Marc Benioff is getting his mojo back as Salesforce's AI strength quiets skeptics

Salesforce and Anthropic have announced a major new partnership called Claudeforce, which aims to integrate the AI Claude into Salesforce's suite of services. The deal includes a new plugin with 37 pre-built sales skills, allowing Claude to access customer data and information stored in Salesforce to carry out tasks more efficiently.

This includes a new feature called Salesforce in Claude, which gives Claude direct access to customer data and business context, enabling it to automate pipeline updates and take action based on live revenue context. Additionally, Claude will be integrated into Agentforce, serving as a reasoning model for the Atlas Reasoning Engine, and powering Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker by default.

The partnership also makes Claude the default model for Slack, serving as the intelligent backbone of the platform. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei emphasized the safe and capable nature of Claude, which is used by leading businesses for their most important work. In contrast, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dismissed concerns about a "SaaSpocalypse," stating that frontier models like Claude depend on CRM systems like Salesforce and cannot replace them.

Benioff noted that the new financial results show a 435% surge in spending on Salesforce and Slack from a year ago, with nine of the top 10 AI companies using Salesforce and Slack as their foundation for AI agents. He emphasized that Salesforce is a data business and that AI models like Claude require a high level of intelligence, security, and user control.