Salesforce 's announced acquisition of Informatica. Why investors may be underrating the growth of 5G. Then, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp joins Ricky for a look at annuities and how they actually work.

Informatica data management for agentic AI will be integrated into Salesforce CRM, Tableau, MuleSoft, and more.

Salesforce Inc. has agreed to buy Informatica Inc. for about $8 billion, sealing the deal on a software firm that had seen its shares plunge by as much as 59% since the companies’ first talks failed last year.

Salesforce founder Marc Benioff has tested investors’ patience with costly M&A. Benioff, whose penchant for zen wisdom went as far as gathering a coterie of monks, saw his empire disrupted by pushy hedge funds. Informatica’s data-wrangling nous could even help the company’s efforts to sell artificial intelligence-infused software.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff talked Informatica, future M&A, AI, GenAI, Agentforce and AI agents on Wdnesday’s Q1 earnings call.

The company is focused on improving the monetization of its Agentforce platform, which uses AI to automate business tasks.

Salesforce already possesses an extraordinary amount of data on the world’s biggest companies. The software giant’s acquisition of data management and analytics firm Informatica, however, signals its AI-agent platform,

Salesforce is buying Informatica for $8 billion, a deal that could see the San Francisco tech giant fold in a competitor's slate of data management tools.