Summer '26 is the largest Marketing Cloud Next release so far, and the most lopsided. Almost everything aimed at marketers lands in Next. Marketing Cloud Engagement gets a single item, and it is plumbing.

That ratio is the story. The features are worth knowing about; the distribution is worth planning around.

AMPscript is now in Marketing Cloud Next

The headline item. Next now supports AMPscript alongside the Handlebars support added in Spring '26, with validation built into the message editor. You can retrieve, transform and format CRM and profile data directly in email content.

If you have spent a decade in Engagement, this is the single change that most alters how a migration feels. AMPscript was the main reason serious Engagement builds could not be lifted into Next without a rewrite — every lookup, every conditional, every format call had to be re-expressed. That objection is now much smaller.

RCS arrives, and it needs more setup than SMS

Rich Communication Services is generally available: branded cards, images, carousels and suggested-reply buttons, with content managed as a reusable type in Salesforce CMS.

RCS is the most genuinely new channel here. It puts branded, interactive content in the native messaging app, with delivery and read signals that SMS never gave you.

The agent features are real, but they change who does the work

Three Agentforce-powered capabilities went GA:

• Account Nurturing Agent — identifies buying groups and orchestrates touchpoints as an opportunity progresses.
• Distributed Marketing Agent — surfaces the right email template for sales users and reports on engagement with what they send.
• Campaign Creation and Journey Decisioning agents — now consolidated into the new Agentforce Builder.

Alongside them, Engagement History on Opportunities puts a unified dashboard of email, form and web activity directly on the Opportunity record.

Triggers and offers: useful if you sell online, quiet if you do not

Summer '26 adds automated triggers for abandoned carts, price drops, back-in-stock events and order milestones, plus dynamic offers embedded in email using structured offer data.

This is squarely aimed at self-service, transaction-driven models. If you sell through a long, consultative cycle, there is less here than the announcement suggests — the triggers assume a commerce-shaped signal you may not have.

Signup forms reduce your dependency on segmentation

Forms can now invoke flows the way completion actions used to, and you can populate lists by CSV upload or by adding members manually — without routing everything through Data 360 segmentation logic.

What Marketing Cloud Engagement got

One item: Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, an open framework that makes platform data and automations reachable by external AI agents.

It is genuinely interesting technology and it will matter to a small number of teams building their own agent tooling. For most Engagement users it changes nothing about next quarter.

What we would actually do this quarter

1. Audit your AMPscript against the three buckets above. This is the highest-value half-day in the release, and it turns a vague migration fear into a number.
2. Start RCS sender verification if messaging matters to you. The lead time, not the build, is the constraint.
3. Decide who owns agent output before enabling the Account Nurturing or Distributed Marketing agents.
4. Do not start new strategic build in Engagement without asking whether it belongs in Next. Keep running what runs; be deliberate about what you add.
5. Check your add-on position. Several multi-channel features consume add-on credits or need a higher SKU. Confirm what you are entitled to before you design around it.

One caveat on everything above

Release notes describe what shipped, not what is switched on in your org. Availability varies by edition, SKU and region, and several of the multi-channel features consume add-on credits. Check your own entitlements in Setup before you plan around anything here — or ask us and we will check with you.

Sources

• Salesforce Release Notes (official)