Salesforce-Anthropic integration expanded, begets 'Claudeforce'

Salesforce and Anthropic said late yesterday that they have deepened their integration between the two platforms.

Dubbed "Claudeforce" and expected to be in open beta in September, the expanded partnership will include Salesforce in Claude, a Claude plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills, with more planned for later this year. It will also include new hooks for Claude in Salesforce, such as serving as the reasoning model for the Atlas Reasoning Engine and as the default LLM in Slack.

Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller said that many enterprises are remixing their IT to reduce "swivel-chairing" among AI tools, apps like Salesforce and other business platforms. This latest Salesforce-Claude integration is just the latest way to bring more functionality into one interface -- be it the traditional Salesforce web front or newer alternatives.

"The name's cute. It's very easy to get caught in the shtick," Miller said. "If we look beyond the shtick -- and I think that's important to do -- this now brings exactly what people want, and what they're already using, into the platforms where they want to work, whether that's Claude or Salesforce."

The benefit of using Salesforce in Claude, as opposed to just using a coding agent to replace Salesforce wholesale, Miller continued, is that it encourages users to build more useful, functional tools with greater business value.

Furthermore, Salesforce's agent harness, AIforce, provisions governance and security where it would not otherwise be present in Claude. For example, there's no Salesforce data retention inside Claude and, therefore, no model training.

AIforce will be a focus at the company's Dreamforce user conference next month, CEO Marc Benioff said on Salesforce's quarterly earnings call late Wednesday afternoon.

"Claudeforce" is the fruit of Salesforce's headless strategy, announced earlier this year at Salesforce's TDx developer show, and was brought into focus with last week's bundle of platform releases and previews under the Headless 360 umbrella.

Anthropic itself is one of Sales Cloud and Slack's biggest users, Salesforce Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Milano also said on the call.

Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Stokes added that customers and global service integrators are using headless capabilities to enable work inside Salesforce, but also to build Salesforce tools with coding agents from Anthropic and OpenAI that do work outside of the Salesforce interface.

"They want to take this capability to use Salesforce in different ways and get more value out of it," Stokes said. "So rather than logging into this discrete application, and this application, and this application to get an answer to one question … you can now just take these MCP servers and plug them into any tool that you want."

Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.