Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff participates in an interview during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, 2025.
Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce is ramping up partnerships with leaders in generative artificial intelligence as investors continue to fear that the software company faces business risks due to the rapid growth of AI.
Just ahead of its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce said Tuesday it will enable the use of AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic inside its Agentforce 360 software. A day earlier, Salesforce expanded Agentforce beyond text chats to also handle voice calls.
“The way people are going to interact with software is going to fundamentally shift,” said Brian Landsman, CEO of Salesforce’s AppExchange business and executive vice president of partnerships, in an interview. The interaction could be in ChatGPT or in Slack, he said.
Salesforce will collaborate with Anthropic to bring Agentforce 360 into Claude, Landsman added.
Shares of Salesforce are down about 26% this year, while the S&P 500 index has gained 13%, as Wall Street seeks faster revenue growth from the cloud software company. So far, Agentforce revenue has been “modest,” Morgan Stanley analysts, who have the equivalent of a buy rating on Salesforce, wrote in a Monday note.
Large software companies are increasingly turning to popular AI model developers for new capabilities. Atlassian, Datadog and Intuit have previously signed deals with OpenAI, and Microsoft has invested almost $14 billion in the company. In September, Databricks committed to spending $100 million on OpenAI models.
As part of Salesforce’s announcement, customers will be able to access corporate information in Agentforce 360 and create charts in Tableau through the ChatGPT assistant, which has more than 800 million weekly users. Last week OpenAI announced a software development kit for integrating third-party applications into ChatGPT.
Companies working with both OpenAI and Salesforce will be able to sell products through ChatGPT’s instant checkout feature later in 2025. Salesforce plans to work with Anthropic on selling products for regulated industries, starting with financial services.
OpenAI said last month that ChatGPT users would be able to purchase products from U.S. Etsy sellers and Shopify merchants.
Meanwhile, Salesforce said its engineering organization is adopting Anthropic’s Claude Code programming product.
“We plan to continue to go much deeper with these partners over time,” Landsman said.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been defending his company’s position in the AI boom. And on last month’s earnings call, he said Anthropic and OpenAI both use Salesforce tools.
“All these next-generation AI companies ranging from OpenAI to Anthropic to everyone are on Slack,” Benioff, who is also Salesforce’s co-founder, told analysts. “And it is incredible how they’ve used that as their operating system and as their platform to run their companies.”
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