Just months after the Salesforce CEO told everyone to stop getting anxious about AI taking away software jobs, the company has joined hands with one of the biggest AI companies to do what it has never done before. Salesforce and Anthropic expanded their strategic partnership and unveiled ‘Claudeforce’, a new way for salespeople to work within Anthropic’s product. The announcement marks the first time that Salesforce has ever added its “Force” suffix at the end of another company’s product.Claudeforce is launching as a plugin with 37 pre-built sales skills that will allow Claude users to compose emails, update records and take other relevant actions, according to a release. The companies said they plan to introduce more integrations across Claude, Salesforce and its messaging platform Slack in the future.“By fusing Claude’s extraordinary reasoning with the trusted data, workflows, and governance every enterprise runs on, we’re delivering a dynamic interface that thinks, reasons, and acts,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement. “This is how every business will run.”
When Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that stop worrying about SaaSpocalypse
In February this year, Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI revolution won’t be its death when it announced fourth-quarter earnings. The huge clarification came as the Software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, with Salesforce as their poster child, continued to get hammered lately. Fearing that the rise of AI agents will undermine software companies, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete, investors have been running away from them. The situation has been dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.” The concept reportedly hung so heavily in the air during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the term at least six times.“You’ve heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a few of them,” he said, later adding, “If there is a SaaSpocalypse, it may be eaten by the Sasquatch because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents.”“Through this partnership, companies can point Claude at the customer information and business context that they’ve been building in Salesforce for decades — surfacing the insights that really matter and helping their businesses run more efficiently and grow more quickly,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement.All in all, Salesforce and its software peers have been under pressure as investors question whether AI tools from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI will replace them. Salesforce shares are down about 22% this year after dropping 20% in 2025. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, is up about 35% since the end of 2024.
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