Salesforce opens CRM data to external AI interfaces

Salesforce has introduced AIforce, an innovative interface layer that enables workers and artificial intelligence agents to access live customer relationship management (CRM) data and functionality from various tools like Claude, Slack, and Amazon Quick. Unveiled at Dreamforce 2026, AIforce allows external AI interfaces to use Salesforce data, business logic, and context without opening the Salesforce application itself.

Salesforce has positioned AIforce as the crucial connection layer between its platform and an increasing number of AI applications.

AIforce provides a secure and controlled interface, ensuring that users and agents can only see information they are authorized to access. All requests and actions are routed through Salesforce, maintaining existing access controls configured by customers. Salesforce offers various AI interface options, including Claudeforce, Slackforce, and Agentforce Coworker, which are directly connected to Salesforce's core platform.

Through its AgentExchange ecosystem, Salesforce enables partners to build interfaces and agents using its Headless Toolkit, which features Model Context Protocol servers, APIs, plug-ins, skills, and development tools. Salesforce's AgentExchange partnership includes Anthropic, AWS, Google, and OpenAI, among others, all working on integrations through the toolkit globally.

Salesforce has also integrated Tableau analytics and capabilities into Agentforce, expanding the toolkit's functionality across various Salesforce modules, such as service, marketing, and commerce, as well as industry-specific workflows. Slackforce allows Salesforce context to be incorporated into Slack conversations and workflows, enabling users to work with accounts, record call notes, and update records using natural language prompts.

Slackbot can draw on both Slack conversations and governed Salesforce context to identify account changes, examine support cases, and initiate follow-up actions.

Furthermore, Salesforce has strengthened its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), making Salesforce data, context, and skills accessible within Amazon Quick. This integration allows users to retrieve Salesforce pipeline information, account summaries, service cases, and operational analytics without custom integration or data migration. The AWS DevOps Agent will also be introduced into Slack, with additional agents like Security, FinOps, and Partner Central following soon.

Salesforce's Agentforce includes its first CRM reasoning model, Koa, based on Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Super and post-trained with Salesforce's proprietary synthetic dataset. Koa is designed for multistep tasks specific to sales, service, and other customer operations, with extensive industry coverage and simulation of tasks such as lead generation, opportunity qualification, service case routing, and action sequencing.

Internal testing of Koa has shown an 11% increase in accuracy, 2.1 times greater reliability, and a 15% improvement in long-context retention compared to general models used as baselines. These performance figures are Salesforce's own benchmarks, not independently verified measurements.