Salesforce seeks to rewrite enterprise software with AIforce

Kicking off the Dreamforce Conference 2026 in San Francisco on Tuesday, Salesforce launched AIforce, a live interface layer for enterprise software it hopes will transform the way knowledge workers access enterprise data.

By unlocking Salesforce data, workflows, business logic, semantics, permissions, security, and governance for any AI interface, the company also aims to broaden the scope of its business by reaching knowledge workers within the enterprise who’ve never used Salesforce before. The promise is the ability for users to create custom and composable applications that leverage Salesforce as the system of record.

“For the last 50 years or so, we’ve been using software the same way,” said Patrick Stokes, president of applications and marketing at Salesforce. “As a human, I ask software for what I want, either at the command line or by clicking through these UIs.”

User interfaces can create tremendous friction, however, so users need to know the functions they need from an application and where to click to find them — a task that can grow truly byzantine in more complex applications. So AI agents have the potential to cut through much of that complexity.

“They’re able to navigate these applications via the APIs, CLIs, and all sorts of different ways to help us get work done,” Stokes said.

Laying the groundwork

At its TDX 2026 developer conference earlier this year, Salesforce announced Headless 360, which made Salesforce’s AI and developer tools available as a headless, API-driven layer intended to help enterprise teams build agent-first workflows.

At the time, Salesforce Cofounder Parker Harris, who designed Salesforce’s Lightning user interface, questioned whether there would be a need to even log into Salesforce going forward.

Stokes said Harris sensed something: The UI is not Salesforce’s product.

“The Salesforce product is the platform where our customers store their data, metadata, workflows, and all their permissions and security,” he said. “It’s basically where they encode the way their business runs.”

Headless 360 was a first step to help customers break free of the shared user interface to a world in which every individual in an organization can have their own dynamic, intelligent interface. While an important step, and one that generated a lot of interest, it was extremely hard to use and scale. But determined users could leverage Headless 360 for interesting results, yet there wasn’t enough infrastructure there to make it viable for businesses to use it to create tools and deploy them across the enterprise.

Enter AIforce to address that need. The first implementation of AIforce was Claudeforce, announced by Salesforce and Anthropic in August. Claudeforce allows joint Salesforce and Anthropic customers to leverage Salesforce data, workflows, business logic, actions, and governance within Claude. As part of the AIforce announcement, Stokes said the Claudeforce open beta is now available on the AppExchange.

“You can go to our AppExchange, sign up, and grab the plugin in open beta, install it into your Claude enterprise account, and all the hard work is done for you,” Stokes said. “All of the Salesforce MCP servers, the skills that you need, the security, the zero data retention, it’s all wired up and just working almost instantaneously.”

Analysts felt the venture could signal a new agentic era for enterprise software.

“Core ERP, core CRM, core HR, most of these tools are going to see a similar sort of realignment where the models will provide probabilistic capability that uses the best of breed from your intelligence coupled with the rich, proprietary data that businesses depend on to operate,” said Daniel Newman, CEO and principal analyst of research firm The Futurum Group.

But Claudeforce is just the beginning. AIforce is launching with Claudeforce, Slackforce, and Agentforce Coworker (an AI teammate within the Lightning interface), but Stokes made it clear that more AI platforms would be announced soon.

Stokes said AIforce makes AI interfaces:

• Intelligent and dynamic. Agents are able to reason across all the data, logic, and conversations in Salesforce.
• Secure and governed. AI agents still run every request on existing permissions and business rules.
• Composable. Anyone can build an interface, agent, or view built on trusted data and business logic by describing it.

Zero data retention is also built into AIforce, meaning the model provider doesn’t retain any data used, and the Headless Toolkit powers AIforce, which provides an open architecture that exposes every element of the Salesforce platform. Builders and developers have access to the MCPs, APIs, plug-ins, skills, and developer tools they need to create customized AI experiences on Salesforce architecture.