Salesforce’s Kodak moment: Rewriting scripture to stay relevant
AI in business
At the height of its power, Kodak was not blind. Contrary to the myth, it saw the digital future. It even invented it and still failed to act. Not because it didn’t see what was coming, but because it held its own story too tightly.
It honoured its legacy, its film empire, its once-perfect model and struggled to let go. That’s what makes it a cautionary tale. Not a lack of foresight, but a reluctance to reimagine what had once worked so well.
That is the danger of dogma.
Salesforce, a company born in the cloud and well versed in CRM, is in the midst of a quiet but seismic self-reformation. Not because it is broken. Not because the market demands it. But because, like any great institution, it understands that success can harden over time unless it's actively questioned. It knows that dogma, if left unchecked, becomes the prelude to decline.
The risk of being right for too long
Organisational dogma doesn’t begin with failure, but rather with success. When a strategy works, especially at scale, it gets locked in. Processes become playbooks, playbooks become doctrine. And, over time, teams stop asking why something is done a certain way and focus instead on doing it faster, bigger and more efficiently. What once was innovation becomes routine.
And routine, left unexamined, becomes dogma.
That’s what happened with manual data entry. For years, it powered the CRM industry. Salesforce built a world-class platform around it, enabling companies to log, track and manage customer relationships at scale. It worked, and it worked reliably.
But as AI advanced, that model started to feel out of sync. A new question emerged.. what if AI is making data entry obsolete?
Today’s users don’t want to spend time logging calls or writing up notes. They expect systems that already know. Tools that can listen, learn, and connect the dots. Tools that pull context from emails, meetings, support tickets and conversations without needing to be told where to look. In an age of generative intelligence, ambient data and real-time context, relying on manual input is a liability.
To its credit, Salesforce heard the signal and moved.
A transformative bet - Informatica
On May 27, 2025, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica for approximately $8 billion.
Why does this matter?
Informatica is not merely a data player. It is a pioneer in AI‑powered data management. Its suite includes advanced data catalog, integration, governance, quality, privacy, metadata and Master Data Management (MDM) capabilities. And when combined with Salesforce’s Data Cloud, Agentforce, MuleSoft, Tableau and Customer 360, the result is a unified architecture for enterprise AI. Something Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff describes as “the most complete, agent‑ready data platform in the industry”
Learning from the ghosts of giants
The history of business is littered with once-great empires that collapsed under the weight of their own convictions. Blockbuster famously had the chance to buy Netflix and laughed it out of the room. Nokia saw the smartphone tsunami coming and still drowned in it. Xerox invented the graphical user interface but could not sell it to itself.
What these companies shared was not stupidity. It was loyalty to a way of doing things, a way of seeing the world, a culture that conflated success with infallibility.
Salesforce’s real edge is seeing that legacy isn’t the problem. The risk is in treating it as untouchable.
The playbook for dogma-free growth
For today’s business leaders, the Salesforce story is not just a case study. It is a cautionary compass. It reveals a playbook for how to inoculate your organisation against dogma:
- Kill your darlings early. The most sacred parts of your business model are likely the most vulnerable. If you do not challenge them, someone else will.
- Aggregate laterally. Value no longer lives in vertical stacks of specialised data. It flows in horizontal streams that cut across departments, devices and disciplines.
- Build systems that learn. Intelligence must be ambient, not requested. In a world of AI-native competitors, latency is death.
- Question success, not just failure. Dogma feeds on achievement. The best time to rethink everything is precisely when things are going well.
The new playbook
Salesforce isn’t perfect. But in a business world that often values consistency more than curiosity, its decision to rethink its own model is both unusual and important. It shows that real transformation doesn’t have to wait for a crisis. It can be a way to stay ahead of one.
For any company looking to stay relevant, the challenge is learning to let go of what worked in the past. The choice isn’t just between sticking with what you know or trying something new. It’s about recognising whether what made you successful can evolve fast enough to keep you successful.
Or, as the new Salesforce might say, the data will decide.
