Skip to content

Salesforce — native AI

Tier C · Last reviewed 2026-05-13 · phase-2-research

Named AI products

Salesforce's AI surface as of mid-2026 is consolidated under the Agentforce 360 brand, introduced at Dreamforce 2025.1 The brand covers four pieces: the Agentforce Platform (build, run, and govern AI agents), Data 360 (renamed from Data Cloud — the grounding layer for agents), Customer 360 Apps, and Slack.

  • ~$800M
    Agentforce ARR · FY26 Q4 (+169% YoY)23
  • ~$2.9B
    Combined Agentforce + Data 360 ARR23
  • ~29,000
    Agentforce deals in FY26 Q4 alone23
  • 38+
    Hyperforce regions (20+ with residency)18
timeline
  title Agentforce release cadence (last 12 months)
  2024-12 : Agentforce 2.0 launch
  2025-02 : Agentforce 2.0 GA (Slack, MuleSoft, RAG)
  2025-05 : Flex Credits pricing
  2025-06 : Agentforce 3 (Command Center, MCP, streaming)
  2025-10 : Agentforce 360 + Anthropic/OpenAI/Google partnerships
  2025-11 : Observability GA
  2025-12 : Agentforce 360 for AWS · Agentforce in ChatGPT (Sales)

Key milestones in the past 12 months:

  • Agentforce 2.0. GA February 2025; added Slack actions, MuleSoft for Flow, enhanced reasoning and RAG.2
  • Agentforce 3. Launched 23 June 2025. Introduced the Command Center for observability, native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, response streaming GA, 100+ prebuilt industry actions, and language/region expansion.3
  • Agentforce 360. Unveiled at Dreamforce 13 October 2025. Added Agentforce Builder, Agentforce Voice, Agent Script (pilot/beta), Agentforce Vibes ("vibe coding"), and hybrid reasoning.1
  • Einstein Copilot rename. Renamed to "Agentforce" (Agentforce Assistant) in the Spring '25 release notes with no functional change; Salesforce now positions copilots as superseded by autonomous agents.4
  • Data Cloud → Data 360. Renamed at Dreamforce 2025; positioned as the grounding/context layer for Agentforce.5
  • Atlas Reasoning Engine. The orchestrator/"brain" of Agentforce; in 2025 it became configurable across multiple foundation models.6

What the features actually do (GA vs preview)

GA

  • Agentforce Voice. GA in all regions in English (US/UK) as of 21 October 2025, spanning phone, web, and app channels with low-latency speech.7
  • Agentforce Observability ("Monitor & Optimize"). Reached GA in November 2025 with detailed analytics and conversation logs stored in Data 360.8

  • Prompt Builder. GA, with Winter '26 adding multimodal prompt support (images, PDFs). Model Builder (within Einstein Studio) is GA for bringing custom models from Vertex AI, SageMaker, OpenAI, Databricks, and Snowflake-hosted models.9

    Source gap

    Salesforce official release notes and Trailblazer Community announcements not located within the 12-month window. Attempted: Salesforce official release notes, Salesforce Admins blog within 12-month window, Trailblazer Community announcements. The source most cited by the research was Salesforce Admins, which serves as the corroborating link.

  • Agentforce 360 for AWS. Announced December 2025; runs on AWS infrastructure via Amazon Bedrock with Claude and Amazon Nova Lite/Pro models; AWS Marketplace rollout in early 2026.10

Pilot / preview

  • Agent Script. Programmable agent behavior with hybrid reasoning; in pilot at Dreamforce 2025 with customer beta in November 2025.6
  • Agentforce Vibes ("vibe coding"). Introduced as part of the Agentforce 360 platform; build maturity unclear at GA time.6
  • Agentforce in ChatGPT. Agentforce Sales in ChatGPT and Agentforce Commerce in ChatGPT — Sales variant shipped December 2025, Commerce follows.11

Model providers and partnerships

Salesforce has moved decisively to a multi-model posture in the last 12 months, with three high-profile partnership expansions all announced in October 2025:

  • Anthropic Claude. Named a foundational model in Agentforce 360 on 14 October 2025. Crucially, Anthropic became the first LLM provider fully integrated within the Salesforce trust boundary — Claude traffic stays inside Salesforce's VPC. Positioned as the preferred model for regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, cybersecurity, life sciences).12
  • OpenAI. Partnership expanded the same day. OpenAI frontier models including GPT-5 are available within Agentforce; Agentforce 360 apps and Agentforce Commerce will also be accessible inside ChatGPT.13
  • Google. Partnership expanded 16 October 2025: Gemini can power the Atlas Reasoning Engine; zero-copy integration with BigQuery; Vertex AI Grounding with Google Search.14
  • AWS. Partnership deepened December 2025: Agentforce 360 for AWS uses Amazon Bedrock for reasoning, plus Amazon Nova models alongside Claude on Bedrock.10

  • In-house xGen family. Salesforce maintains its in-house xGen foundation-model family (xGen-Sales, xGen-Code, xLAM, xGen-MM) for data-local sales-specific use cases. The line is reconfirmed through 2025 Agentforce model-list documentation.

    Source gap

    The xGen primary blog predates the Tier C window. Attempted: xGen-Sales primary blog after 2025-05-13, Salesforce AI Research recent papers; only older sources located, treated as directional.

Data handling

sequenceDiagram
  autonumber
  participant User
  participant SF as Salesforce tenant
  participant Trust as Einstein Trust Layer
  participant LLM as External LLM<br/>(OpenAI · Anthropic · Google · Bedrock)

  User->>SF: Prompt + CRM context
  SF->>Trust: Grounding from Data 360
  Trust->>Trust: PII masking · Prompt defense
  Trust->>LLM: Sanitized prompt
  LLM-->>Trust: Response
  Trust->>Trust: Toxicity scoring · Audit log
  Trust->>SF: Cleaned response
  SF-->>User: Final answer
  Note over Trust,LLM: Zero data retention contractual.<br/>Anthropic traffic stays in SF VPC.

The Einstein Trust Layer is Salesforce's umbrella term for AI data protections.15 It enforces:

  • Grounding. Secure data retrieval and dynamic grounding from Data 360.
  • Prompt defense. Prompt defense and data masking.
  • Zero data retention. Prompts and outputs are not stored or used to train external models; this is contractual with LLM partners.
  • Toxicity + audit. Toxicity scoring and an audit trail of prompts and responses.

Historically, zero data retention applied most cleanly to OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. The October 2025 Anthropic deal extended fuller in-boundary handling — making Anthropic the first LLM provider whose traffic never leaves Salesforce's trust boundary.16

Trust Layer limits

Independent analysts note real limits: data masking is pattern + ML based, does not apply universally across all text fields or languages, and full masking is "not fully supported at the Agent layer, only at the prompt and feature levels." Toxicity scoring is also language-dependent.17

Data residency is enforced via Hyperforce, which by 2025 covers 38+ regions globally with data-residency/compliance support in 20+. Einstein and Agentforce features inherit residency settings from Hyperforce.18

Pricing

Salesforce now publicly maintains three-plus concurrent pricing models for Agentforce — an unusual posture in this cohort:19

Model List price Notes
Per-conversation $2 per Agentforce conversation Original consumption model, still available19
Flex Credits $0.10 per action ($500 entry; 100,000-credit minimum) 20 credits per Agentforce action; 30 per Voice action; pay-as-you-go GA August 202520
Agentforce add-on ~$125/user/month Layered on Sales, Service, Field Service; unlimited employee-facing agent usage21
Agentforce 1 Edition ~$550/user/month Agent-native seat-based edition; 6% list-price increase21
Salesforce Foundations Free to Enterprise Edition+ Bundles Agentforce + Data 360; includes 200,000 Einstein Requests, 100,000 Flex Credits, 10,000 Data Cloud credits22

Standout

Strength

Adoption signal — strong but contested on the upside. Salesforce closed FY26 Q4 (ended 31 Jan 2026) with Agentforce ARR ~$800M (up 169% year-over-year) and ~29,000 Agentforce deals in the quarter alone. Combined Agentforce + Data 360 ARR exceeded $2.9B.23 Constellation Research reported a 60% quarter-over-quarter increase in customers moving Agentforce from pilot to production in late FY26.24 Customer-side: 1-800Accountant reported resolving 50% of incoming support requests via Agentforce in normal operations, rising to 70% during 2025 tax-week peaks (vendor-sourced).28

Limitation

The picture is not uniformly rosy. Third-party coverage cited a ~5.3% adoption rate among the Salesforce installed base in 2025, with RBC characterizing revenue as "not amazing" relative to Salesforce's overall size.25 In September 2025, Salesforce reduced its own customer-support headcount from ~9,000 to ~5,000 citing Agentforce deployment, with CEO Marc Benioff publicly framing the cut as "I need less heads."26 Forrester wrote in 2025 that Salesforce showed "little adoption or impact from AI agents despite lots of potential" and characterized core innovation as "incremental," also questioning whether Data 360 could displace Databricks or Snowflake as the grounding layer.27

  1. Salesforce, "Welcome to the Agentic Enterprise: With Agentforce 360, Salesforce Elevates Human Potential in the Age of AI," Salesforce Press Release, 2025-10-13. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/10/13/agentic-enterprise-announcement/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩↩

  2. Salesforce, "Introducing Agentforce 2.0: The Digital Labor Platform for Building a Limitless Workforce," Salesforce Press Release, 2024-12-17 (canonical announcement). https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2024/12/17/agentforce-2-0-announcement/ Accessed 2026-05-13. Predates 12-month window; corroborated by Constellation Research within-window coverage. ↩

  3. Salesforce, "Salesforce Launches Agentforce 3 to Solve the Biggest Blockers to Scaling AI Agents: Visibility and Control," Salesforce Press Release, 2025-06-23. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/06/23/agentforce-3-announcement/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  4. Salesforce Help, "Einstein Copilot for Salesforce is Now Agentforce," Spring '25 release notes. https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.rn_copilot_new_name_agentforce_default.htm&release=252 Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  5. Salesforce Ben, "Salesforce Data Cloud Renamed to 'Data 360' As Part of 'Agentforce 360'," 2025. https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-data-cloud-renamed-to-data-360-as-part-of-agentforce-360/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  6. Salesforce Developers Blog, "Build and Optimize Agents with New Agentforce 360 Features," 2025-10. https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2025/10/build-and-optimize-agents-with-new-agentforce-360-features Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩↩↩

  7. CNBC, "Salesforce adds voice calling to Agentforce AI customer service software," 2025-10-13. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/13/salesforce-adds-voice-to-agentforce-ai-customer-service-software.html Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  8. SalesforceDevops.net, "Salesforce Makes Agent Observability GA, Extending the Agentic SDLC," 2025-11-20. https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2025/11/20/salesforce-makes-agent-observability-ga-extending-the-agentic-sdlc/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  9. Salesforce Admins, "Turn Your Data Into Custom AI Models With Einstein Studio," 2025. https://admin.salesforce.com/blog/2025/turn-your-data-into-custom-ai-models Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  10. Salesforce / AWS joint press release, "Salesforce and AWS Deepen Collaboration to Launch Agentforce 360 for AWS," 2025-12. https://press.aboutamazon.com/aws/2025/12/salesforce-and-aws-deepen-collaboration-to-launch-agentforce-360-for-aws-driving-faster-safer-ai-success-for-enterprises Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩↩

  11. SalesforceDevops.net, "Salesforce Launches Agentforce in ChatGPT to Head Off 'Homegrown MCP Servers'," 2025-12-22. https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2025/12/22/salesforce-launches-agentforce-in-chatgpt-to-head-off-homegrown-mcp-servers/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  12. Salesforce, "Anthropic and Salesforce Expand Strategic Partnership to Deliver Trusted AI for Regulated Industries," Salesforce Press Release, 2025-10-14. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/10/14/anthropic-regulated-industries-partnership-expansion-announcement/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  13. Salesforce, "Salesforce and OpenAI Announce Strategic Partnership Expansion," Salesforce Press Release, 2025-10-14. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/10/14/openai-partnership-expansion-announcement/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  14. Salesforce, "Salesforce and Google Expand Strategic Partnership with Deeper Integrations Across Agentforce 360 and Gemini Enterprise," Salesforce Press Release, 2025-10-16. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/10/16/google-gemini-agentforce-partnership-expansion-announcement/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  15. Salesforce Help, "Einstein Trust Layer." https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.generative_ai_trust_layer.htm Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  16. Anthropic, "Anthropic and Salesforce expand partnership to bring Claude to regulated industries," 2025-10-14. https://www.anthropic.com/news/salesforce-anthropic-expanded-partnership Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  17. eesel AI, "What is the Salesforce Einstein Trust Layer? A 2025 overview," 2025. https://www.eesel.ai/blog/salesforce-einstein-trust-layer Accessed 2026-05-13. Third-party assessment. ↩

  18. Salesforce, "Salesforce Infrastructure and Sub-processors," 2026-03-20. https://www.salesforce.com/en-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/documents/legal/misc/salesforce-infrastructure-and-subprocessors.pdf Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩↩

  19. SaaStr, "Salesforce Now Has 3+ Pricing Models for Agentforce. And Maybe Right Now, That's The Way to Do It," 2025. https://www.saastr.com/salesforce-now-has-3-pricing-models-for-agentforce-and-maybe-right-now-thats-the-way-to-do-it/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩↩

  20. Salesforce, "Salesforce Introduces New Flexible Agentforce Pricing to Accelerate the Digital Labor Revolution," 2025-05-15. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/05/15/agentforce-flexible-pricing-news/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  21. Salesforce Ben, "Salesforce Announces 6% Pricing Increase and Unlimited Agentforce Licenses," 2025. https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-announces-6-pricing-increase-and-unlimited-agentforce-licenses/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩↩

  22. Salesforce, "Salesforce Foundations" product page. https://www.salesforce.com/crm/foundations/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  23. Salesforce, "Salesforce Delivers Record Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2026 Results," Salesforce Investor Press Release, 2026-02-25. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/02/25/fy26-q4-earnings/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩↩↩↩

  24. Constellation Research, "Salesforce Q4 strong, Agentforce picks up momentum," 2026. https://www.constellationr.com/insights/news/salesforce-q4-strong-agentforce-picks-momentum Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  25. Salesforce Ben, "Why Agentforce Adoption Is Slower Than Expected – And What Salesforce Needs to Do," 2025. https://www.salesforceben.com/why-agentforce-adoption-is-slower-than-expected-and-what-salesforce-needs-to-do/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  26. Fortune, "Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says his company has cut 4,000 customer service jobs as AI steps in: 'I need less heads'," 2025-09-02. https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-billionaire-marc-benioff-ai-agents-jobs-layoffs-customer-service-sales/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  27. Forrester, "Salesforce Dreams Of The Agentic Enterprise," Forrester blog, 2025. https://www.forrester.com/blogs/salesforce-dreams-of-the-agentic-enterprise/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩

  28. Salesforce, "1-800Accountant Adopts Salesforce's Agentforce to Scale Expertise During Tax Season Surge, Now Resolving 50% of Customer Support Inquiries with Digital Labor," Salesforce Press Release, 2025-03-04. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/03/04/1800accountant-agentforce-customer-support/ Accessed 2026-05-13. ↩