Key Takeaways:
Salesforce shares climbed after quarterly results, with CEO Marc Benioff announcing a new partnership with Anthropic and citing 6x growth in agentic usage.
"This is really the best of both worlds. This is the number one A.I. in the world, Anthropic, and the number one CRM, Salesforce, coming together for the first time in an incredibly powerful way to build a new product called Claudeforce," Benioff said on CNBC's "Mad Money."
The partnership, dubbed Claudeforce, will launch Salesforce within Claude, Anthropic's AI model. Benioff said Salesforce's investment in Anthropic could be worth $30 billion to $40 billion, calling it "consequential" to the company's asset base. Agentic usage surged 6x as AI agents increasingly rely on Salesforce's platform, Benioff said.
The results and partnership position Salesforce to capture more of the enterprise AI market, with Benioff calling the combination of Anthropic's probabilistic AI with Salesforce's deterministic systems "the way all enterprise systems are going to run in the future." Shares rose on the news, with the company set to discuss details at Dreamforce next week.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dismissed the "SaaSpocalypse" thesis that AI would destroy traditional software companies. "We're not interested in destroying anyone. We think of this as a very positive sum thing," Amodei said. "It's about how much of these enormous gains go to various people and various companies."
The two companies already have several joint products, including Slack Code and Claude Tag in Slack. Benioff said the new partnership will allow customers to query all their Salesforce data, applications, semantic layers, and agents, and even build new applications dynamically on top of the stack.
On data security, Amodei said the companies are working on "enterprise frontier safeguards" that keep data on Salesforce's side while ensuring models don't run out of control. "Claude is a little bit like an employee using Salesforce," he said, with permissions managed through Salesforce's existing governance framework.
Benioff noted that customers have invested "hundreds of billions of dollars" into Salesforce, and the partnership is designed to unlock value that has been "trapped" in the platform. The company's cash flow and revenue numbers are "quite good," he said.
Salesforce's results and the Anthropic partnership strengthen its position in the enterprise AI market. Investors will watch the Dreamforce conference next week for more details on the Claudeforce rollout and updated segment metrics.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
