Is Claudeforce Enough? What the Dreamforce ’26 Announcement Might Be

Dreamforce is next week. As ever, the community’s eyes and ears will be open for whatever big new announcement is going to shake the Salesforce ecosystem, setting the tone for the coming year. 

Two years ago, at Dreamforce ‘24, we saw the official launch of Agentforce. The product had been teased in the company’s Q2 earnings that year (and on the SF Ben website) ahead of the conference, but we certainly got a much clearer picture of what ‘Agentforce’ actually was. 

This year, something similar seems to be taking place. In the Salesforce Q2 ‘27 earnings report, the CRM company and Anthropic announced Claudeforce – a partnership between the two tech giants which brings their products closer together. 

So, like in 2024, we might be tempted to think that we already know what the big Dreamforce ‘26 announcement will be. Claudeforce, right? Well, it might not be that straightforward. Let’s consider some of the recent messaging from Salesforce. 

The ‘Deeply Unified Platform’

If you’ve been paying attention to the ecosystem for the past two years, you might have noticed a phrase which keeps popping up in Salesforce marketing – besides the usual buzzwords like ‘cloud’, ‘360’, and of course, Agentforce. That phrase is: ‘deeply unified platform’. 

In Salesforce’s Q1 FY26 earnings call in May last year, Robin Washington, Salesforce’s CFO, told investors that the company had started the year strong “with a trusted, deeply unified platform”.

Kishan Chetan, EVP & GM, Service Cloud at Salesforce, also mentioned the “deeply unified platform” when discussing whether Salesforce was operating a “land and expand” strategy with ServiceNow, in October that year. 

There will always be a certain uniformity in messaging from Salesforce leadership, with marketing messages strictly adhered to in all public communications. Phrases like “deeply unified” and “Customer 360” go back a long way – they’ve always been the path, and the message, for Salesforce. What we’re noticing now is the way this philosophy is manifesting in the age of AI. What it means, in simpler terms, is more complete integration.

In June 2025, Salesforce revealed that it would be embedding Slack directly into its CRM with ‘Salesforce Channels’ – a step towards creating a single space for workers to collaborate. A single, deeply unified platform. 

Then in March 2026, Salesforce launched ‘Slack CRM’, with the capabilities of both products available in one tab, so context-switching could be cut even further. 

So, Salesforce and Slack are becoming even further integrated. What else? 

In June, Anthropic and Salesforce announced Claude Tag, integrating the two technologies so Slack users could type @Claude in any channel to loop the AI into their workflows. 

Then, two months later, Claudeforce was announced.

And a New Company Name? 

It’s something of a recurring joke in the community that Salesforce loves a good rebrand. The website renameforce.com – a useful help site for Salesforce professionals which keeps track of every Salesforce renaming – currently lists CRM Analytics as the product which had the most renames, with eight since 2010. 

Talk of Salesforce renaming itself has been rumbling in the ecosystem, with ‘Agentforce’ seeming an obvious frontrunner over the past few years, thanks to Salesforce’s seemingly single-minded focus on this product. 

But Marc Benioff recently put out a surprising suggestion that the company might rebrand to ‘SalesforceSlack’ to ‘capture its AI-era power in bots, coding, and surfaces’. The CEO asked his social media followers on X if the move was a good idea, and 68.3% said no, 23.3% said yes, and 8.4% said maybe. 

Whether Benioff’s post was just a tongue-in-cheek suggestion for the purposes of marketing, or a genuine idea Salesforce is considering, what is clear is that Slack is becoming increasingly important to Salesforce. 

It seems unlikely that Salesforce will unveil a full company name change next week, but Benioff’s suggestion is still there. 

In any case, more integration between Salesforce, Agentforce, Data 360 and Slack is to be expected. 

The Agentforce Pricing Saga

Agentforce pricing has been somewhat contentious in the ecosystem. It was originally announced as $2 per conversation when it launched in 2024, but over the next few years, Salesforce introduced a number of updates. 

In May 2025, Salesforce introduced Flex Credits, then pay-as-you-go and pre-commit models in August. SF Ben had that year spoken to Craig Shull, EVP of Pricing and Packaging Strategy, at the Agentforce World Tour in New York that year. He told us that there were many use cases that people wanted Agentforce for, and the $2 per conversation was not the best metric for some specific use cases.

Craig added: “I think that what we have done historically, especially over the last six months, is really listen to our customers and understand the challenges that they had with our pricing model and evolve it.”

The messaging has been clear: Salesforce hears your pain re Agentforce pricing, and is taking measures to improve it. 

More recently, Salesforce also introduced a pay-per-resolution model for its Agentforce Help Agent. “If the customer asks for a human or walks away unhappy, there is no charge,” Salesforce said when it was announced, adding: “Your cost is tied to outcomes, not activity.”

We later caught up with Prasad Raje, SVP of Product for Agentforce Service, to get a little more guidance around the new Agentforce pricing model – particularly for how exactly Agentforce determines when an issue is ‘resolved’. 

It was an interesting move from Salesforce, but the messaging has certainly been consistent recently: customers should only pay for value delivered. 

In any case, Salesforce is regularly tweaking the pricing model for Agentforce to get as close as possible to that goal. In terms of a Dreamforce announcement, it might lack a certain punch which Salesforce is looking for – unless they announce something radically different. A return to pay-per-seat modelling seems very much not on the cards. If there is a new Agentforce pricing model announced, it will likely lean further towards this idea of paying for value delivered. 

Agentforce… 5.0? 

Dreamforce ‘24 unveiled Agentforce. Just a few months later, Agentforce 2.0 was revealed, with new pre-built skills and workflow integrations. 

Then, at Trailblazer DX in March 2025, it was Agentforce 2dx, a kind of 2.5 version, which allowed agents to integrate into data systems, business logic, and user interfaces, so agents could anticipate what is needed and take action.

In June, it was Agentforce 3, which added the Agentforce Command Center – a way to track, monitor, and measure AI agents – along with Model Context Protocol (MCP) features to let agents connect to different systems without the need for custom setups.

And at Dreamforce ‘25, the big announcement was Agentforce 360, the culmination of a full year of Agentforce. While ramped versions seemed to be announced every few months after its initial release, the year since Dreamforce ‘25 has seen no proper rebranding of the Agentforce platform. 

I admit that I had expected this to be ‘Agentforce 4’ at the time. To go slightly off-piste for a moment, I think the deviation from simply increasing the number is actually somewhat important here (note: in the age of LLM-generated articles, I’m trying to avoid saying “that distinction matters”, or similar).