Salesforce just launched an AI product and, in the same breath, declared its own interface obsolete. After 27 years selling its own user interface, the customer relationship software company now says the UI was never the product.
The real asset was always what sits underneath: the data, metadata, workflows, permissions and security rules that actually run a business.
Enter AIforce, unveiled on September 15 at Dreamforce, the company’s annual customer conference in San Francisco. The pitch: AI agents get deeper, direct access to data across the Salesforce ecosystem, no interface required.
Users pull what they need from a laptop, phone or tablet, by voice or text, in plain language with nothing standing between them and the answer.
AIforce gives users three ways to work with Salesforce without ever opening Salesforce: Claude Force, built on Anthropic’s frontier model; Slack Force, which turns Slack into a workspace where users build their own tools just by asking; and Agentforce Coworker, an AI assistant wired directly into the Salesforce screens people already use.
The new offering is an “interface revolution”, said Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff at the opening of Dreamforce, held at San Francisco’s convention space, Moscone Centre.
The new interfaces, he added, will be dynamic, intelligent, live and composable.
“We believe every company can become agentic enterprise, and we’re going to show you the best way to do it by doing it ourselves,” he noted.
He explained that AI models alone cannot run the enterprise “as they are not going to show users what’s possible”. Besides, he said, AI models are also very probabilistic.
With AIforce, the enterprise knowledge inside Salesforce which includes the data, workflows, business logic, security and governance becomes accessible to any AI interface a company chooses to use.
The payoff, according to Benioff, is enterprises finally unlocking the value sitting in all the accumulated business knowledge, translating into new levels of growth and productivity.
For Omdia industry analyst Su Lian Jye, AIforce opens the doors into Salesforce’s business knowledge.
The software company is in a strong position because it has a full technology stack built through its acquisitions of Informatica and Tableau that give it the unified data foundation needed to power agentic enterprises, he said at the event.
Informatica provides the backend infrastructure to clean, govern and integrate enterprise data, while Tableau lets Salesforce users “see” and understand their data within the ecosystem without needing advanced coding or data science skills.
The new offering from Salesforce is also an acknowledgement by the company that data is its key competitive advantage, said Su.
“Over the years, its users have accumulated a lot of data with the company such as customer profiles, marketing campaigns, supplier inventory,” he added.
“The new offering can pull that data together, some of it previously unseen, to surface better insights, backed by the right guardrails and governance,” he explained.
Besides, AIforce is also built to work with third-party software inside Salesforce’s AI fabric – security and governance included – giving customers more confidence that whatever AI they deploy will actually hold up, he noted.
He also highlighted Salesforce Trailblazers, the company’s 23 million-strong user community. The group marks its 20th anniversary this year of sharing tips and guides on using Salesforce.
“That’s Salesforce’s strength,” he said. “Not developers, not coders, everyday users in marketing, procurement and other departments using the product every day. That’s the stickiness of this business.”
The 1.96m-tall Benioff has a commanding presence. Instead of speaking from a podium, he paced the floor around attendees during his keynote. His guests Dario Amodei, co-CEO of Anthropic, and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, joined him on the floor too.
Amodei reiterated his recent call for a slowdown in AI development, arguing that the risks associated with it were serious and that companies and governments must be given time to address them.
Huang, on the other hand, pushed back against deceleration. AI, he said, is just hardware and software built by humans which means that it can be controlled by humans and existing laws. His preference for AI development: “Run as fast as you can”.
For AI adoption in Asean, enterprises are identifying ways AI can generate revenue on top of improving productivity and efficiency, said Arun Kumar Parameswaran, Salesforce executive vice-president and managing director for South India and Asean.
For example, an AI agent answering questions in a call centre can work every hour every day – without taking a rest or sick leave – to deliver a better customer experience which translates to revenue improvement.
Early adopters in Asean and the Indian sub-continent will be led by consumer facing sectors such as financial services, travel and transport, he said in an interview with Techgoondu on the sidelines of Dreamforce.
Salesforce’s new offerings unlock real business opportunity here. In marketing, following up on leads is what actually drives revenue, yet industry metrics show that roughly 90 per cent of leads go untouched, simply because there are not enough sales executives to work every one, he noted.
“We have experienced this ourselves,” he added. “Our own sales agents go back to re-qualify the customer leads that were not acted upon and created hundreds of millions of dollars of sales pipeline, because now we’re not restricted anymore by people.”
Interest in AI adoption is broad-based with scale in sectors enterprises serve consumers like Singapore Airlines and SingLife, he added.
Singapore is leading the race in AI adoption, followed by Malaysia and Indonesia, according to Salesforce.
Dreamforce has about 50,000 people attending the three-day event which ends today. The event “took over” San Francisco: the road in front of Moscone Centre was closed and covered in fake grass with open space for attendees to network as music played in the background.
Traffic marshals kept the crowds moving and pedestrians in check, while vehicles were diverted around the restricted zone, only buses got through.
Singer Gwen Stefani made a surprise appearance at the keynote, kicking off the event by performing her hit song “Underneath It All”. She also performed a full concert for Dreamforce attendees at Oracle Park.
