Decidr

Not out of ignorance, but because of reverence. Reverence for its own legacy, for its film empire, for a business model too sacred to question. And that is why, it is the great corporate tragedy i.e. not a failure of vision, but of imagination shackled by doctrine.

That is the danger of dogma.

Salesforce, a company born in the cloud and baptised in the gospel of 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 ossifies unless challenged. It knows that dogma, if left unchecked, becomes the prelude to decline.

The risk of being right for too long

Organisational dogma is not incompetence. It is competence calcified. It is what happens when yesterday’s breakthroughs become today’s blind spots. In the early days, Salesforce changed the world by dragging enterprise software out of the server room and into the browser. It evangelised the cloud with a near-religious fervor, made “No Software” its rallying cry and built a trillion-dollar industry on the backs of salespeople diligently entering customer data by hand.

But therein lay the rub. Manual data entry, the bedrock of CRM, became its own religion. Salesforce built temples to it, sold licenses by the millions and trained legions of users in its rituals. It was, for years, the model of repeatable, scalable, software-as-a-service perfection.

Then came the whisper of heresy… “What if data entry itself is obsolete?”

Today’s users do not want to key in notes, they want systems that already know. They want tools that observe, infer and predict. Systems that connect dots across Slack conversations, calendar events, email threads and customer service tickets without being told to. The age of generative intelligence and ambient data has little patience for tools that still rely on human input as their primary fuel.

To its credit, Salesforce heard the rumblings and acted.

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 great insight is that legacy is not the enemy. The danger lies in worshipping it.

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:

1. 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.
2. Aggregate laterally. Value no longer lives in vertical stacks of specialised data. It flows in horizontal streams that cut across departments, devices and disciplines.
3. Build systems that learn. Intelligence must be ambient, not requested. In a world of AI-native competitors, latency is death.
4. Question success, not just failure. Dogma feeds on achievement. The best time to rethink everything is precisely when things are going well.

The new catechism

Salesforce may not be perfect. But in a business culture that still rewards consistency over curiosity, its willingness to cannibalise its own orthodoxy is rare and instructive. It reminds us that transformation is not a response to failure. It is a hedge against it.

To avoid becoming a cautionary tale, companies must become comfortable rewriting their own scripture. The choice is not between legacy and reinvention. The real question is whether your legacy can survive reinvention.

Or as the new Salesforce might suggest… the data will tell us.