Salesforce and Anthropic today announced they have expanded their strategic partnership to deliver Claudeforce, enabling customers of both companies to leverage Salesforce data, workflows, business logic, actions, and governance within Claude.
“What we’re seeing is that when people stop using Salesforce through the traditional human interface and start using it through an agentic interface, it dramatically increases the value of Salesforce,” Patrick Stokes, president of Applications & Marketing at Salesforce, told CIO.com on Wednesday. “They’re using Salesforce more than they ever have before.”
Stokes explained that momentum around the Claudeforce partnership began building after Salesforce’s TDX 2026 developer conference earlier this year. At the conference, Salesforce announced Headless 360, a platform that packaged Salesforce’s AI and developer tools into a headless, API-driven layer designed to help enterprise teams build agent-first workflows. It allowed AI clients like Claude or ChatGPT to read, write, and reason over Salesforce data without the traditional browser-based UI.
“It was a very popular decision among developers,” Stokes said. “Salesforce was actively endorsing people using Salesforce through an agentic interface rather than through the UI that we have had in place for 27 years.”
Developers immediately started hooking MCP servers up to their own agents. And Salesforce watched them struggle to scale their efforts.
“How do you do it for 100 or 1,000 users?” Stokes asked. “How do you deal with managed authentication to make sure it’s using the permissions of the user inside Salesforce? All the things that are necessary in order to scale this out weren’t really in place.”
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, was seeing the same thing. Its sales teams were using Salesforce through Claude and struggling to scale it. The two companies worked together to create a solution and decided to productize the result as Claudeforce.
Prebuilt sales skills and token consumption
The first fruit of the Claudeforce partnership is Salesforce in Claude, a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills. Stokes said these skills will enable sellers and agents to reason over live revenue context, automate pipeline updates, and take governed action within Claude. Claude-powered agents can access Salesforce data, workflows, and rules directly.
“We’ve been using it internally and so has Anthropic and some pilot customers for some time,” Stokes said. “It’s really highlighting what we think is a new way to work where the user is way faster than they’ve ever been before.”
According to Stokes, Salesforce users are leveraging Claudeforce to vibe code their own CRM interfaces, creating purpose-built command centers for how they want to run their teams. They’ve also been using it for forecasting.
“You just ask the question, and it’s going to go out and analyze the data and use its intelligence to try to tell you what to do,” he said.
He did note that customers will have to evaluate their own appetite for token consumption when it comes to leveraging Claudeforce.
“We’re starting to see early signs of what the token use looks like,” he said. “The token consumption is certainly not zero, but it is nowhere close to approaching the amount of consumption that you would find in a development use case.”
As part of the Claudeforce partnership, Salesforce is embedding Claude directly into Slack. Claude will be the default model for Slack, powering Slackbot, augmenting team decision-making via Claude Tag, and accelerating multiplayer coding through Slack Code.
The partners plan to introduce more integrations across Claude, Salesforce, and Slack over time. The Salesforce in Claude elements of Claudeforce are available to some pilot customers now and the partners said they expect to launch an open beta in September. They will launch additional prebuilt skills starting in the third quarter.
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Source: News