Salesforce

Salesforce is the world's largest CRM (Customer Relationship Management) company, founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff and Parker Harris. Salesforce pioneered cloud-based enterprise software and serves over 150,000 companies worldwide.

Salesforce's AI strategy centers on Einstein AI and Agentforce, the company's platform for building and deploying autonomous AI agents across sales, service, marketing, and commerce. Agentforce agents can handle customer inquiries, qualify leads, manage cases, and take actions in Salesforce — operating autonomously within defined guardrails. Einstein GPT provides generative AI capabilities across the Salesforce platform, including email drafting, code generation, and predictive analytics. Data Cloud, Salesforce's real-time data platform, unifies customer data to power AI personalization.

Salesforce's massive enterprise distribution (used by 90%+ of Fortune 500) gives its AI features immediate access to the workflows where customer-facing teams spend their days. The company has invested heavily in AI research through Salesforce AI Research and has made strategic investments in AI companies including Anthropic. CEO Marc Benioff has positioned Agentforce as the company's central growth strategy.

In 2026, Salesforce agreed to acquire Fin — a leading customer-service AI agent, formerly Intercom — for approximately $3.6 billion, folding it into Agentforce and reinforcing Benioff's positioning of autonomous agents as Salesforce's central growth strategy.

On August 26, 2026 Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, an expanded partnership that runs in both directions. Claude serves as a reasoning model for the Atlas Reasoning Engine and powers Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker by default, running through Amazon Bedrock inside the Salesforce Trust Boundary so regulated-industry customers can deploy it without data leaving that environment. Pointing outward, a plugin called Salesforce in Claude carries 37 prebuilt sales skills that let a seller work an entire revenue cycle from inside Claude, with actions routed back through Salesforce so business rules are enforced. Claude also became the default model across Slack, including Slackbot. Chief executive Marc Benioff summarised the design as "the UI is the AI" — a company whose product has always been its interface conceding that the interface can now be a chat window it does not own.

Three weeks later Salesforce moved in the other direction and built a model of its own. On September 15, 2026 it announced Koa, its first CRM reasoning model, created by post-training NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Super on synthetic scenarios modelled on enterprise workflows across more than 14 industries, with no customer data in the training corpus. Until Koa, multi-step reasoning inside Agentforce was routed out to a frontier model through the platform's AI gateway; Salesforce now holds the weights and runs post-training and inference inside its own trust boundary. On its own CRM benchmark the company reports Koa matching or exceeding leading models on CRM actions with three times fewer errors, a vendor-run benchmark on a vendor-defined task set. The strategic point is that the largest enterprise software company concluded the reasoning layer was too important to rent — while being careful to say Koa is an alternative within Agentforce rather than a replacement for Claudeforce. It reached select pilot customers at announcement, with general availability expected in winter 2026 in US regions.