Salesforce NYSE: CRM executives outlined the company’s approach to AI partnerships, Slack monetization and premium product adoption during a Goldman Sachs Communacopia session, emphasizing the role of agents in expanding how customers use its software.
Bill Patterson, Salesforce’s president and chief commercial officer, said the company’s recently announced Claudeforce offering emerged from a growing relationship with Anthropic. Salesforce is an Anthropic customer, while Anthropic uses Salesforce products, creating what Patterson described as natural synergies between the companies’ technologies.
“It was more than just an announcement,” Patterson said, describing Claudeforce as a product that had already been built, used and deployed by customers. He said the collaboration is intended to support higher-quality agents and employee productivity.
AI Adoption Varies Across Customer Groups
Patterson said customer interest in AI can be divided into three broad groups. The first includes early adopters that were already building integrations between Salesforce and Anthropic products. A second group is focused on determining whether AI deployments can scale economically, particularly as businesses evaluate token costs and productivity gains. A third group remains skeptical about AI’s potential effect on work.
Salesforce has a responsibility to show hesitant customers that AI can transform work rather than act as a destructive force, Patterson said.
Addressing concerns that Anthropic could gain a foothold in Salesforce’s customer base through Claudeforce, Patterson said the companies have distinct missions. He characterized Anthropic’s focus as broad AI adoption and Salesforce’s role as helping businesses improve operations. He added that new technologies have repeatedly been viewed as potential threats to CRM, but have instead changed how CRM platforms are used.
Slack Positioned as an AI Work Interface
Rob Seaman, executive vice president and general manager of Slack, rejected the view that AI interfaces could reduce Salesforce to a database. He said companies encode their operating processes into CRM metadata, making that information difficult to replicate. While users may spend less time in a traditional CRM interface, he said more work can occur through the underlying services connected to platforms such as Slack and Claude.
Seaman said Salesforce’s internal use of its own products has increased, with much of that activity occurring through Slack and Claude. He linked that increase in usage to greater productivity.
Slack’s role, Seaman said, is to serve as an “operating system for work” by reducing the complexity created by a growing number of applications, agents and communications competing for employees’ attention. He said the average Slack user has the application open for 10 hours per day and actively uses it for about two hours daily.
Seaman also said Slack’s design encourages organizations to work openly in public channels. He cited Anthropic, OpenAI and Vercel as companies that use Slack to make product discussions and employee “notebook” or “brain” channels broadly accessible. That approach can help employees and agents access shared knowledge, reduce duplicated work and learn from activity occurring across the organization, he said.
Monetization Could Move Beyond Per-User Pricing
Slack historically has used a per-user, per-month model, but Seaman said the company sees potential for new monetization approaches as agents become more prevalent in workplaces. He said Salesforce expects that, over time, there could be more agents in Slack than human users.
Possible models could include treating agents as users or using consumption-based pricing, though Seaman said Salesforce has not fully determined the approach. Patterson added that monetization could increasingly be tied to outcomes delivered through Slack and other Salesforce products.
Salesforce also sees continued opportunity to convert customers to premium editions. Patterson said approximately 5% of Salesforce’s installed base is currently on premium SKUs, referring to a figure previously shared by Miguel Milano, the company’s president and chief operating officer.
Patterson said Salesforce’s Agentforce 1 Edition combines Claudeforce, Agentforce, Data Cloud, Sales Cloud, Slack and Tableau in a premium tier. The offering can represent a 60% to 80% uplift over traditional core cloud products, he said. Salesforce aims to consolidate spending that customers may currently direct to separate tools for sales performance management, enablement, content, call recording and coaching.
For context, Patterson said the average U.S. spending associated with those additional technologies is about $1,300 per sales professional, while the Agentforce 1 Edition retails for $550. He said premium adoption is expected to occur over time as customers renew contracts and replace products from other vendors.
Agents, Outcomes and Business Process Change
Patterson distinguished specialized agents from Salesforce’s broader orchestration platform. He described Fin as a customer-service-focused agent and Qualified’s Piper as a marketing agent designed to qualify website visitors and book sales meetings. Agentforce, he said, is designed to orchestrate activity among those agents and developer-built agents as customer interactions move from marketing to sales and service.
Customers using Agentforce, Piper or Fin do not separately pay Anthropic token costs for those interactions, Patterson said. Customers that purchase Claude directly from Anthropic would do so through Anthropic.
Looking ahead, Patterson said AI agents could blur the traditional line between front-office and back-office software as businesses redesign processes previously built around the limitations of human labor. Seaman said Slack will continue pursuing a broad horizontal opportunity among knowledge workers, while also identifying opportunities to focus more deeply on functions such as technology, development and coding.
About Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)
Salesforce, Inc is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) technology and related enterprise applications. Its platform helps organizations manage sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, data analytics and business operations through subscription-based software and cloud services.
The company's product portfolio includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud and the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce also offers Slack for workplace collaboration, Tableau for data visualization and analytics, MuleSoft for application integration, and artificial intelligence capabilities, including its Agentforce platform for building and deploying AI agents.
Founded in 1999, Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and serves businesses and organizations across a broad range of industries and geographic markets worldwide.
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