If you feel like you’ve been hearing a lot about Claudeforce lately, be prepared for that trend to continue.
With Salesforce’s flagship conference, Dreamforce, now right around the corner, Claudeforce is undoubtedly going to be one of the most talked-about announcements. But many of Salesforce’s customers and users are a little unsure as to how exactly Claudeforce fits into the company’s wider AI portfolio or even AI mission. How is it different from Agentforce Coworker? Does this mean Slack isn’t as important anymore? Does Claudeforce render Agentforce irrelevant?
What Does Claudeforce Actually Do?
Claudeforce is essentially a plugin that brings Salesforce into Claude – the biggest step in the partnership between Anthropic and Salesforce. It’s in place to bring Claude intelligence and judgment, reasoning, adapting, and deciding in real time with Salesforce’s data, rules, and trusted workflows.
This plugin has 37 prebuilt sales skills, including meeting prep, deal health review, and pipeline review. Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, said that one of Claudeforce’s key features is that “the UI is the AI” and that it allows users to “build custom apps dynamically and answer any enterprise question”.
Once again, this leans into the topic of what UI will look like in the future, and how interfaces will adapt to meet users where they are in an increasingly intelligent and interconnected way. “This is how every business will run,” Benioff said.
But that still doesn’t quite cover what Claudeforce actually does. As it is a new product, there isn’t a lot of information out there, and it’s not expected to become GA until Dreamforce at the earliest.
Salesforce says Claudeforce can “[give] every seller an AI CRO”. It does this by putting Salesforce into Claude, meaning that Claude understands your specific permissions and business rules when it comes to assisting anyone in your company. The plugin can also work alongside Claude Tag – a Claude/Slack connector that “acts like a human coworker” – to handle collaborative tasks and automate workflows directly within team threads.
At its core, Claudeforce allows Salesforce customers (sales only at present) to simplify their workdays by utilizing a small selection of AI tools to help them prioritize their tasks. This is done through insights that can be delivered right to them, in their workspace, rather than having to search across multiple different applications.
What About Agentforce Coworker?
If this is beginning to sound eerily familiar, you wouldn’t be the only one.
If you cast your mind back to May, you’ll remember the release of Agentforce Coworker – what Salesforce calls “your new AI teammate […] inside every search bar”. Coworker’s entire purpose is to bring Agentforce into your CRM data at any time to take action, working across Salesforce, Slack, Teams, ChatGPT, and more to connect to agents in all areas of your business – across platforms – and bring you the answers you need, all in one place.
Back then, it was clear that Agentforce Coworker marked the next step in Salesforce’s goal to transform the way its users navigate its UI. Although we don’t know too much about its adoption numbers just yet, it did get a substantial amount of initial positive feedback.
Then there’s Claudeforce. Claudeforce is also centered around bringing answers and solutions to where you work, especially if you have a preference for working with Claude. It brings the answers to you, instead of you having to manually search across multiple platforms and applications. Those aspects are shared with Coworker.
However, Claudeforce stands out with its plugin capabilities, which, as aforementioned, only apply to Sales workers, but will likely expand over time. These specific skills encourage the use of Claude as a platform to complete a specific type of task; Coworker can be used outside of this on more of a macro scale if needed.
As Muzammal Nazir, a Salesforce and MuleSoft Consultant, wrote on LinkedIn: “Claude’s reasoning plus Salesforce data and workflows is a stronger combo than Agentforce trying to do everything alone.”
What About Slack?
Then, of course, there’s Slack. Slack’s importance within the world of Salesforce and its ongoing mission to transform enterprise SaaS UI, with the release of Slack Channels, Slackbot, and Slack Code to make working with the technology feel commonplace.
With Claudeforce in the picture now, Slack’s relevance has also fallen into question, particularly Slackbot, as Salesforce recently shared that Claude is now the default model for Slack.
Salesforce states that Claude is the “intelligent backbone across every layer of the Slack experience”, powering Slackbot and working with Claude Tag and Slack Code. The connections – at least on paper – do seem to be there, but it is still unclear as to whether the products can work separately or not, inciting further questions about the pricing of Salesforce’s ever-growing AI catalogue.
Final Thoughts: Is Agentforce Now Irrelevant?
At least for now, Agentforce has not been rendered obsolete. It still powers and acts as the operating system for all of Salesforce’s biggest AI tools and products, materializing in less obvious ways in some and more obvious ways in others.
However, we’re likely to see Claude and Anthropic take more center stage as time goes on. With Claude already the default model for Slack and chosen as the number one UI for many Salesforce and general tech professionals, it makes sense to capitalize on that.
Agentforce will need to continue to evolve, and whether that looks like becoming more of a “hidden” layer amongst Salesforce’s AI portfolio or a reinvented system is not yet clear.
