When you’re as deep into the AI race as Salesforce is, the pace of innovation needs to be fast. We keep hearing that if you don’t keep up, you will fall behind, and it’s safe to say that Salesforce has been feeling that pressure ever since it released Agentforce two years ago.
With innovation comes scaling and changes, and for Salesforce’s growing AI product portfolio, this has transpired through renames, rebrands, updates, and pricing changes. You could argue this is natural – especially as the company learns more about its enterprise AI customers – but how much change is too much, and what are you meant to do when a significant portion of your customer base is telling you they can’t keep up?
Salesforce’s Rebrand and Repackage Problem
I think most people in this ecosystem would agree that Salesforce releasing new AI products and features is not a problem on its own. After all, the world’s biggest AI vendors like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Salesforce’s enterprise competitors such as ServiceNow and Microsoft, all regularly do the same.
However, confusion starts mounting when customers and users suddenly get told that one tool they’ve been using or have been interested in is now called something else, or that it has become a legacy tool – even if it’s only been on the market for a few months. We call this AI exhaustion, and it’s only getting worse.
Salesforce has a renaming problem, and it’s something that is widely acknowledged across the ecosystem. The company even recently acknowledged it publicly at this year’s True to the Core session at Dreamforce, with Patrick Stokes saying it “drives us nuts too” and that the renames are just about “making it seem like it is a new version.”
The problem is not limited to renaming either, but repackaging too. In April, at this year’s TrailblazerDX conference, Salesforce announced Headless 360, its platform layer that granted AI agents access to anything in the platform that they needed. Come Dreamforce, and AIforce is announced; although it was not made clear at the time, AIforce is actually Headless 360 renamed and repackaged. The tool was not even six months old.
Three New Editions
Earlier this month, Salesforce announced three replacement editions: Core, Advanced, and Max. These exist for Sales, Service, and Industries, and bundle Slack, Tableau Next, the Premier Success Plan, enterprise-grade security, and out-of-the-box AI.
It is believed that these editions will replace Unlimited and Enterprise, although this is not confirmed. It is also not clear as to whether these editions have been brought in to encourage new and existing Salesforce customers to buy a heftier licence in order to be able to gain access to more AI features, but it is certainly a possibility.
In the company’s latest earnings call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed that Claudeforce – Salesforce’s latest partnership product with Anthropic – required customers to have a “premium” licence to be able to use it. According to Salesforce’s website, this specifically refers to the Unlimited licence, so if that eventually translates to the Max licence, it will cost customers $550 per user per month to access.
According to Miguel Milano, Salesforce’s President and COO, only 5% of the knowledge workers who use Sales and Service Cloud have upgraded to the higher-end editions. So, at present, only a very small minority of customers will be able to access Claudeforce at all.
This exclusivity tactic is not new to Salesforce – it did the same with Agentforce when it was first released. However, Claudeforce is the AI product lovechild of two influential companies, and both will want to see it succeed. With that in mind, will Salesforce want to hold onto that exclusivity factor for as long as possible, or do what it takes to get adoption numbers up? Either way, its customer base will need to know how to bite the bait – and whether it’s worth it at all.
New AI Pricing
Then we get to AI pricing, which has been a whole different ballgame for the CRM giant. Just last week, Salesforce made another update to its pricing, this time revealing that it would be charging Flex Credits for agentic MCP and API calls going forward.
Although this update is likely to have security benefits, it will also heavily impact customers who are already bringing external AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT into Salesforce, as they will already be paying those providers. Not only that, but there is also ambiguity surrounding the actual costs; Salesforce says that the cost per interaction will vary, and that consumption varies based on the harness and prompt implementation. No further information has been provided at the time of writing.
The community has already begun weighing in, with SF Ben’s Editor-in-Chief Peter Chittum taking to LinkedIn to write: “So many times, Salesforce has overreached on pricing. Is this another one of those times?”
While some, like Rob Smith, the SVP of Commerce at OSF Digital, can understand the change, saying he can “see why this makes sense”, others like Timo Kovala, long-time Salesforce voice and author, called it a “risky move”, saying that it’s “one step away from requiring customers to implement Agentforce agents if they want to interact with Salesforce from the outside.”
How Much Change Is Too Much Change?
It’s been nearly a year since Salesforce Co-Founder Parker Harris told a room full of True to the Core attendees that if Salesforce didn’t go “all in”, it would “go obsolete”.
Salesforce does have to keep up with a certain scale of innovation, but I don’t personally think this is what ecosystem members and customers have been lamenting about. Salesforce might be able to keep up with this rapid pace of change – but can everyone else?
When I wrote my piece on AI exhaustion earlier this year, it opened my eyes to the true extent of just how tired the ecosystem had become. This has only materialized further as the months have gone on, with Salesforce Architect and Director of AI at CLD Partners Cecilia Chiderski telling me she noticed it particularly at this year’s Dreamforce.
“There’s a disconnect between the pace things are moving, and the pace organizations can adopt them,” she told SF Ben. “We need to focus more on that side: how do we help people get started?”
“My take is that we can’t forget we’re still talking about people. There’s all this effort to get people to learn the product, learn the new tools, adopt pre-packaged agents. Do we really think that will do it?”
Final Thoughts
With Salesforce’s customers and community still largely confused about how to get started on their AI journeys and still navigating core problems, the company has to ask itself whether the ongoing confusion at the expense of innovation is worth it.
This feels like a story that we’ve been hearing for some time now, and it will likely continue. If Salesforce can get itself and its customer base on the same page, then we may be able to finally put this story to rest.
