.” Zero-copy federation — the capability that enables Data 360 to query external data warehouses without moving data — is “growing nearly 300%,” allowing enterprises to leverage existing data warehouse investments.
Rahul Auradkar, President of Data Foundations at Salesforce, frames the competitive distinction directly: “Most competitors have always stuck with the ‘M’ in CDP — they’ve really been marketing data platforms. We put the ‘C’ back in CDP.”
The contrast with other vendors validates this framing. Gartner positions Adobe as a Visionary rather than a Leader, noting that “Adobe’s CDP is a marketing-centric platform and is not well suited to solve enterprise-wide CDP needs.” The evaluation criteria have shifted beneath vendors still optimizing for campaign activation.
What This Means in Practice
The abstract concept of a “context engine” becomes concrete when you see it deployed. Dr. Romi Chopra offers a compelling example.
Chopra is a physician-entrepreneur who founded MIMIT Healthcare, building what he calls an “agentic enterprise” on the Salesforce platform. His architecture wraps an intelligent operating layer around traditional electronic health records, using MuleSoft for integration and Data 360 as the unifying substrate.
“Data is like oil,” Chopra explains. “If it’s in different tanks everywhere, it doesn’t work. So, we got it all in one place — we harmonized it, we unified it, we segmented it, we activated it. Now if a patient comes in, their labs from somewhere else, their records from somewhere else — through Data 360, I click on their 360 profile and I can see it all.”
The results are tangible. Patients reach their care team 24/7 via text, WhatsApp, or email. AI agents summarize medical histories. Care teams coordinate through Slack with full visibility into patient context. When a patient experiences post-procedure complications at 2 AM, they message the contact center, the on-call physician responds with complete context, and the interaction is logged for the morning team — all without an emergency room visit.
“Today we are wall-to-wall Salesforce,” Chopra says. “We are basically an agentic enterprise. All your data —…
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