Salesforce and Anthropic launch 'Claudeforce' for sales teams
The long-simmering question about whether generative AI will eat the software incumbents is getting its clearest answer yet: the incumbents are racing to put the models inside their own products. Salesforce and Anthropic on Wednesday deepened their alliance, and the enterprise giant's results show just how much its AI bet is paying off.
Salesforce and Anthropic are betting enterprise AI is their upgrade, not their replacement. The two companies expanded their strategic partnership by unveiling "Claudeforce," a plugin that lets salespeople work directly inside Anthropic's Claude chatbot — composing emails, updating customer records, and pulling key data from Salesforce without switching tools. It ships with 37 pre-built sales skills, a select group of pilot customers gets access today, and a broader preview follows next month. The naming is deliberate: it's the first time Salesforce has ever appended its "force" suffix to another company's product, a not-so-subtle claim that Claude is now an extension of its platform rather than a rival.
The partnership lands against what CEO Marc Benioff is calling "SaaSpocalypse" anxiety — investors have pounded software stocks this year on fear that AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI will make subscription software redundant. Salesforce shares, down 22% year to date, jumped as much as 14% after the news and beat earnings estimates: $11.35 billion in revenue, up 11%, with a $2.6 billion gain on its strategic investments mostly tied to its stake in Anthropic, which raised funds in May at a $965 billion valuation. It is a neat piece of positioning — the same company whose data sits inside Claude now shows investors that its Anthropic stake is worth billions on paper while its own AI products are its growth engine.
Okta is cashing in on the agentic-AI security boom. The identity company's shares rose about 15% in extended trading after it beat fiscal Q2 estimates, with revenue up 11% to $805 million and new products accounting for 30% of bookings. The driver is a surge in demand for security tools as companies deploy swarms of AI agents — each one a new identity that needs managing and protecting. Okta made its "Okta for AI Agents" tool widely available this quarter, closed "dozens" of AI deals including a multi-million-dollar healthcare contract, and finished its roughly $200 million acquisition of threat-detection startup Permiso Security. CEO Todd McKinnon said the opportunity is "very early," with recent incidents like the OpenAI Hugging Face hack "catalyzing interest." His thesis: the network is the biggest cyber category today, but with millions of agents running in the years ahead, identity will be where the money goes. Okta shares are up 55% this year on the same logic that has driven CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks to record highs.
What to watch: whether Salesforce's "SaaSpocalypse" counter-argument convinces investors that the AI models are complements, not competitors — and how fast its Agentforce product, now past $1.5 billion in annualized revenue, grows from here.
Your company also deploying AI agents — and is identity security on the roadmap, or still an afterthought? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: CNBC — Salesforce, Anthropic expand partnership · CNBC — Salesforce stock jumps on AI growth · CNBC — Okta tops estimates as AI threat spikes demand
