Salesforce cosies up to OpenAI and Anthropic amid sluggish sales
Software giant Salesforce is doubling down on its partnerships with AI heavyweights OpenAI and Anthropic to bolster its flagship AI platform, ‘agentforce 360’, as uptake remains modest.
At this week’s Dreamforce conference, chief executive and co-founder Marc Benioff announced: “We’re so thrilled to have our relationship with OpenAI”.
“You guys are becoming a critical part of our infrastructure, of everybody’s infrastrucutre”, he added.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, announced with Benioff: “We believe that AI systems are going to unlock potential for humanity and levels that we today can’t even comprehend”.
OpenAI integration
Salesforce announced that its expanded partnership with the ChatGPT maker will allow customers to access ‘agentforce’ inside the LLM.
Meanwhile, customers will also be able to build AI agents and prompts using OpenAI’s GPT5.
The US software maker also plans to integrate a commerce feature within its operations, allowing merchants to access GPT users, whilst still maintaining full control over customer data.
Claude steps in
What’s more, Salesforce unveiled a strengthened partnership with Anthropic, whose Claude model will support the deployment of AI in regulated industries, like finance or healthcare.
Claude is set to become fully integrated into Slack, Salesforce’s popular corporate messaging platform, allowing teams to access AI tools securely within the app.
Benioff told reporters at Dreamforce on Tuesday: “[Many companies] rely on us for the fundamental backbone of their mission, critical operations of their business, from the manufacturing of their products, to sales, services or support”.
He claimed: “Every tech revolution, clients pick Salesforce because they believe best in class. They’re the most innovative, and they’ve got that handled now”.
Slack as an ‘agentic’ system
The company is also emphasising Slack as an “agentic operating system”, by having AI directly added into the platform that employees already use.
During his keynote, Benioff highlighted how ChatGPT and Codex can summarise complex conversations, draft responses, and even complete coding tasks within Slack, without switching applications.
There are two ways for that to happen, Lightcap told the audience.
“One is, we’ve got to integrate with the systems and tools that people use. Two is, we’ve got to be able to create new experiences for people to do more. And three, it’s all got to be trust based”. “And we’ve got to get that right”, he claimed.
Challenges ahead
Yet, questions remain over whether Salesforce can translate these partnerships into meaningful revenue growth.
Agentforce adoption has so far been limited, and shares have fallen roughly 15 per cent in 2025.
Investors will be watching closely to see if embedding OpenAI and Anthropic models across ChatGPT, Slack, and Salesforce’s own platform can reverse the trend.
But in the meantime, Salesforce’s flurry of announcements this week signals that it intends to remain at the centre of enterprise AI.