While Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has frequently used quarterly earnings calls to proclaim that some recent deal made him more excited than he’s ever been, I am fully convinced that Benioff really meant it last week when he gushed that his breakthrough deal with Anthropic is delivering “something the world has never seen.”
And the primary reason for why I’m willing to suspend all disbelief about Benioff’s bullishness about Claudeforce is his blunt candor in admitting that Anthropic and Claudeforce can deliver to Salesforce customers something that Salesforce itself — for all of its extraordinary achievements over the last quarter-century — could not do: unleash the business value accumulated within Salesforce systems over some or even all of that time.
Describing his recent meeting with a huge Swiss customer that’s spending $100 million this year with Salesforce and has spent more than $1 billion during their 20-year relationship, Benioff shared his impression of how the customer’s executive team reacted to Claudeforce:
“And all of a sudden, literally, I could see the customer’s mouth just dropped open because it was astonishing. They were seeing that we were able to reveal this value that had been trapped in their systems, okay, right into this dynamic user interface. And they weren’t having to hire all these FTEs and all this stuff to get it going. It was building these apps on the fly for them using the foundation that they had spent two decades building with Salesforce.”
Many, many times has Marc Benioff talked about the unmatched power of customer data captured by and stored in Salesforce systems — but to the best of my recollection and research, never before has he described that Salesforce data and knowledge and insight and potential as being “trapped,” with its enormous potential business value lying dormant.
Later in the call, Benioff returned to the theme of “trapped” potential for innovation and growth, and described how both Salesforce and Anthropic will be able to use Claudeforce to drive new opportunities not only for customers but also for each other.
“I really saw it myself, as I said, in Europe, where we would really show these exhaustive demos to customers and when they could see that all this value that they have in their systems that has been trapped becomes untrapped.
“But you also saw it here at Salesforce. This quarter, we actually released it to many of our executives all over the world and many of those executives were the ones who are actually demoing it directly to those customers,” Benioff said.
“We’ll also work hand-in-hand with Anthropic sales executives as well, and we’ll do whatever we can to make sure that this becomes a huge part of our sales ecosystem. I think this is going to be an incredible opportunity for both companies.”
Of course, unprecedentedly powerful new capabilities aren’t free, and Benioff said that customers that “want Claudeforce, that want Headless, that want all these value-added agentic editions and capabilities” will have to upgrade to Salesforce Premium Edition.
“That’s going give you the power to fully operate inside your enterprise and deliver this high level of capability and unleash the huge amount of value that’s been trapped for so many years.”
Anthropic CEO Shares His View
Immediately preceding the earnings call, Salesforce showed a video conversation between Benioff and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about Claudeforce and the innovation and value it can unlock for customers.
“Within Anthropic, for a long time, we’ve been accelerating the research teams within Claude,” Amodei said.
“But this is the first time that we’ve really been able to incredibly accelerate our go-to-market efforts with Claude. And we want that for all the other enterprises, and me and Marc want to bring it together to everyone,” Amodei said.
“All the data, all the information comes from being managed in Salesforce. But the conversation, the interaction, that comes through Claude. So you can see how these two things can be more than the sum of their parts.”
Benioff Sees Powerful Synergy
“Why this is so exciting is it’s a perfect complement,” Benioff said.
“Anthropic builds this amazing model, and now the model has this incredible user interface, Cowork. And when you take Cowork and put it right on top of Salesforce, it’s able to bring the data, the applications, the semantics, the agents themselves and build complete applications, a total user interface to let you get all the value out of Salesforce that’s been trapped.
“Customers have put hundreds of billions of dollars into Salesforce,” Benioff said.
“And there is a huge amount of value that can be unleashed through this combination.”
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