Salesforce opened Dreamforce on September 15, 2026, with a new name, AIforce, and three products underneath it: Claudeforce, Slackforce, and Agentforce Coworker. The company also announced Koa, a CRM reasoning model built with NVIDIA, and expanded partnerships with Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Siemens.
This article is for people who work in Salesforce and want one question answered: what can you switch on this week, what is announced but not yet documented, and what is still only Salesforce’s description of itself. (Individuals named here are referenced for news context only; they are not affiliated with Coursiv and do not endorse it.)
What Salesforce means by AIforce
Salesforce describes AIforce as a live interface layer. Stripped of the marketing vocabulary, the claim is this: data, workflows, business logic, and permissions that already exist in a company’s Salesforce instance can be reached from an AI assistant instead of through Salesforce’s own screens, and the assistant sees only what the signed-in user could see anyway.
Technically it sits on Headless 360, the APIs, MCP servers, and command-line tools Salesforce released earlier in 2026 for developers. AIforce packages that plumbing into ready-made experiences for non-developers. Patrick Stokes, Salesforce’s president of applications and marketing, said in launch interviews that the value of Salesforce was never in the UI, and that the goal is for each employee to have an interface of their own instead of a shared one. If the vocabulary is new, our explainers on AI agents and the Model Context Protocol cover the two terms that matter most.
Claimed vs available: the three surfaces
| Surface | Salesforce’s claim | Available now | Known limits | Independently verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agentforce Coworker | AI teammate inside Lightning that reasons across accounts, activity, and history and takes action within existing permissions | Yes. Push-button activation, no migration | Only what Agentforce agents a company has already deployed can be called; pricing not disclosed | No. Adoption figure (100,000 users in 35 days) and Fulton Bank case (20+ use cases, about 3,000 users) are Salesforce-reported |
| Claudeforce | Salesforce inside Claude with 37 sales skills; a Salesforce Development plug-in for Claude Code | Beta on all paid Claude plans, after an admin connects the org through AgentExchange | Sales skills only; service, marketing, and commerce skills promised later; two contracts (Salesforce and Anthropic) | No. Pilot references (Deloitte, GitLab, Legora, Siemens) are vendor-published |
| Slackforce | Slackbot reasoning over Slack and Salesforce; Slack Surfaces, live interactive views inside Slack; Slack CRM for record updates by prompt; Slack Code | Announced at Dreamforce; no published rollout schedule or plan requirements | Unknown which Slack plans include it; pricing not disclosed | No. One customer, Engine, named as testing |
Two of the three are usable. Agentforce Coworker is the one most Salesforce users will meet first, because it appears inside the interface they already use and needs no new tool. Claudeforce requires a Claude plan and an admin; we cover its setup and skills in Salesforce in Claude is now in beta and the August partnership in our Claudeforce explainer. Slackforce is a name and a demo until Salesforce publishes documentation.
Koa: a model tested by its maker
Koa is Salesforce’s first CRM-specific reasoning model, built with NVIDIA by post-training the Nemotron 3 Super open model on synthetic datasets that Salesforce says encode 27 years of deployment patterns across more than 14 industries. No customer data was used, according to the company.
Salesforce reports that Koa matches or beats leading general models while making three times fewer errors on CRM tasks. That result comes from Salesforce’s own benchmark, whose methodology has not been published or independently reproduced, so treat it as a claim rather than a measurement. Koa powers Agentforce agents inside Salesforce, is with select pilot customers, and is scheduled for general availability in winter 2026 in U.S. regions. It does not replace Claude: Claude is the assistant people talk to through Claudeforce, while Koa runs inside Salesforce for agent workflows.
What is not disclosed
- Pricing for any of the three surfaces. Salesforce’s notice says pricing and packaging are subject to change and availability varies by region.
- Combined billing. Customers using Claudeforce contract with Salesforce for headless API consumption and separately with Anthropic for Claude. Salesforce acknowledged in August that there is no single contract yet.
- Slack plan requirements for Slackforce, and whether Slack Surfaces need Salesforce licenses in addition to Slack seats.
- Any third-party measurement of accuracy, time saved, or error rates for Coworker, Claudeforce, or Koa. Salesforce cited its own scale figures instead: 12 million apps built by its community, 9.6 billion API calls a day, 156 million lines of AI-generated code.
How it was received
Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chair and CEO, framed AIforce as an interface revolution built with Zero Data Retention and governed by existing permissions. Analysts were more reserved. diginomica’s Stuart Lauchlan called the messaging unclear and the concept not fully cooked through, while accepting that the shift away from the shared UI is real. ITPro’s account used Stokes’s own phrase, letting enterprises break free of a shared user interface, as the clearest summary. On X, a Salesforce partner described AIforce as the interface layer on top of what customers already own, with Data 360 as context, Customer 360 as application logic, and Agentforce as the workforce; critics called it another layer nobody asked for and noted the name sits uncomfortably close to Agentforce and Claudeforce.
One critique applies to all three surfaces and predates them: an assistant reasoning over a CRM is only as reliable as the records in it. Duplicate accounts and stale stages produce confident wrong answers whether the question is asked in Lightning, Slack, or Claude. Nothing announced on September 15 addresses data quality itself.
What to do if you work in Salesforce
- Admins: Coworker can be activated now; Salesforce says it inherits existing permissions and needs no migration. Test it with one team before company-wide rollout, and confirm which Agentforce agents it can call in your org.
- Sales teams on Claude Team or Enterprise: ask your Salesforce admin about the Claudeforce beta. Setup steps are in our beta guide.
- Slack-first teams: wait for documentation. Nothing about Slackforce can be evaluated yet beyond the demo.
- Everyone: watch Dreamforce, which runs through September 17, 2026, for pricing, Slackforce dates, and service and marketing skill packs. For how the shift changes a revenue role, see our guide to AI skills for sales professionals.