Salesforce AI is the suite of artificial intelligence products, research initiatives, and platform capabilities developed by Salesforce, the San Francisco-based enterprise software company, organized around the Einstein intelligence layer, the Agentforce autonomous-agent platform, and the Salesforce AI Research lab. Since acquiring the deep learning startup MetaMind in 2016,[17] Salesforce has built one of the most extensive AI research organizations in the enterprise technology sector, producing open-source large language models, multimodal models, protein generation systems, and a full stack of AI-powered CRM tools branded under the Einstein name. The company's AI strategy spans internal research through Salesforce AI Research, product integration through Einstein AI, autonomous agent deployment through Agentforce, and startup investment through Salesforce Ventures. By the close of fiscal year 2026 (ended January 31, 2026), combined Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue exceeded $2.9 billion (up more than 200% year over year), Agentforce annual recurring revenue alone reached $800 million, and CEO Marc Benioff said the company had been rebuilt to become "the operating system for the Agentic Enterprise."[19] The research lab frames its long-term goal as "enterprise general intelligence" (EGI), which it defines as "purpose-built AI agents for business optimized not just for capability, but for consistency, too."[51]

Salesforce AI Research

Origins and Leadership

Salesforce AI Research traces its origins to the April 2016 acquisition of MetaMind, a Palo Alto-based AI startup founded in July 2014 by Richard Socher, a Stanford PhD specializing in machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.[17] Salesforce acquired MetaMind for approximately $32.8 million,[20] and Socher became the company's Chief Scientist. MetaMind's products were folded into Salesforce Einstein, while MetaMind's standalone services shut down in May 2016.[17] Socher led Salesforce Research until his departure in 2020 to co-found You.com, an AI search engine.[21]

In April 2021, Salesforce hired Silvio Savarese as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist to lead the research division.[22] Savarese, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, brought expertise in computer vision and robotics. Under his leadership, Salesforce AI Research expanded its focus to include multimodal models, large action models, and generative AI applications for enterprise use cases.

Salesforce AI Research operates from offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, Seattle, and Bellevue, as well as an international research lab in Singapore. The Singapore team, founded in 2019, produced the highly cited BLIP series of vision-language models.

Key Research Contributions

Salesforce AI Research has produced several influential research outputs spanning language modeling, vision-language understanding, code generation, protein engineering, and autonomous agent systems. The team has published work at top-tier venues including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and Nature Biotechnology, and has released numerous open-source models and libraries.

Notable contributions include the BLIP and BLIP-2 vision-language models, the LAVIS library for language-vision intelligence, the CodeGen family of code generation models, the xGen series of large language models, the ProGen protein generation model, and the xLAM family of large action models.

Earlier influential work from the lab includes CTRL, a 1.63-billion-parameter conditional language model released in September 2019 that used control codes to steer the style and content of generated text,[23] the AI Economist, a 2020 reinforcement learning framework for designing tax policies inside economic simulations,[24] and CodeT5, an identifier-aware encoder-decoder model for code understanding and generation presented at EMNLP 2021.[25] More recent open releases include the SFR-Embedding family of text-embedding models, which topped the MTEB leaderboard on release in 2024,[26] and Moirai, a universal time-series forecasting Transformer presented at ICML 2024 and trained on LOTSA, an open archive of time-series data spanning nine domains including energy, transport, climate, and finance.[27]

What is Salesforce AI Research working on in 2025 and 2026?

As Agentforce scaled, Salesforce AI Research shifted much of its output toward agent reliability, evaluation, and agentic AI training methods, a program the lab frames around two coined terms. In May 2025 it introduced "jagged intelligence," its label for the gap between a model's raw reasoning ability and its inconsistent performance on simple real-world enterprise tasks, and released SIMPLE, a public benchmark of 225 straightforward reasoning questions designed to quantify how jagged a system's capabilities are.[51][52] Chief Scientist Silvio Savarese argued that reliability, not raw capability, is the binding constraint for business deployment: "For businesses, AI isn't a casual pastime; it's a mission-critical tool that requires unwavering predictability."[51] The lab presents enterprise general intelligence (EGI), business-optimized AI tuned for consistency, accuracy, and trust, as its stated "north star" for 2026 and 2027.[52]

In May 2025 the team also released CRMArena-Pro, a benchmark of nineteen expert-validated tasks across sales, customer service, and configure, price, and quote processes in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer settings. The study found that leading LLM agents achieved only around 58% success on single-turn tasks, dropping to approximately 35% in multi-turn settings, and exhibited near-zero inherent confidentiality awareness.[28] Salesforce presented the results as evidence that general-purpose models still need enterprise-specific grounding and guardrails.

In April 2025 the lab released the xLAM-2 generation of large action models together with the APIGen-MT multi-turn data pipeline (described below). In September 2025 it published SFR-DeepResearch, a reinforcement learning method that turns reasoning-optimized open-source models into autonomous single-agent researchers equipped with web search, page crawling, and a Python interpreter; the best variant, SFR-DR-20B, scored up to 28.7% on Humanity's Last Exam.[29]

Einstein AI Platform

Einstein AI (2016)

Salesforce launched Einstein AI in September 2016 at the Dreamforce conference as its integrated intelligence layer for the Salesforce platform.[1] Einstein brought predictive analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning capabilities directly into Salesforce's core CRM products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud.[1]

The initial Einstein release included several key capabilities:

Feature	Description
Lead Scoring	Prioritizes sales leads based on their likelihood of conversion using historical data patterns
Opportunity Insights	Provides predictive signals on deal health and likelihood of closing
Sales Forecasting	Predicts future revenue to inform strategic planning
Next Best Action	Recommends optimal actions for sales and service representatives
Einstein Vision	Image recognition capabilities for visual search and product identification
Einstein Language	Sentiment analysis and intent classification for text data

Einstein represented Salesforce's effort to democratize AI for business users who lacked data science expertise. Rather than requiring customers to build their own models, Einstein embedded pre-trained AI capabilities directly into existing CRM workflows.

Einstein GPT (March 2023)

On March 7, 2023, Salesforce announced Einstein GPT at the TrailblazerDX developer conference, describing it as "the world's first generative AI for CRM."[2] Einstein GPT combined Salesforce's proprietary AI models with OpenAI's ChatGPT technology and real-time data from Salesforce Data Cloud to generate personalized content across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interactions.[2]

Einstein GPT capabilities included:

Product	Capability
Einstein GPT for Sales	Auto-generates sales tasks, composes personalized emails, and creates call summaries
Einstein GPT for Service	Generates knowledge articles and auto-generates personalized agent chat replies
Einstein GPT for Marketing	Generates personalized content for customer engagement across email, mobile, web, and advertising
Einstein GPT for Commerce	Generates personalized product descriptions and commerce-specific recommendations
Einstein GPT for Developers	Generates Apex code and provides an AI chat assistant using Salesforce Research's proprietary CodeGen LLM

Alongside the Einstein GPT announcement, Salesforce and OpenAI revealed the ChatGPT for Slack app, providing AI-powered conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance within the Slack workspace.[2] Salesforce Ventures also announced a $250 million Generative AI Fund on the same day.[2]

AI Cloud and Einstein Trust Layer (June 2023)

On June 12, 2023, Salesforce announced AI Cloud, a suite of capabilities for delivering trusted generative AI experiences across all Salesforce applications and workflows.[3] The centerpiece of AI Cloud was the Einstein Trust Layer, a security architecture designed to address enterprise concerns about data privacy when using generative AI.[3]

The Einstein Trust Layer included several protective features:

The Trust Layer was designed to let Salesforce customers use both proprietary Salesforce models and third-party models (from Anthropic, Cohere, Google, OpenAI, and others) while maintaining enterprise-grade security.[3]

Einstein Copilot (September 2023)

At Dreamforce 2023 on September 12, 2023, Salesforce introduced Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant built into the user interface of every Salesforce application.[4] Einstein Copilot allowed users to interact with their CRM data using natural language, grounded in the company's proprietary data through Salesforce Data Cloud.[4]

Einstein Copilot could proactively suggest actions beyond the user's immediate query. For example, after a sales call, it could provide a recommended action plan; in service contexts, it could check order status or change shipping dates without requiring the user to navigate multiple screens.

Salesforce also announced Einstein Copilot Studio,[4] a toolkit comprising three components:

Component	Function
Prompt Builder	Enables administrators to create, customize, and A/B test AI prompts tailored to their brand
Skills Builder	Allows companies to control which workflows and data sources the copilot can access
Model Builder	Lets companies bring their own AI models (from Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, Google Cloud, or OpenAI) or use Salesforce's proprietary LLMs

Einstein Copilot was later rebranded and evolved into Agentforce as Salesforce shifted its AI strategy from copilot-style assistance toward fully autonomous AI agents.

What open-source models has Salesforce AI Research released?

Salesforce AI Research has released most of its foundation models under open licenses, spanning code generation (CodeGen), language modeling (xGen), vision-language understanding (BLIP, BLIP-2, xGen-MM), protein design (ProGen), and agentic tool use (xLAM). The sections below summarize the major families.

xGen-7B

Released in July 2023, xGen-7B is a series of 7-billion-parameter large language models trained with standard dense attention on sequence lengths of up to 8,192 tokens.[11] The models were trained on up to 1.5 trillion tokens of text data.[11] The xGen-7B family includes several variants:

Model	Context Length	Use Case	License
xGen-7B-4K-Base	4,096 tokens	General-purpose base model	Apache 2.0
xGen-7B-8K-Base	8,192 tokens	Long-context base model	Apache 2.0
xGen-7B-8K-Inst	8,192 tokens	Instruction-following tasks	Non-commercial research

On standard NLP benchmarks, xGen-7B achieved comparable or better results than other open-source LLMs of similar size at the time of release, including MPT, Falcon, LLaMA, RedPajama, and OpenLLaMA.[11] The long context window of 8K tokens was a differentiating feature, as many 7B-class models at the time supported only 2K or 4K token contexts.

xGen-MM (BLIP-3)

xGen-MM (xGen-MultiModal), also referred to as BLIP-3, is a family of open large multimodal models released in 2024.[12] The models extend the xGen initiative into vision-language understanding, building on the earlier BLIP and BLIP-2 architectures developed by Salesforce AI Research.

The xGen-MM framework improves upon BLIP-2 in three ways: (1) increasing the richness, scale, and diversity of training data, (2) replacing the Q-Former layers with a more scalable vision token sampler, and (3) simplifying the training process by unifying training objectives to a single loss at every stage.[12]

The v1.0 release (May 2024) included base and instruct models built on the Phi-3 Mini backbone.[12] The pretrained foundation model, xgen-mm-phi3-mini-base-r-v1, achieved strong performance under 5 billion parameters and demonstrated robust in-context learning capabilities.

The v1.5 release (August 2024) introduced the xGen-MM-instruct-interleave variant, which improved on both single-image and multi-image benchmarks.[12] A key capability of xGen-MM is handling "interleaved data" combining multiple images and text, enabling complex tasks like answering questions about several images at once.

BLIP and BLIP-2

BLIP (Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training) is a vision-language model framework developed by Salesforce AI Research for unified visual understanding and generation tasks. The original BLIP model was released in early 2022.[30]

BLIP-2 was released on January 30, 2023, introducing a novel pre-training strategy that bootstraps vision-language capabilities from frozen pre-trained image encoders and frozen large language models.[9] The architecture consists of three components: a CLIP-like image encoder, a Querying Transformer (Q-Former), and a large language model. Only the lightweight Q-Former is trained, while the image encoder and LLM remain frozen.[9]

BLIP-2 achieved state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language tasks despite having significantly fewer trainable parameters than competing methods. It outperformed Flamingo80B by 8.7% on zero-shot VQAv2 while using 54 times fewer trainable parameters.[9] The BLIP series of papers authored by Junnan Li and collaborators accumulated over 15,000 citations combined.

CodeGen

CodeGen is a family of open-source models for program synthesis developed by Salesforce AI Research. The models were trained on TPU-v4 hardware provided by Google, using data and model parallelism implemented in JAX.[8]

CodeGen 1.0 was released in March 2022 with the accompanying paper presented at ICLR 2023.[8] It included models in four sizes (350M, 2B, 6B, and 16B parameters) and three training stages:

Variant	Training Data	Description
CodeGen-NL	The Pile, natural language corpus	Base model trained on English text
CodeGen-Multi	BigQuery, multiple programming languages	Initialized from CodeGen-NL, further trained on code in multiple languages
CodeGen-Mono	BigPython, Python-only corpus	Initialized from CodeGen-Multi, further trained exclusively on Python

CodeGen 1.0 was competitive with OpenAI Codex on code generation benchmarks at the time of release.[8]

CodeGen2 was released in May 2023, introducing several improvements including infilling capability and support for a broader range of programming languages (C, C++, C#, Dart, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Lua, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Shell, SQL, Swift, TypeScript, and Vue).[31] CodeGen2 came in 1B, 3.7B, 7B, and 16B parameter sizes and was trained on the permissive subset of the Stack dataset (v1.1).[31]

CodeGen2.5 was released in July 2023 as a 7-billion-parameter model trained on the StarCoderData dataset containing 783 GB of code across 86 programming languages.[14] Despite having only 7B parameters, CodeGen2.5 outperformed earlier CodeGen models more than twice its size, making it practical for production deployment.[14] CodeGen2.5 became the backbone for Salesforce's internal coding assistant (CodeGenie) and the Einstein for Developers product.[13]

xGen-Code

xGen-Code is the latest addition to Salesforce's in-house LLM family, specifically designed for developer-centric tasks within the Salesforce ecosystem. Released in 2024 as part of the Agentforce for Developers initiative, xGen-Code powers the Dev Assistant feature and excels at complex, multi-turn interactions and dynamic chat functionality.[13]

While CodeGen2.5 handles quick, on-the-fly code completions, xGen-Code provides deeper, more interactive development support. According to Salesforce, xGen-Code outperforms both open-source and proprietary models in accuracy and efficiency on Salesforce-specific developer use cases.[13] Since the internal launch of CodeGenie (Salesforce's internal developer tool powered by CodeGen and xGen-Code), developers have accepted over 2 million lines of AI-generated code and submitted more than 500,000 chat questions.[13]

xGen-Sales

xGen-Sales is a proprietary model designed by Salesforce AI Research to handle sales-specific tasks with generative capabilities. The model was created by refining advanced LLMs using human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning, drawing on datasets from diverse sources including product guides, industry best practices, and curated dialogues.

What are xLAM large action models?

xLAM is a family of Large Action Models (LAMs) optimized for function calling, reasoning, and planning in agentic AI systems. Unlike traditional LLMs that focus on text generation, LAMs are built to execute real-world actions by calling APIs, tools, and functions.[15] Salesforce reported that its xLAM-8x22b model reached the top of the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, surpassing GPT-4 on tool-use accuracy.[51]

The xLAM family includes several model variants:[32]

Model	Parameters	Base Architecture	Use Case
xLAM-1B-fc-r	1.3B	DeepSeekCoder-1.3B-instruct	Lightweight function calling
xLAM-7B-fc-r	7B	DeepSeek-Coder-7B-instruct-v1.5	Function calling and tool use
xLAM-7b-r	7B	General	Academic exploration with limited GPU resources
xLAM-8x7b-r	8x7B (MoE)	Mixture-of-Experts	Industrial applications balancing latency and performance

The xLAM models were trained using the APIGen pipeline, which utilizes 3,673 executable APIs spanning 21 categories.[33] Each training example undergoes a three-step verification process: format checks, actual function executions, and semantic verification.[33]

On the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard, xLAM-7B-fc achieved the second-highest score overall (as of August 2024), outperforming larger models including GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus despite being significantly smaller and more cost-effective.

In April 2025, Salesforce released xLAM-2, a second generation of action models trained for multi-turn conversation and tool use using APIGen-MT, a pipeline that synthesizes verified multi-turn training data by simulating agent-human interplay.[34] The xLAM-2-fc-r series spans five sizes: 1B, 3B, and 32B models built on Qwen 2.5 backbones, plus 8B and 70B models built on Llama backbones, all released for research use.[36] According to Salesforce, the largest model achieved state-of-the-art results on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard v3, and on tau-bench it reached a 56.2% overall success rate, ahead of GPT-4o's 52.9% though behind Claude 3.5 Sonnet's 60.1%.[35][36]

ProGen

ProGen is a protein generation model that applies natural language processing techniques to amino acid sequences. Rather than generating English text, ProGen treats amino acids as words and protein sequences as sentences, learning the grammar of protein structure from evolutionary data.

The model is a 1.2-billion-parameter Transformer-based neural network trained on 280 million protein sequences spanning more than 19,000 protein families.[10] Training data was augmented with control tags specifying protein properties such as biological function and taxonomic origin.[10]

ProGen's results were published in Nature Biotechnology on January 26, 2023.[10] The research, conducted in collaboration with UC San Francisco and Tierra Biosciences, demonstrated that 73% of ProGen's artificially generated proteins were functional, compared to 59% of natural proteins tested under the same conditions.[10] Artificial proteins fine-tuned to five distinct lysozyme families showed catalytic efficiencies comparable to natural lysozymes, even when sequence identity to natural proteins was as low as 31.4%.[10]

LAVIS Library

LAVIS (LAnguage-VISion) is an open-source deep learning library developed by Salesforce AI Research for training and evaluating language-vision models. Released in September 2022, the library provides access to over 30 pre-trained and task-specific fine-tuned model checkpoints across four foundation model families: ALBEF, BLIP, CLIP, and ALPRO.[37] LAVIS supports a range of vision-language tasks including visual question answering, image captioning, image-text retrieval, and multimodal classification.[37]

What is Agentforce?

Agentforce is Salesforce's platform for building and deploying autonomous AI agents that can reason over CRM data, plan, and take action with limited human supervision. It launched at Dreamforce 2024 and, by the company's reporting, had generated more than $800 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of fiscal 2026.[19]

Launch at Dreamforce 2024

Salesforce unveiled Agentforce on September 12, 2024, at the Dreamforce conference.[5] Agentforce represents a strategic shift from copilot-style AI assistants to fully autonomous AI agents that can analyze data, make decisions, and take action on tasks without requiring constant human intervention.[5]

The platform combines three major Salesforce tools: Agent Builder (for creating and configuring agents using low-code tools), Model Builder (for selecting and deploying AI models), and Prompt Builder (for designing and testing prompts).

The initial Agentforce release included several pre-built agents:

Agent	Function
Service Agent	Handles customer service inquiries autonomously, replacing traditional chatbots
Sales Development Representative	Engages with inbound leads around the clock, qualifying prospects and scheduling meetings
Sales Coach	Provides personalized training and feedback for sales teams using role-play scenarios
Campaign Optimizer	Manages marketing campaign lifecycles, optimizing targeting and spend
Personal Shopper	Recommends products to consumers based on browsing behavior and preferences
Buyer Agent	Helps B2B customers find products, place orders, and track shipments
Merchant Agent	Handles site merchandising tasks including product placement and promotions

Agentforce became generally available on October 25, 2024, with pricing starting at $2 per conversation.[5][6]

Agentforce 2.0 (December 2024)

On December 17, 2024, Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0, positioning it as "the first digital labor platform for enterprises."[7] The release introduced new pre-built skills for sales development, sales coaching, marketing campaign management, and commerce merchandising, along with an enhanced Agent Builder capable of interpreting natural language instructions to auto-generate new agents.[7]

Key additions in Agentforce 2.0 included:

Integration with MuleSoft for extending agents to external systems and workflows
Deployment of Agentforce agents within Slack
Advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Scheduling skills for service engagements and new capabilities for field service workers

Agentforce 2.0 became generally available in February 2025.[7]

Agentforce 3 (June 2025)

On June 23, 2025, Salesforce announced Agentforce 3, an update focused on observability and interoperability for agents running in production.[38] The release introduced the Agentforce Command Center, a dashboard that lets teams monitor agent health, measure performance, and optimize outcomes, and added native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing agents to connect to external tools and services without custom integration code.[38] Through an expanded AgentExchange marketplace, customers gained access to MCP-compatible services from more than 30 partners, including AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM, PayPal, and Stripe.[38] Agentforce 3 also shipped more than 100 prebuilt industry-specific actions, and Salesforce said overall platform latency had fallen 50% since January 2025, with streamed responses generally available.[38]

Agentforce 360 (October 2025)

At Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce announced Agentforce 360, described as "the world's first platform designed to connect humans and AI agents in one trusted system."[18] This release introduced several new capabilities including Agentforce Builder (a conversational workspace for building, testing, and refining agents), Agent Script (a scripting language for controlling agent behavior with the predictability of code), Agentforce Voice (a voice-first platform for natural conversations with AI agents), and Intelligent Context (a feature that grounds agents in complex, unstructured business data through the Data 360 engine).[18]

Foundation model partnerships (2025)

During 2025, Salesforce expanded the set of frontier models available inside Agentforce through a series of partnerships with major model providers.

On February 24, 2025, Salesforce and Google announced an expanded partnership to bring Gemini models into Agentforce for prompt building and reasoning, drawing on Gemini's multimodal capabilities and long context windows, and to run Salesforce's Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360 applications on Google Cloud infrastructure.[39] Bloomberg reported that Salesforce committed to spend about $2.5 billion on Google Cloud services over seven years as part of the arrangement.[40]

On October 14, 2025, Anthropic and Salesforce announced an expanded partnership making Claude a preferred foundation model for Agentforce 360 customers in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, cybersecurity, and life sciences. Anthropic became the first LLM provider whose models run fully within Salesforce's trust boundary, with Claude traffic contained inside Salesforce's virtual private cloud; the companies also deepened Claude's integration with Slack.[41] The same day, Salesforce and OpenAI announced an agreement to make Agentforce 360 apps, Tableau visualizations, and Agentforce Commerce available inside ChatGPT, and to offer OpenAI frontier models, including GPT-5, for building agents and prompts within the Salesforce platform.[42]

Salesforce Ventures and AI Investments

Salesforce has funded AI development externally through Salesforce Ventures, the company's corporate venture capital arm.

Date	Milestone	Total AI Commitment
March 7, 2023	Launched $250M Generative AI Fund; initial investments in Anthropic, Cohere, You.com, and Hearth.AI[2][16]	$250 million
June 12, 2023	Doubled the fund to $500M; added investments in Humane and Tribble[16]	$500 million
March 2024	Led a $106M funding round in Together AI[43]	Growing
Mid-2024	Announced another $500M AI fund[16]	$1 billion

By mid-2024, Salesforce Ventures had invested in over two dozen AI companies, including Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, Mistral AI, Runway, and Together AI.[16] The $1 billion total commitment made Salesforce Ventures one of the largest corporate investors in the generative AI ecosystem.[16]

2025 Acquisitions: Informatica and Convergence.ai

Salesforce made two acquisitions in 2025 aimed directly at its agentic AI strategy.

On May 27, 2025, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management company, for approximately $8 billion in equity value net of Salesforce's existing investment, paying holders of Informatica's Class A and Class B-1 common stock $25 per share in cash.[44] The acquisition closed on November 18, 2025, ahead of the original schedule.[45] Salesforce said Informatica's data catalog, data integration, governance, data quality, privacy, metadata management, and master data management services would combine with its own platform to establish a unified data foundation for agentic AI underneath Agentforce and Data 360.[45] In Salesforce's fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, Informatica contributed $1.1 billion of cloud ARR to the combined Agentforce and Data 360 total and $399 million to full-year revenue.[19]

In May 2025, Salesforce also agreed to acquire Convergence.ai, a London-based startup founded in 2024 by Marvin Purtorab and Andy Toulis that built AI agents capable of navigating dynamic web interfaces, adapting in real time to pop-ups, errors, and changing page layouts.[46] Salesforce said the Convergence team would accelerate Agentforce development and form the nucleus of a new AI research and development center in London.[46]

Marc Benioff's AI Vision

Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has positioned AI, particularly agentic AI, as the central pillar of the company's future strategy. At Dreamforce 2024, Benioff articulated a vision of "digital labor," describing autonomous AI agents as a multitrillion-dollar market opportunity. He argued that unlike copilots and chatbots, which require continuous human guidance, AI agents can independently retrieve data, build action plans, and execute tasks.

Salesforce backed this vision with early adoption data, reporting 32,000 agent-driven conversations per week, with 83% of customer support cases resolved autonomously and 50% fewer escalations to human agents.[7]

In 2025, Benioff described agentic AI as reshaping Salesforce's internal operations as well. The company redeployed thousands of employees internally rather than expanding headcount, with engineering hiring remaining largely flat while AI-driven productivity increased. Benioff's annual strategic planning document (the V2MOM, standing for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measurements) emphasized industry-specific AI agents for sectors including automotive, pharmaceuticals, and government.

Benioff has also presented Salesforce as the leading reference customer for its own agents, with consequences for headcount. In September 2025 he said the company had reduced its customer support organization from about 9,000 people to roughly 5,000, eliminating some 4,000 support roles, because AI agents were handling about half of all customer support interactions.[47] Announcing fiscal 2026 results, he said Salesforce had been rebuilt as the operating system for the "Agentic Enterprise" and set a revenue target of $63 billion for fiscal 2030, including Informatica.[19]

Missionforce and National Security

In September 2025, Salesforce launched Missionforce, a business unit dedicated to bringing its AI, data, and cloud products to defense, intelligence, and aerospace customers. The unit is led by Kendall Collins, previously CEO of Salesforce Government Cloud and a former chief of staff to Marc Benioff, and focuses on personnel management, logistics and supply chains, and analytics.[48]

On January 26, 2026, Salesforce announced that the U.S. Army had awarded it a 10-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract with a $5.6 billion ceiling to support military modernization with cloud, data, and agentic AI capabilities. The award runs through Computable Insights LLC, Salesforce's wholly owned national security subsidiary operating within Missionforce, and consists of a five-year base period with a single five-year option.[49]

Financial Performance of AI Products

Salesforce's AI-driven products have shown rapid revenue growth:

Metric	Value (FY2026)
Total Salesforce Revenue	$41.5 billion (10% YoY growth)[19]
Combined AI and Data Cloud ARR	$2.9 billion (over 200% YoY growth)[19]
Agentforce ARR	$800 million (169% YoY growth)[19]
Organic AI ARR (excluding acquisitions)	$1.8 billion (100%+ YoY growth)[19]

While Salesforce's overall revenue growth remained in the 10% range for fiscal year 2026, its AI initiatives experienced triple-digit growth rates and became the company's most significant growth driver.[19]

Full results for fiscal 2026 (ended January 31, 2026) were reported on February 25, 2026. Fourth-quarter revenue was $11.2 billion, up 12% year over year, and Salesforce said it had closed more than 29,000 Agentforce deals since launch, up 50% quarter over quarter, with more than 60% of fourth-quarter Agentforce and Data 360 bookings coming from existing customer expansion.[19] The company also introduced a usage metric called Agentic Work Units (AWUs) to measure tasks completed by AI agents, reporting 2.4 billion AWUs delivered to date across Agentforce and Slack and more than 19 trillion tokens processed, up five times year over year.[19] Salesforce guided fiscal 2027 revenue to between $45.8 billion and $46.2 billion, including roughly three percentage points of contribution from Informatica, and set a fiscal 2030 revenue target of $63 billion.[19]

Momentum continued into fiscal 2027. In first-quarter results reported on May 27, 2026, revenue reached $11.1 billion, up 13% year over year, while Agentforce ARR passed $1.2 billion, up 205%, and combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR approached $3.4 billion, including $1.1 billion of Informatica Cloud ARR.[50]

How does Salesforce AI compare to Microsoft and other competitors?

Salesforce competes with several major technology companies in the enterprise AI space:

Competitor	AI Product	Approach
Microsoft	Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365 AI	Integrated AI across Office, Teams, and Dynamics 365; horizontal platform play with 60% of Fortune 500 adoption for Copilot
Oracle	Oracle AI Agent Studio, Fusion Applications AI	AI agents embedded in ERP, CRM, and HCM applications; emphasis on unified data models
Google	Vertex AI, Gemini for Workspace	Cloud-native AI platform with Gemini models integrated into Google Workspace
SAP	SAP Joule, Business AI	AI copilot integrated into SAP S/4HANA and SuccessFactors
ServiceNow	Now Assist	AI assistant for IT service management and workflow automation

The primary rivalry is between Salesforce and Microsoft, the two largest players in CRM. Salesforce maintains a customer base of over 202,600 organizations, compared to Microsoft Dynamics 365's approximately 91,400. While Microsoft leverages its broader ecosystem (Azure, Office 365, Teams) for cross-selling AI capabilities, Salesforce argues that its purpose-built, CRM-native AI delivers deeper functionality for customer-facing workflows.

The competitive landscape shifted in 2024 and 2025 as all major enterprise vendors introduced autonomous AI agent capabilities, moving beyond basic copilot functionality. Salesforce's Agentforce, Microsoft's Copilot Studio, and Oracle's AI Agent Studio represent converging approaches to agentic AI, with differentiation increasingly hinging on data integration, trust and security features, and industry-specific customization.

Summary of Key Models and Products

Name	Type	Year	Key Details
Einstein AI	AI platform	2016	Predictive analytics, lead scoring, NLP built into Salesforce CRM
CTRL	Conditional language model	2019	1.63B parameters; control codes steer style and content of generated text
CodeT5	Code model	2021	Identifier-aware encoder-decoder for code understanding and generation
CodeGen 1.0	Code generation LLM	2022	350M to 16B parameters; competitive with OpenAI Codex
BLIP	Vision-language model	2022	Unified vision-language understanding and generation
LAVIS	Open-source library	2022	30+ pre-trained model checkpoints for language-vision tasks
BLIP-2	Vision-language model	January 2023	Q-Former architecture; 54x fewer trainable parameters than Flamingo80B
Einstein GPT	Generative AI for CRM	March 2023	First generative AI CRM tool; integrates OpenAI and Salesforce models
ProGen	Protein generation model	January 2023	1.2B parameters; 73% of generated proteins functional
CodeGen2	Code generation LLM	May 2023	1B to 16B parameters; infilling support; 19 programming languages
AI Cloud	Enterprise AI suite	June 2023	Einstein Trust Layer for data security and compliance
xGen-7B	Large language model	July 2023	7B parameters; 8K context; 1.5T training tokens
CodeGen2.5	Code generation LLM	July 2023	7B parameters; trained on 783 GB of code in 86 languages
Einstein Copilot	Conversational AI assistant	September 2023	Natural language CRM assistant with Copilot Studio
xGen-MM (BLIP-3)	Multimodal model	May 2024	Multi-image understanding; scalable vision token sampler
xLAM	Large action model	2024	Function calling; outperformed GPT-4 on Berkeley Leaderboard
xGen-Code	Code generation LLM	2024	Salesforce-specific developer use cases; powers Agentforce for Developers
xGen-Sales	Sales-specific LLM	2024	Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning for sales tasks
Agentforce	Autonomous AI agents	September 2024	Pre-built agents for service, sales, marketing, and commerce
Agentforce 2.0	Digital labor platform	December 2024	MuleSoft integration, Slack deployment, enhanced reasoning
xLAM-2	Large action model	April 2025	1B to 70B parameters; multi-turn function calling trained with APIGen-MT
CRMArena-Pro	Agent benchmark	May 2025	19 enterprise tasks; top agents about 58% single-turn, 35% multi-turn success
Agentforce 3	Agent platform release	June 2025	Command Center observability; native Model Context Protocol support
SFR-DeepResearch	Research agent models	September 2025	RL-trained autonomous research agents; 28.7% on Humanity's Last Exam
Agentforce 360	Agent platform	October 2025	Voice, Agent Script, Intelligent Context, and Builder workspace

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Editing: Salesforce AI