Tag: Claudeforce

Last updated: 14 October 2026

Three names in two months. Headless 360 in spring, AIforce at Dreamforce, and SIForce last week. If you look after a Salesforce org, the obvious worry is that one of these quietly turns into a migration project nobody budgeted for.

We read Salesforce’s own impact notes so you don’t have to, and the honest answer is: it’s smaller than it sounds, but it isn’t nothing. This guide walks through the AIforce impact on your Salesforce implementation, what stays exactly as it is, the dates that matter, and the checklist we’d work through before the new rules switch on. If you want the background on the announcement itself, start with our explainer What Is AIforce?

What is Salesforce AIforce?

AIforce is Salesforce’s interface layer for AI. It brings Salesforce data, workflows and permissions into the tools people already work in, so a rep can ask Claude or Slack about an account instead of opening Salesforce. Salesforce first showed the idea at TDX 2026 under the name Headless 360 and launched it as AIforce at Dreamforce on 15 September 2026.

It arrives in three forms, all running on the same foundation:

• Claudeforce (Salesforce in Claude): a prebuilt MCP server with 37 sales skills that lets Claude read and act on Salesforce records. It launched in beta for Salesforce customers. Our guide to Claudeforce covers it in detail.
• Slackforce: Salesforce context and actions inside Slack, such as creating accounts or logging notes from a prompt.
• Agentforce Coworker: an AI teammate inside the Lightning interface that works within existing permissions and can call the Agentforce agents you have built. See our Agentforce Coworker guide.

Under all three sits the Headless Toolkit: the MCP servers, APIs, skills and plug-ins that expose the platform to outside AI tools. That toolkit is where the implementation impact comes from.

AIforce is now SIForce: what the rename means

On 9 October 2026, Marc Benioff posted on X: “AIForce is officially SIForce.” The rename followed a US executive order that asks federal agencies to say “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence”.

For your org, the rename changes nothing yet. No features, prices or availability were announced with it, and Salesforce’s help documentation still uses the name AIforce. Our advice is the same as for the Agentforce product names Salesforce reversed in September: keep contracts, order forms and internal documents on the current names until your account team confirms how they will appear at renewal. In this guide we use “AIforce”, because that is the name in Salesforce’s own documentation today.

Do you need to migrate to AIforce?

No, not in the usual sense. There is no data migration, no new object model and no rebuild of your flows, reports or page layouts. AIforce reads from the org you already have. We already give every integration a dedicated, least-privilege user on the Salesforce CRM integration work we do, and agent identities follow the same idea.

The “migration” is narrower and more technical. It applies to agents: any AI tool, script or MCP client that connects to Salesforce on its own. Salesforce’s help article Understand AIforce Impact sets out two changes for them.

What Salesforce AIforce changes in your implementation

1. Salesforce agent registration: every agent gets its own identity

Right now, a lot of AI tools get into Salesforce by borrowing someone’s login or a shared integration user. Under the new model, admins register each agent through a feature called Agentic Identity. The agent gets its own identity on the platform, and you can give it a narrower permission set than any human user has.

Security-wise, this is a good change. An agent with its own identity can be limited, watched and switched off without touching a person’s account. The catch is the work behind it: someone has to find every agent, register it, and swap its OAuth credentials so Salesforce knows it’s talking to an agent and not a human.

2. Headless Platform Interactions: a new meter for agent calls

Each successful call a registered agent makes to Salesforce, over MCP or direct API, is metered as a Headless Platform Interaction (HPI). HPIs are tracked in Digital Wallet and paid for with Flex Credits, under the Customer 360 Platform section of the Flex Credits rate card.

Two details matter for budgeting:

• The price isn’t set yet. The HPI multiplier is listed as “TBA”, and Salesforce says it will give 30 days’ notice before metering begins.
• Your org must be on Flex Credit billing. Salesforce names Salesforce Foundations (listed at $0) or another SKU that enables Flex Credits. If Flex Credits are new to you, our guide to Agentforce pricing and Flex Credits explains how they work.

3. The deadline depends on how you buy and connect

Salesforce is targeting November 2026 for agent registration, the new security controls and the billing model.

Our take: the rename gets the headlines, but the meter is what will show up in budgets. If your renewal falls in the next six months, it’s worth getting the agent inventory done now, while the multiplier is still “TBA” and nothing is being charged.

4. Sandboxes stay free

HPIs are only charged in active production orgs. Sandboxes, scratch orgs and Developer Edition orgs aren’t metered, so your team can build and test agents without using credits.

What stays the same

Most of your implementation doesn’t change at all. This is the part teams worry about most, so here it is side by side.

Where your current setup will show its gaps

AIforce doesn’t create new problems in an org. It makes the existing ones visible faster, because an AI answer is only as good as the data and permissions behind it.

• Over-wide permissions. Every AIforce request runs as the user who makes it. If a profile has collected extra access over years of quick fixes, Claude or Slack will show that data to anyone who asks the right question. Permission sets that were “fine because nobody looks there” stop being fine.
• Duplicate and stale data. An agent asked to brief a rep on an account reads whatever is in the org. Duplicate accounts and opportunities stuck in old stages produce answers that sound confident and are wrong. Approval steps catch bad writes, not bad reads.
• Agents nobody listed. Scripts, browser extensions and MCP clients set up by individual teams are easy to miss. Under the new rules, an unregistered agent is both a security gap and an unplanned bill once metering starts.
• Integrations running on a person’s login. If an integration or AI tool uses a named employee’s account, it breaks when that person leaves, and it hides what the tool is actually doing. Registration is the right moment to fix this.

If you want to measure these gaps before the November changes, our free CRM health-check template covers permissions, data quality and integrations in 30 checks.

AIforce readiness checklist for existing Salesforce orgs

Here’s the order we’d tackle it in. For most mid-sized orgs this is a few days of admin time, not a project. Start with the inventory; everything else depends on knowing what’s actually connected.

1. Inventory every agent. List each AI tool, script and MCP client that connects to Salesforce, who owns it, and which user it runs as today.
2. Split production from sandbox. Only production calls will be metered, so note which connections touch production.
3. Design one permission set per agent. Give each agent the least access it needs. Don’t reuse an admin or a sales manager’s profile.
4. Confirm Flex Credit billing. Check whether your org already has Salesforce Foundations or another SKU that enables Flex Credits.
5. Note your renewal date. Existing API-based agents move to the new billing model at renewal, so that date sets your timeline.
6. Plan the credential switch. Each agent will need new OAuth credentials tied to its registered identity. Schedule the reconnection so nothing breaks mid-quarter.
7. Clean the data your first use case touches. Merge duplicate accounts and close out stale opportunities on the objects your pilot will read.
8. Pilot read-only first. Start one team on Salesforce in Claude or Agentforce Coworker with read access, check the answers, then allow writes with approval.
9. Watch for Salesforce’s notices. The Agentic Identity announcement starts the three-month clock, and the 30-day HPI notice tells you when billing begins.

Frequently asked questions

AIforce vs Agentforce: is it the same thing?

No. Agentforce is the set of AI agents that do work inside Salesforce. AIforce is the layer that lets people and agents reach Salesforce from Claude, Slack and Lightning. Agentforce Coworker is where the two meet. Our comparison of Claudeforce vs Agentforce goes deeper.

Is SIForce a different product from AIforce?

No. SIForce is the new name Marc Benioff announced on 9 October 2026 for the same product. No feature or pricing change came with it.

Do we have to pay extra for AIforce?

Salesforce hasn’t published a single AIforce price. What is confirmed is that registered agent calls to production orgs will be metered as Headless Platform Interactions and paid in Flex Credits, at a rate still listed as “TBA”. Confirm your entitlements with your account executive.

Will our existing integrations be billed as HPIs?

Traditional integrations keep their current pricing. The new meter applies to AI agents and MCP clients that are registered under Agentic Identity.

Which Claude plan does Salesforce in Claude need?

Published sources disagree, so check the current admin setup guide on AgentExchange or ask your Salesforce account team before you budget for it.

When do the new rules start?

Salesforce is targeting November 2026. New purchases from 17 September 2026 and anyone using a Salesforce MCP server have three months from Salesforce’s Agentic Identity notice to register agents. Existing customers with API-based agents move over at renewal.

The bottom line

AIforce, now SIForce, is not a migration of your Salesforce org. It is a new front door, and the house behind it stays the same. The work is in the doorway: knowing which agents come in, giving each one its own key, and budgeting for the new meter before it starts.

Ashapura Softech can run an AIforce readiness review for your org, covering an agent inventory, a permission audit and a Flex Credit estimate. Our Salesforce Agentforce consulting team handles agent setup and permissions, or you can talk to our Salesforce team directly.

How we put this guide together

Everything about registration, billing and deadlines here comes from Salesforce’s own help article on AIforce impact, dated 17 September 2026. Product details come from Salesforce’s Dreamforce announcements, and the rename from Marc Benioff’s post on 9 October. A few things are still open (the HPI price, final packaging), and we’ve said so where they come up rather than guessing. We’ll update this page when Agentic Identity goes live.

Of everything Salesforce announced under AIforce at Dreamforce 2026, Agentforce Coworker is the piece most admins will meet first. It is not a pilot you apply for. In many orgs it is already switched on, because Salesforce began turning it on automatically from 10 August 2026. This guide explains what Agentforce Coworker is, what it can and cannot touch, what it costs, how to turn it on or keep it off, and how to fix the errors admins run into during setup.

Related: Agentforce Coworker is one of the three AIforce interfaces. If you are planning for the new agent registration and billing rules, read how Salesforce AIforce impacts your implementation.

Agentforce Coworker at a glance

Related: Coworker works with your existing Agentforce agents, and from winter 2026 those agents can run on Salesforce Koa, Salesforce’s new CRM reasoning model.

Planning Agentforce? Start with our free Agentforce readiness checklist, or book a free 30-minute consultation.

What is Agentforce Coworker?

Agentforce Coworker is an AI assistant that sits in the Salesforce search bar inside Lightning. A user types a question in plain language, and instead of a list of matching records they get one written answer built from the data they are allowed to see. Salesforce’s own Coworker FAQ describes it as a teammate that can reason over complex requests, build a multi step plan and call backend tools to finish the task.

The simplest way to think about it: Coworker replaces “search, open five records, read, piece it together” with “ask once, get the summary”. It does not replace your agents, your flows or your reports. It sits in front of them and becomes the single entry point to them.

Agentforce Coworker timeline

• May 2026: Marc Benioff announced Coworker as an AI teammate “inside every Salesforce search bar”, and it opened as a beta for Agentforce customers.
• 10 August 2026: Salesforce started enabling it automatically for eligible orgs, on a rolling basis.
• 15 September 2026: At Dreamforce it became one of the three products inside AIforce, next to Claudeforce and Slackforce. Salesforce said 100,000 users activated it in the first 35 days.

Agentforce Coworker vs traditional Salesforce search

Classic global search is good at one thing: finding a record when you already know roughly what it is called. Coworker is built for the questions that sit between records.

Where Agentforce Coworker works

The Lightning search bar is where most users first see it, but Salesforce’s Agentforce Coworker page lists more surfaces: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Claude, ChatGPT and mobile. The point is that the same assistant, with the same permissions, follows the user into whichever tool they already have open. That is the idea behind AIforce as a whole, and it is why Coworker pairs naturally with Claudeforce for teams that already work in Claude.

What Agentforce Coworker can search and do

According to the Salesforce developer guide and the help FAQ, Coworker reads across three kinds of source:

• Salesforce CRM data: accounts, contacts, opportunities, cases, custom objects, knowledge articles and past case history.
• Slack: messages, channels and conversations the user can already access.
• Data 360 sources: Salesforce says more than 270 external sources connect through Data 360 connectors, including data lakes, knowledge bases and enterprise apps such as Jira.

On top of search, it does three things that matter in daily work:

• Create or update records. It checks permissions and validation first, and asks the user to confirm before it saves anything. Today this works only on Salesforce CRM records, not on Slack or external data.
• Route the request. If a question belongs to a specialised agent, for example a service agent or one of the named agents like Casey or Piper, Coworker hands it over rather than guessing.
• Summarise across sources. A sales rep can ask what is putting a deal at risk and get the open cases, the Slack thread about pricing and the stalled approval in one answer.

Agentforce Coworker use cases and example prompts

The value shows up when people ask the questions they currently answer by opening several tabs. These are the kinds of prompts that fit each team.

Sales

• “What should I know before my call with this account tomorrow?”
• “Which of my opportunities closing this quarter have had no activity in two weeks?”
• “Log a note on this opportunity: pricing approved, legal review next week.”

Service

• “Has this customer reported this issue before, and how was it fixed?”
• “Why are cases about login errors spiking this week?”
• “Find the knowledge article that answers this case.”

Customer success and leadership

• “Summarise open cases, renewal date and recent Slack discussion for this account.”
• “Which strategic accounts have an open escalation and a renewal in the next 90 days?”

For the wider picture of where agents earn their keep, see our Agentforce use cases guide.

How it handles security and permissions

Salesforce says Coworker “fully honors the existing Salesforce access model”. It runs with the permissions of the person using it, so if a user cannot open a record, Coworker cannot read it for them. Behind that sit attribute based access control, PII masking, toxicity detection and result grounding through Data 360, and the AIforce announcement repeats the zero data retention model for the underlying language models.

External sources need more thought. Permission aware sources carry their access rules across automatically, and federated sources enforce permissions in real time at the source. For other connectors, an admin has to create governance policies in Data 360 by hand. Data from sources that are not zero copy is ingested and stored in Data 360, which matters for data residency reviews.

The practical catch is that “respects your permissions” is only as good as the permissions themselves. Many orgs have years of broad sharing rules, public read on objects that should be private, and profiles that were cloned instead of designed. Search used to hide that problem because nobody scrolled through everything. A good AI answer surfaces it in seconds. If you have not reviewed sharing in a while, do that before you roll Coworker out widely. Our Agentforce readiness checklist covers the same ground.

Automatic enablement: is Coworker already on in your org?

Salesforce’s automatic enablement FAQ says the rollout began on 10 August 2026 on a rolling basis. Your org is in scope if it has Unmetered User Based AI seats and Einstein is active.

Some orgs are left out of automatic enablement:

• Orgs that have opted out of generative AI.
• Multi dataspace or multi org setups.
• HIPAA, health and life sciences, and government orgs.
• Flex Foundation seats without Unmetered entitlements.

If your org is in scope and you would rather roll it out on your own schedule, there are two ways to opt out: the link in the notification email Salesforce sends, or Setup > Agentforce Coworker > Opt Out of Auto Activation. Users who gain an eligible seat after the automatic switch on still need an admin to give them access by hand.

Agentforce Coworker pricing: what does it cost?

For most seat based customers, the search itself is included. Salesforce states that searching CRM data and Slack carries no extra fee for users on eligible Unmetered seats, and that their usage shows as zero consumption in the Digital Wallet.

Costs appear in two places:

• Data 360 objects. Answers that pull from connected Data 360 objects consume Flex Credits or Data Services Credits.
• Users without an eligible seat. Anyone who loses an Unmetered seat moves back to normal Flex Credit or Data Services Credit billing.

So the budget question is not “what does Coworker cost” but “which users are on metered seats, and how much Data 360 do we plan to expose”. If you are still working out how Flex Credits are counted, start with our Flex Credits explainer, and read the Core, Advanced and Max editions change alongside it, since the new editions bundle credits differently.

Requirements to turn on Agentforce Coworker

If your org was not switched on automatically, you can turn it on yourself. The setup guide and the help FAQ list these requirements.

How to turn on Agentforce Coworker, step by step

1. In Setup, type Agentforce Coworker in the Quick Find box.
2. Select Get Started with Agentforce Coworker, click Turn On and confirm. Einstein turns on automatically at this point. Setup takes a few minutes, and Salesforce shows a warning if any prerequisite is missing.
3. If your org has more than one data space, choose the data space, then select the data sources Coworker should use.
4. In the Manage Users section, click Manage and assign the Access_Ai_Search permission set group to the users who should have it.
5. For seat based access, open each user in Setup, go to Permission Set License Assignments, tick Unmetered User-Based AI and save.
6. Test with two or three users from different roles before you widen access. Ask each the same question and check that the answers differ in the way their permissions say they should.

Troubleshooting common Agentforce Coworker errors

These are the errors Salesforce lists in its troubleshooting FAQ, with the fix for each.

Limits worth knowing before rollout

• 30 language model calls per minute per user. Salesforce notes this is not technically enforced yet, but one question can trigger several calls, so heavy users will reach it sooner than the number suggests.
• Record updates are CRM only. Coworker can read Slack and Data 360, but it can only write to Salesforce records.
• Files over 75 MB are not indexed, so very large documents will never show up in answers.
• English only during the beta. Salesforce says other languages follow at general availability.
• Not yet available in GovCloud. It does work for authenticated Experience Cloud users.
• Answers are only as good as the data. Duplicate accounts, empty close dates and stale opportunity stages all show up in the answer. An AI summary of messy data is still messy data, just faster.

A sensible Agentforce Coworker rollout plan for admins

Before rollout, it helps to have your core Salesforce Sales Cloud workflows documented, because Coworker surfaces whatever your automation writes to records, good or bad.

Whether Coworker is already on or you are about to switch it on, the order of work is the same:

1. Check the status. Open Setup and see whether Coworker is active and who has the Access_Ai_Search group.
2. Review sharing. Look at organisation wide defaults, sharing rules and the objects with public read. Fix what you would not want a quick question to reveal.
3. Clean the high use objects. Merge duplicate accounts and contacts and fill the fields reps rely on, such as stage, close date and next step.
4. Decide on Slack and Data 360. Connect Slack if your teams live there. Connect Data 360 sources only where the value is clear, set governance policies for any source that is not permission aware, and remember those answers consume credits.
5. Start with a pilot group. Pick one sales team and one service team, collect the questions they actually ask, and write short guidance on what Coworker is good at.
6. Measure. Track adoption, the questions that return weak answers and credit consumption for the first month before you expand.

If you need help with the sharing review, the data clean up or the Data 360 connections, our Salesforce managed services and Data Cloud consulting teams work on exactly these steps.

Frequently asked questions about Agentforce Coworker

Is Agentforce Coworker part of AIforce?

Yes. At Dreamforce 2026 Salesforce grouped Agentforce Coworker, Claudeforce and Slackforce under AIforce, its new interface layer for reaching Salesforce data from any screen.

Is Agentforce Coworker free?

Searching CRM data and Slack carries no extra fee for users on eligible Unmetered User Based AI seats. Answers that use Data 360 objects consume Flex Credits or Data Services Credits, and users without an eligible seat are billed on credits.

Was Agentforce Coworker turned on automatically?

Possibly. Salesforce began automatic enablement on 10 August 2026 for orgs with Unmetered User Based AI seats and Einstein active. HIPAA, health, government and multi org setups were excluded.

How do I opt out of automatic activation?

Use the opt out link in the Salesforce notification email, or go to Setup, Agentforce Coworker, and turn on Opt Out of Auto Activation.

Can Agentforce Coworker see data a user cannot see?

No. It runs with the permissions of the person using it, so it can only read and change what that user can already read and change.

Does Agentforce Coworker work in Slack and Microsoft Teams?

Yes. Salesforce lists Slack, Microsoft Teams, Claude, ChatGPT and mobile as surfaces alongside the Salesforce search bar.

Which editions support Agentforce Coworker?

Enterprise, Unlimited and Agentforce 1 editions, with Data Cloud or Data 360 in place.

Why can’t I see Agentforce Coworker in my org?

Usually the user is missing the required permission set licence or the Access_Ai_Search permission set group. Check both in Setup before looking for anything else.

The bottom line

Agentforce Coworker is the most visible part of AIforce because it lives where every user already clicks: the search bar. It costs little or nothing for most seat based orgs, and it may already be running in yours. The real work is not switching it on. It is making sure your permissions and data are in a state where a fast, confident answer is also a correct one. Start there, pilot small, and expand once the answers hold up.

For two years Agentforce was something you built. You picked a topic, wrote instructions, wired up actions, tested it, and hoped the thing behaved in production. At Dreamforce in September 2026 Salesforce changed the starting point: seven named agents that arrive already configured for a specific job, six of them generally available on day one.

That shift is bigger than the names suggest. A prebuilt agent is an opinion about how a job should be done, baked into software. It will fit some orgs closely and fight others. This guide goes through all seven, what each one is actually scoped to do, which cloud it needs, what is shipping today versus later, and where we would not use it.

The seven Agentforce named agents at a glance

1. Casey: the service agent that finally covers voice

Casey handles customer service issues end to end across voice, SMS, WhatsApp and web chat. The channel spread is the part worth noticing. Most deflection projects we see start and stop at web chat, because chat is where the transcript is clean and the integration is easy. Voice is where the volume and the cost actually sit, and voice is where a handover to a human has always been ugly.

What Casey is good at: repeat, policy driven questions where the answer exists in a knowledge article or a record. Order status, appointment changes, password and access issues, returns inside policy.

What it does not remove: the need for a clean knowledge base. An agent that reads bad articles gives confident bad answers faster than a human would. If your knowledge base has not been audited in a year, that audit is the first project, not the agent.

2. Paige: employee service, where the ROI case is easiest

Paige answers IT and HR service requests inside Slack and employee portals. Of the seven, this is the one with the least risk attached, because the audience is internal. A wrong answer to an employee costs a follow up ticket. A wrong answer to a customer costs the customer.

That makes Paige a sensible first deployment even for an organisation whose real target is customer facing automation. You get the operating experience, the prompt tuning habits and the escalation design without putting revenue on the line while you learn.

3. Carter: commerce assistance, not a storefront replacement

Carter works inside Commerce Cloud on product discovery, comparison and checkout assistance. It is the agent most often confused with something it is not. Carter does not replace your storefront, your catalogue structure or your merchandising rules. It sits on top of them, and it inherits their quality.

If product data is thin, if attributes are inconsistent between categories, or if the same item appears three times under different SKUs, Carter surfaces those problems to shoppers rather than hiding them. Catalogue hygiene is the prerequisite. We cover how that data flows in our guide to Salesforce ecommerce integrations.

4. Piper: inbound lead qualification

Piper engages and qualifies inbound leads across websites and email. The job is speed to lead and consistency of questioning, two things humans are reliably bad at on a Friday afternoon.

The caution here is qualification criteria. Piper applies whatever definition of a qualified lead you give it, at scale, without the quiet human correction that normally happens in the background. If your MQL definition has drifted from what sales will actually accept, an agent will expose that gap within a week. Fix the definition before you automate it.

5. Fin: the cross channel workflow agent

Fin is scoped to complex customer experience workflows that span channels, which is the vaguest brief of the seven and also the most interesting. Think of the cases that start in chat, move to email, require a back office action and end with an outbound confirmation. Those are the ones that fall through today, because no single team owns them end to end.

Fin is worth evaluating if your complaint volume is driven by process breakage rather than by product problems. It is not worth evaluating if your handoffs are undocumented, because there is nothing for it to follow.

6. Marshall: deterministic back office execution

Marshall orchestrates back office processes with what Salesforce calls deterministic execution. That word matters. Most of the anxiety around agents in finance and operations comes from non determinism: the same input producing a different sequence of steps on different days. Marshall is positioned as the answer to that, running defined processes in a defined order rather than reasoning its way to an outcome.

Where this fits: invoice handling, order processing, fulfilment exceptions, reconciliation steps that today sit in a spreadsheet and a person’s head. Where it does not: anything where the process itself is undefined. Marshall executes a process, it does not design one for you.

7. Hunter: outbound pipeline, and the one that is not GA yet

Hunter covers outbound sales pipeline from account research through to outreach, and it is the only one of the seven still in pilot, with general availability expected in November 2026. It is also the agent that debuts long horizon runtime, which is the genuinely new platform capability in this release.

Long horizon runtime means an agent can pursue a goal across days and weeks rather than inside a single session. It preserves memory between runs, survives interruption through durable execution, and can be steered mid flight without being restarted. For outbound that is the difference between a sequence and a campaign that adapts.

It is also the capability that deserves the most governance attention. An agent working a goal for three weeks accumulates three weeks of decisions nobody reviewed individually. Decide in advance what it is allowed to send, to whom, and what it must escalate.

What shipped alongside the agents

Three platform pieces came with the agent portfolio and change how the seven are used together.

Multi agent orchestration is generally available now, and routes work across the specialised agents so they operate as a team rather than seven separate deployments. This is what stops Casey and Fin from both claiming the same case.

AI Skills in Agentforce Coworker lets an employee teach a task once and have it reused across the workforce. It is in pilot now with general availability expected in October 2026.

Agent Optimizer covers building, refining, testing and analysing agent performance across the lifecycle, with general availability expected in October 2026. Until it lands, measurement of agent quality is still something you assemble yourself.

All of this sits inside the wider announcement Salesforce made at Dreamforce. If you want the commercial side, including which Flex Credit allowance comes with which tier, start with what AIforce actually changed and the Core, Advanced and Max editions.

When a named agent is the wrong answer

Four situations where we would tell a client to wait.

The underlying data is not trustworthy. Every one of these agents reads your records and your content. Duplicate accounts, stale knowledge articles and half migrated product data do not get smoothed over by an agent, they get amplified and put in front of a customer.

The process is undocumented. Marshall and Fin in particular assume a process exists. If the answer to “what happens next” depends on which person picks it up, an agent has nothing to follow.

Your volume is low. An agent earns its keep on repetition. A team handling forty cases a week will spend more effort tuning than it saves.

The job is judgement, not throughput. Complaint escalations that involve goodwill decisions, a renewal conversation with an unhappy account, anything with a legal or clinical dimension. Those stay human, with the agent doing preparation rather than resolution.

How to choose which one to turn on first

The order we recommend, and the reasoning behind it.

Start with Paige if you have an internal service desk. Lowest blast radius, fastest feedback loop, and the operating habits transfer directly to the customer facing agents afterwards.

Start with Casey if service cost is the board level number. It is the only one of the seven that touches voice, which is usually where the cost sits.

Start with Piper if speed to lead is the bottleneck. Measure current first response time before you deploy, because this is the one agent whose effect shows up in a single clean metric.

Wait on Hunter unless you are comfortable in a pilot. General availability is expected in November 2026, and long horizon runtime is new enough that early deployments are learning exercises as much as productivity ones.

Whichever you pick, scope one job, instrument it, and run it for a month before adding a second. Teams that switch on four agents at once cannot tell which one caused the change in their numbers.

What this means for existing Agentforce builds

If you already built custom agents, the named agents do not obsolete them, but they should prompt a review. Anything you built that maps closely to one of the seven jobs is now maintenance you may not need to carry. Anything you built that is specific to your business, your products or your regulatory position is exactly what should stay custom.

The practical exercise is to list your current agent topics against the seven and mark each as replace, keep or merge. Our Agentforce readiness checklist covers the questions to ask before either path, and the implementation partner guide covers how the delivery work is usually split.

The named agents are not the only way users reach Agentforce. Agentforce Coworker in the Lightning search bar routes a question to the right specialised agent on its own, and our Agentforce Coworker guide explains how that works and what it costs.

The named agents arrive alongside a busy platform release. See the Salesforce Winter ’27 release guide for the 15 changes to test in your org, including the new Agent Skills registry.

Frequently asked questions

Are all seven Agentforce named agents available now?

Six are generally available: Casey, Paige, Carter, Piper, Fin and Marshall. Hunter is in pilot, with general availability expected in November 2026.

Do the named agents replace custom built Agentforce agents?

No. They cover common, well defined jobs. Anything specific to your products, your industry rules or your internal processes still needs to be built, and the two run alongside each other under multi agent orchestration.

Which licences do the named agents need?

Each sits inside a product area, so Casey needs Service Cloud, Carter needs Commerce Cloud and so on. Consumption is drawn from the Flex Credit allowance that comes with your edition, which means two organisations on the same edition can see very different usage. Confirm current entitlements with Salesforce or your account executive before budgeting.

What is long horizon runtime?

It lets an agent pursue a goal across days and weeks instead of within one session, by preserving memory between runs, surviving interruptions and accepting steering mid task. Hunter is the first agent to use it.

Where do we start if we have never deployed an agent?

With an internal use case, a documented process and a single measurable metric. Paige on an IT or HR service desk is the usual low risk starting point.

Talk to us about which agent fits

Ashapura Softech is a certified Salesforce partner working with teams in the United States on Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Agentforce delivery. If you want a view on which of the seven fits your org, and what would have to be cleaned up first, get in touch.

Source: 21 Things We Announced at Dreamforce 2026 (Salesforce).

Last updated: 14 October 2026

On 15 September 2026, at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Salesforce announced AIforce. The framing Salesforce used for it is blunt: AI replaces the UI. Instead of asking people to open Salesforce to get work done, AIforce lets AI agents read and act on Salesforce data from wherever the person already is, whether that is Claude, Slack, Lightning or a tool your own team has built.

If you run a Salesforce org, this is the announcement from this Dreamforce that actually changes how your users will touch the system. Here is what was announced, what is available today, and what it is reasonable to do about it this quarter.

What is AIforce?

AIforce is a layer on top of Salesforce’s existing Agentic Enterprise architecture, not a replacement for Agentforce. It takes what already sits in your org, Customer 360 records, Data 360 context and the Agentforce agents you have configured, and exposes them to AI interfaces outside the Salesforce UI.

The practical effect is that a rep can update an opportunity, log a call, pull pipeline or ask for account research without opening a Salesforce tab. Marc Benioff described the idea as combining model intelligence with the context customers have already built inside Salesforce to create a composable system.

The word composable is doing real work in that sentence. AIforce is built on the Headless 360 toolkit Salesforce shipped in March 2026, which exposes platform capability through APIs, Model Context Protocol servers and developer tooling. Agents are assembled from those pieces rather than bought whole.

The three products inside AIforce

Claudeforce

Claudeforce is the extended Anthropic partnership. It puts Salesforce inside Claude, shipping with 37 prebuilt sales skills covering work like prospecting and pipeline management, with analytics and further skills for service, marketing, commerce and industries on the roadmap. There is also a Salesforce Development plug in for Claude Code carrying more than 40 skills for developers.

Salesforce in Claude is in beta and open to all customers now. If your team already uses Claude, this is the lowest friction way to see what the interface revolution actually feels like on your own data.

We covered the Salesforce and Anthropic partnership in detail in What is Claudeforce.

Slackforce

Slackforce brings Salesforce into Slack as an interactive surface rather than a notification feed. It includes a Slackbot assistant and Slack CRM, which lets a user create an account, log call notes and update records from a prompt without leaving the channel. Slack Code covers collaborative AI development in the same place.

For teams whose real working day happens in Slack, this closes the gap that CRM adoption programmes have been fighting for a decade. Data quality problems are usually a data entry friction problem, and this removes a large part of that friction.

Agentforce Coworker

Agentforce Coworker is an AI teammate inside the Lightning interface, working across devices and operating strictly inside your existing business rules, permissions and security model, with zero data retention. Salesforce has described it as instantly available to customers.

Coworker is the part of AIforce most admins will meet first, because Salesforce began switching it on automatically in August. We cover eligibility, cost, the opt out setting and the setup steps in our Agentforce Coworker guide.

Coworker is the one to test first if your objection to agents so far has been governance. It inherits the permission set of the person it is working for, so it cannot see what that person cannot see. Our guide to Agentforce use cases covers where agents have actually been shipped in practice.

The Headless Toolkit and AgentExchange

Underneath the three products sits the Headless Toolkit, which exposes platform elements through MCPs, APIs, plug ins and skills so you can build your own AI experience rather than take one off the shelf. AgentExchange is where partners publish integrations, with Anthropic, AWS, Google, OpenAI, DocuSign and Vercel already named in that ecosystem.

This matters for anyone with a non standard process. The interesting AIforce work in 2027 will not be turning on Coworker, it will be exposing your own objects, validation rules and approval flows as skills an agent can call safely.

Salesforce Core, Advanced and Max: the edition change to read alongside it

Salesforce also simplified its editions, effective September 2026, into Core, Advanced and Max across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and the industry clouds (briefly branded Agentforce Sales, Agentforce Service and Agentforce Industries). Every edition now bundles Agentforce capabilities such as Account Research and Service Rep Assistant, Slack and Slackbot, embedded agentic analytics powered by Tableau Next, enterprise grade data security and Premier Success Plans, along with Flex Credits: 500K on Core, 1M on Advanced and 2.75M on Max.

List pricing is 195 dollars per user per month for Core, 395 for Advanced and 550 for Max. Salesforce has said existing Agentforce 1 Edition customers can move to Max at no extra cost, legacy edition pricing is unchanged for current customers, and Industry Edition pricing is still to come this autumn.

Confirm your own numbers with your account executive before you budget against these. Published list pricing and what lands on a renewal quote are rarely the same thing, and consumption based Flex Credits change the shape of the bill.

What this actually changes for your org

Your interface strategy is now a real decision. Until this announcement, “where do users work” had one answer. Now there are four plausible answers and you should pick deliberately per team rather than let it happen by accident.

Permissions and sharing rules become the control surface. An agent that inherits a user’s permissions is only as safe as those permissions are tidy. If your profiles and permission sets have drifted over years of ad hoc requests, that debt is about to become visible in a new way.

Data quality gets more exposed, not less. An agent asked to research an account will answer from what is in your org. Duplicate accounts, stale contacts and half filled custom fields have been survivable while a human was reading the record and mentally correcting it. They are less survivable when the answer arrives as a confident sentence.

Automation you already have may be duplicated. Before you build an agent for a task, check whether a Flow already does it. Agents are the right tool for judgement and language, not for deterministic steps a Flow handles cheaply.

A sensible order of work

1. Turn on Salesforce in Claude for a small group, in a sandbox or with a limited permission set, and watch what people actually ask it.
2. Run a permissions audit before you widen access. Profiles, permission sets, field level security, sharing rules.
3. Run a duplicate and data completeness pass on accounts and contacts, since that is what agent answers are built from.
4. Pilot Agentforce Coworker with one team and one measurable task rather than across the org.
5. Model your edition options against actual usage before renewal, including what Flex Credit consumption looks like at your volume.

Steps two and three are unglamorous and they are where most of the value is. Agent quality is downstream of org hygiene, which is the bulk of what our Salesforce managed services team spends its time on.

Why AIforce became SIforce, and what the rename changes

On October 9, 2026, Marc Benioff posted on X: “The era of Super Intelligence is here. AIForce is officially SIForce.” That was the whole announcement. Salesforce has not published a release note, a pricing change or a new feature list alongside it, and when we last checked, its help pages still used the AIforce name.

The rename did not come out of nowhere. Coverage, including Salesforce Ben, linked the timing to a recent executive order from President Trump that directs federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI”. Salesforce has not given an official reason, and it sells heavily to US government agencies, so the connection is a reasonable reading rather than a confirmed one.

It is also the third name for the same layer in a little over six months. It debuted as Headless 360 at TrailblazerDX, became AIforce at Dreamforce in September, and is now SIforce. Even Patrick Stokes, Salesforce President of Applications and Marketing, admitted at Dreamforce that the constant renaming “drives us nuts too.”

What the SIforce rename changes for your team

In practical terms, very little has changed under the hood. The products inside the layer, the Headless Toolkit, AgentExchange and the edition structure described above are the same as they were before October 9. What does change is paperwork and search:

• Contracts and quotes. Order forms and statements of work written in September may say AIforce. That is fine, but ask your account executive to confirm in writing that SIforce and AIforce refer to the same entitlements so nobody argues about it at renewal.
• Internal documentation. Update your runbooks, training decks and architecture diagrams, or at least add “SIforce (formerly AIforce)” the first time the name appears, so new admins can find both.
• Help and release notes. Search for both names when you look for documentation. Salesforce usually updates help pages in waves, so expect a period where the two names coexist.
• Security reviews. If your security or procurement team approved “AIforce”, the rename does not change the underlying service, but note the new name in the approval record to keep your audit trail clean.

What does not change is the work that decides whether agents succeed: permissions, data quality and clear ownership of automations. That is where we would put the effort, whatever the layer is called next quarter.

SIforce naming history at a glance

Questions to ask your Salesforce account team about SIforce

If SIforce, or AIforce as your contract may still call it, is on your roadmap, these questions are worth raising at your next account review. They cost nothing to ask and they save surprises at renewal.

• Which SIforce capabilities are included in our current edition, and which need Flex Credits or a separate SKU?
• Do the agents we connect through SIforce need to be registered with their own identity, and who in our team owns that registration?
• How are agent actions logged, and can we see which agent changed which record in our audit trail?
• Will SIforce agents respect our existing sharing rules and permission sets, or do they run under a separate integration user?
• Is there a sandbox or pilot option so we can test one agent on one process before committing budget?

Ask for the answers in writing. Salesforce product names and packaging have changed several times this year, and a short email from your account executive is the simplest way to keep everyone working from the same understanding.

Frequently asked questions about AIforce

Is AIforce the same as Agentforce?

No. Agentforce is the agent platform inside Salesforce. AIforce is the layer that lets those agents and your Salesforce data be reached from outside the Salesforce interface, through Claude, Slack, Lightning or your own build.

Is AIforce available now?

Salesforce in Claude is in beta and open to all customers. Agentforce Coworker has been described as instantly available. Other components, including further Claudeforce skills for service, marketing, commerce and industries, are on the roadmap rather than shipped.

What does AIforce cost?

Salesforce has not published separate AIforce pricing. The related edition pricing effective September 2026 is 195, 395 and 550 dollars per user per month for Core, Advanced and Max respectively, with Flex Credits included at each tier. Check current pricing with Salesforce directly.

What are Salesforce Flex Credits?

Flex Credits are the consumption units bundled with the new editions, 500K with Core, 1M with Advanced and 2.75M with Max. Because agent usage draws on them, two orgs on the same edition can see very different bills depending on how heavily agents are used.

Do we need Data Cloud for this to work well?

You do not strictly need it, but the quality of agent answers depends on the context available to them. If your customer data is spread across systems Salesforce cannot see, that is the gap to close first. Our Salesforce Data Cloud and Data 360 consulting page covers what that work involves.

Where should a mid sized team start?

With one team, one task, and a permissions audit first. Agent quality follows org hygiene, so the groundwork matters more than the agent configuration.

Why did Salesforce rename AIforce to SIforce?

Marc Benioff announced the change on X on October 9, 2026. Salesforce has not given an official reason. Coverage linked the timing to a recent executive order directing US federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “artificial intelligence” and “AI”.

Does the SIforce rename change pricing or contracts?

No feature or pricing change was announced with the rename. Existing quotes and contracts that say AIforce refer to the same layer, but it is sensible to ask your account executive to confirm that in writing before renewal.

Where AIforce lands

We are a certified Salesforce partner working with teams in the United States from Irving, Texas, with our development centre in Ahmedabad. The work we expect to matter most over the next two quarters is not agent configuration, it is the permission, data and automation groundwork that decides whether an agent gives a useful answer or a confidently wrong one.

If you want a second opinion on where your org stands before you widen agent access, get in touch.

Two pieces of this are worth reading on their own. The commercial change is covered in our guide to the Core, Advanced and Max editions, and the earlier question of how the two agent platforms differ is answered in Claudeforce vs Agentforce. If you are working out a credit budget, Flex Credits explained has the arithmetic.

The seven named agents announced alongside all this are covered one by one, with status and licence notes, in our guide to the Agentforce named agents.

Sources

• Salesforce Ben: Salesforce Renames AIforce to SIforce After Trump Order (October 12, 2026)
• The Next Web: Salesforce renames AIForce to SIForce
• Salesforce Newsroom (Dreamforce 2026 announcements)

Sources: 21 Things We Announced at Dreamforce 2026 (Salesforce) and Dreamforce 2026 news and media resources (Salesforce).

Last updated: 21 October 2026

Not to be confused with Koa: at the same Dreamforce, Salesforce also announced Koa, its own CRM reasoning model built on NVIDIA Nemotron. Claudeforce brings Anthropic’s Claude to Salesforce data; Koa is a Salesforce-run model you can pick for individual Agentforce agents. Our guide to Salesforce Koa compares the two.

Update (18 Sep 2026): At Dreamforce on 15 Sep 2026 Salesforce gave this whole direction a name, AIforce, and put Claudeforce inside it alongside Slackforce and Agentforce Coworker. Salesforce also repackaged its editions into Core, Advanced and Max, at 195, 395 and 550 dollars per user per month, each bundling Flex Credits. Full breakdown in What is AIforce.

Update (14 Sep 2026): On 11 Sep 2026 Salesforce announced a new portfolio of named, job-ready Agentforce agents built for specific high-value work: Casey (customer service), Paige (IT and HR service), Carter (shopper agent for e-commerce), Marshall (supply chain orchestration), Piper (inbound lead generation) and Fin (complex customer experience), all generally available now, plus Hunter (outbound sales), in pilot with general availability expected November 2026. The release also adds long-horizon runtime so agents can pursue goals over days or weeks rather than single interactions, AI Skills for teaching agents new tasks (pilot now, GA October 2026), multi-agent orchestration across workflows, and an Agent Optimizer for continuous performance tuning (GA October 2026). This sits on top of the Core, Advanced and Max editions Salesforce introduced in early September.

On 26 August 2026, alongside its Q2 FY27 earnings, Salesforce announced Claudeforce, an expanded partnership with Anthropic that puts Salesforce data inside Claude and puts Claude inside Salesforce. The headline Salesforce chose for the official press release was “The #1 AI Meets the #1 AI CRM.” Marc Benioff’s framing around the launch was blunter: “The UI is the AI.”

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder, described the value differently, and his version is the more useful one for anyone evaluating this: “Through this partnership, companies can point Claude at the customer information and business context that they’ve been building in Salesforce for decades.” The asset is the decades of context. The model is the new way to reach it.

Most coverage so far has re-typed the press release. This piece does something different. We break down what is actually shipping, what is still a slide, how Claudeforce differs from the Anthropic partnership Salesforce announced in October 2025, what it does to your licensing, and what a Salesforce customer should do about it in the next 90 days.

If you have been following the platform’s direction through 2026, this will slot straight onto what we covered in our Dreamforce 2026 breakdown of what Salesforce actually shipped. Claudeforce is the next move in the same strategy, not a departure from it.

What is Claudeforce, in one paragraph

Claudeforce is the brand name for an expanded Salesforce and Anthropic partnership announced on 26 August 2026. It has four parts: a Salesforce plugin inside Claude with 37 prebuilt sales skills, Claude as the reasoning model inside Agentforce, Claude as the default model across Slack, and a mutual customer arrangement where Salesforce runs on Claude and Anthropic runs on Salesforce. The plugin went into beta for Salesforce customers at Dreamforce on 15 September 2026.

Planning Agentforce? Start with our free Agentforce readiness checklist, or book a free 30-minute consultation.

Part 1: The four components of Claudeforce, decoded

1. Salesforce in Claude, and the 37 sales skills

This is the piece that got the attention, and it deserves it. Instead of asking a seller to open Salesforce, Salesforce is handing the seller’s workflow to Claude and keeping the data, permissions and audit trail on its own side.

The 37 skills are not features in the CRM sense. They are prewritten instructions that tell Claude how a competent seller handles a specific job, and Salesforce describes them as grounded in 27 years of its own sales experience. On the Claudeforce product page they group into six areas:

• Daily and weekly workflows: daily briefing, pipeline review, forecast narrative
• Deal strategy: stakeholder mapping, close planning, objection handling
• Customer management: account planning, lead triage, customer health
• Growth: expansion, renewal and new-prospect outreach
• Meeting preparation: call prep, scheduling, conversation summaries
• Actions and governance: win-loss review, activity logging, CRM hygiene

Anyone who has run a Salesforce Sales Cloud rollout will recognise that list. It is the same set of jobs that dashboards, list views and reports were built to serve, delivered through conversation instead of navigation.

Two design decisions matter more than the skill list itself.

One admin connects it, once. Salesforce’s framing is that an admin connects Salesforce in Claude a single time and the whole team has it from day one. Anyone who has tried to roll out per-user MCP server configuration across a 200-seat sales org will recognise why that sentence exists. Setup friction is what killed most 2025-era agent pilots before they reached a second sprint.

There is no new permissions model. The connection inherits each user’s existing Salesforce permissions. A rep who cannot see an account in Salesforce cannot see it through Claude either, and every write action routes back through Salesforce so validation rules, approvals and field history still apply. This is the single most important technical claim in the announcement, and it is the one to test hardest during beta.

Here is why that claim carries so much weight. In a traditional integration, the connecting application holds its own service account and its own idea of who may see what. That is how CRM data leaks: not through the model, but through an over-permissioned integration user. By routing every read and write back through Salesforce’s own sharing engine, Claudeforce keeps a single source of truth for authorisation. Your org’s sharing model becomes the security boundary, which is excellent news if that model is deliberate and a serious problem if it is fifteen years of accumulated exceptions.

2. Claude inside Salesforce

The second component is less visible but has wider blast radius. Claude is now a reasoning model for the Atlas Reasoning Engine, the planning layer under Agentforce, and it is the default model behind Agentforce Vibes (the natural-language build tool) and Agentforce Coworker (the assistant Salesforce put into the search bar across its apps, and into Slack, Teams and ChatGPT, earlier in 2026).

For regulated customers, the deployment path is the part worth reading twice: Claude is available through Amazon Bedrock inside the Salesforce Trust Boundary. That means inference runs inside Salesforce’s virtual private cloud rather than sending records to a public model endpoint. Financial services, healthcare and life sciences customers have been blocked on exactly this question since 2023. If you run Salesforce Health Cloud under HIPAA obligations, the Trust Boundary is the difference between a compliance conversation you can win and one you cannot start.

This component also changes what Agentforce is. Until now, a customer building an agent chose a model and accepted the reasoning quality that came with it. Making Claude the default reasoning model for Atlas raises the floor for every agent built on the platform, including ones already in production. We covered how these agents are assembled in our guide to setting up agentic AI in Sales Cloud, and the build process does not change. The quality of the planning step does.

3. Slack becomes the front door

Claude is now the default model for Slack, powering Slackbot, the Claude Tag and Slack Code. Combined with the MCP servers Salesforce shipped for Slack this quarter, which connect Headless 360 to Slackbot, the practical effect is that a CRM update can begin and end in a Slack thread.

Salesforce is using itself as the proof point. It says Slackbot has driven 8.1 million hours of annualised productivity gains for its own employees, up more than 2x quarter over quarter. Treat that as a vendor-reported internal figure rather than an audited number, but the direction is real and the internal adoption is unusually deep for a first-party claim.

The strategic point is easy to miss. Slack was acquired in 2021 and spent four years as a collaboration product attached to a CRM company. Under Claudeforce it becomes the conversational surface where CRM work happens, which is a far more defensible position than competing with Teams on channels and huddles.

4. Mutual adoption

Salesforce runs Claude. Anthropic runs Salesforce. This is partly commercial theatre, and partly a genuine signal: Salesforce Ventures has invested in Anthropic across multiple rounds, and reporting in mid-2026 put the value of that stake at roughly $5 billion. Salesforce’s Q2 FY27 GAAP EPS came in at $4.29, up 119% year over year, and coverage of the quarter attributed part of that jump to gains on the Anthropic investment. When you read Salesforce’s enthusiasm for Anthropic, read the balance sheet alongside it.

Claudeforce skills: the 37 sales skills, grouped

Claudeforce skills are prebuilt instructions that tell Claude how to do a specific sales job with your Salesforce data. Salesforce in Claude launched with 37 of them, all for sellers (Salesforce newsroom).

Salesforce has not published the full list. Its Claudeforce page groups the skills into six areas and names 15 of them:

How Claudeforce skills use your data

Every skill runs under the seller’s existing Salesforce permissions. Claude sees and changes only what that user could see and change in Salesforce. Writes route back through Salesforce, so validation rules and sharing rules still apply. Salesforce also says Claude asks for approval before emailing people outside the company, and only updates the fields it names.

An admin connects Salesforce in Claude once for the whole team. There is no per-user setup.

What is not in the 37

• Other clouds. Service, Marketing, Commerce, Field Service, Tableau, MuleSoft, Data 360 and Industries skills are listed as “Coming Soon”. Salesforce says more prebuilt skills start launching in late 2026.
• Developer skills. The Salesforce Development plugin for Claude Code is separate and has more than 40 builder skills (Inside). It is for developers, not sellers.
• Custom skills. Salesforce has not said how customers will add or govern their own skills. Treat this as an open question during the beta.

How to test Claudeforce skills in the beta

Pick two skills that match a weekly job your sellers already do, such as pipeline-review and call-prep. Run them for four weeks with a small group. Track one number for each, such as minutes spent on pipeline prep, and compare it with the four weeks before.

Run sfdc-hygiene-check early. If it finds a lot of problems, fix the data before you widen the rollout, because every other skill depends on it.

Part 2: Claudeforce is not the October 2025 partnership. Here is what changed.

A lot of the confusion in the last 24 hours comes from people conflating this with the earlier deal. Salesforce and Anthropic have announced three separate things in eleven months, and each one goes further than the last.

Read in sequence, the story is clear. October 2025 made Claude available in Salesforce. TDX 2026 removed the requirement for a Salesforce interface at all. Claudeforce is what those two decisions were building toward.

Headless 360 is the part practitioners keep underrating. It is not a product you buy. It is a consumption architecture, and it is why the Claude plugin could be built in the first place. We have written a separate guide to what Salesforce Headless 360 is and how it enforces permissions. Without an API-and-MCP layer that carries permissions and business rules with it, “Salesforce inside another vendor’s chat window” would have been a security review that never ended.

How Agentforce, Agentforce Coworker and Salesforce in Claude differ

These three names are being used interchangeably in a lot of commentary, and they are not the same thing.

Salesforce’s own positioning is that Agentforce handles autonomous work touching end customers, while Salesforce in Claude handles knowledge-worker assistance for internal teams. In practice these overlap, and the boundary will move. Treat the table as today’s positioning rather than a permanent architecture.

That table covers the three names inside the Salesforce and Anthropic announcement. If what you want is Claudeforce set against Agentforce and Einstein, including where each one runs, what it costs and how you build on it, we have put the full side by side into its own guide: Claudeforce vs Agentforce vs Einstein.

A note on names. Headless 360, the layer that lets Claude reach Salesforce through MCP, was renamed AIforce at Dreamforce. On 9 October 2026 Marc Benioff posted that AIforce is now “SIforce” (SF Ben). Salesforce had not formally announced the change when we updated this post. The product underneath has not changed.

Part 3: What “the UI is the AI” does to your Salesforce license

Salesforce President Patrick Stokes framed the strategy plainly in interviews around the launch, reported in detail by VentureBeat: the value of Salesforce sits in the data and the metadata, not in the interface. That is a defensible position, and it is also an admission that the interface is no longer where the money is.

Follow the consequences.

Access shifts from seats to consumption. Salesforce says MCP access needs no separate SKU on Enterprise Edition and above, that calls draw on your existing API limits, and that Flex Credits are consumed when an agent action, a Data 360 query or a prompt actually runs. The meter is on actions, not on named users.

Agentforce consumption is priced in Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000 credits, with a standard agent action costing 20 credits, or roughly 10 cents. Our full Agentforce pricing breakdown covers the whole rate card.

Separately, Salesforce reports platform activity in Agentic Work Units. This one is worth getting right, because a lot of commentary has it wrong. An AWU is a disclosure metric, not a billing unit. Salesforce has published no price per AWU and no AWU-to-credit conversion. Its Q2 FY27 results reported 3.2 billion work units delivered in Q2 alone, up 97% quarter over quarter, on a cumulative 7.0 billion. The company also acquired m3ter, a metering and usage-based pricing platform, in the same quarter. Nobody buys a metering company unless they intend to meter a great deal more.

You will likely have two bills. Salesforce charges for platform access and actions. Anthropic charges for inference. Coverage of the launch indicated customers contract separately with each, which changes both procurement and forecasting. If your finance team currently models Salesforce as a fixed annual seat cost, that model is about to stop describing reality.

What Claudeforce costs today

Salesforce still has not published a price for Salesforce in Claude. Its Claudeforce page says nothing about pricing, and the August announcement says pricing and packaging are subject to change.

Two signals point to how it may be sold:

• Marc Benioff told analysts that customers need to “move to our premium edition” to use it (SF Ben).
• TD Cowen analysts reported that Salesforce in Claude is included in the new Max edition at $550 per user per month (CRN Asia).

If Max inclusion is confirmed, the edition decision matters more, so compare the current Salesforce editions before your renewal.

You will also need a Claude plan from Anthropic, which is billed separately. Agentforce usage on the Salesforce side is still metered in Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000 (Salesforce). For the full picture, see how Agentforce pricing and Flex Credits work.

For teams renewing in the next two quarters, the practical advice is unglamorous: model your expected agent traffic in units before you build anything, and negotiate consumption rates and caps in the same conversation as seats, not after it. Agent-to-agent calls, retries and voice actions are the line items that blow up forecasts, because they are invisible in a seat-based mental model. This is the same discipline that separates a controlled Salesforce CRM development programme from one that overruns, applied to a new cost driver.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. If interface access stops being the unit of value, the internal case for buying seats for occasional users weakens. Finance teams will notice. Expect a wave of license rationalisation conversations in 2027 renewals, and expect Salesforce to have priced consumption on the assumption that those conversations happen.

Part 4: The numbers behind the Claudeforce announcement

Claudeforce landed on earnings day, which was not an accident. The Q2 FY27 results gave it a strong backdrop.

One caveat that most write-ups skipped. The Agentforce ARR definition has expanded over the past year to take in Slackbot and Headless 360 consumption. A 240% growth rate on a broadening definition is partly demand and partly accounting, and Salesforce has not published the split. The growth is real; the multiple is not directly comparable to last year’s figure.

The number that deserves more attention than ARR is the work-unit count. Agentic Work Units are the closest public proxy for actual agent usage rather than agent purchasing, and 3.2 billion in a quarter, nearly doubling sequentially, says agents are running in production rather than sitting in sandboxes. That is the metric to watch next quarter, because it is much harder to inflate through repackaging than an ARR definition is.

Part 5: Five things we still do not know about Claudeforce

Any vendor announcement is worth judging by the questions it leaves open. These are the five that will decide whether Claudeforce becomes standard practice or a well-received demo.

1. Pricing and packaging for Salesforce in Claude. Undisclosed. Everything downstream of this is guesswork until beta terms land.
2. Data residency across three boundaries. A single request may touch Claude, Amazon Bedrock and Salesforce. EU, UK, India and Gulf customers need a documented map of where data rests and where it is processed at each hop. The Trust Boundary answers this for the Agentforce path; it does not obviously answer it for the plugin path.
3. Model opt-out. If Claude is the default model for Slackbot and Agentforce Coworker, what is the mechanism for a customer with an existing standard on a different model, and what does opting out cost in capability?
4. Skill customisation and governance. The 37 skills encode Salesforce’s view of good selling. Enterprises with their own methodology will want to edit them, version them and audit changes. How that works has not been detailed.
5. What happens to the admin’s control surface. When work starts in Claude and finishes in Salesforce, page layouts and Lightning components stop being the place behaviour is governed. Validation rules, the sharing model and flows become far more load-bearing than they already are.

Part 6: What to do about Claudeforce in the next 90 days

A practical place to start: tighten the Salesforce workflow automation you already run, so any AI layer lands on clean processes instead of amplifying messy ones.

The mistake to avoid is treating this as a September to-do. The mistake on the other side is buying anything before beta terms are public. Here is a sequence that works for most Salesforce customers.

Next 30 days: get honest about your data

Every agentic feature Salesforce has shipped since 2024 fails the same way, and it is never the model’s fault. It is duplicate accounts, stale opportunity stages, empty next-step fields and a sharing model nobody has audited since the original implementation. Claude reasoning over a pipeline where 30% of open opportunities have a close date in the past will produce a confident, useless forecast narrative.

Before any pilot, run a specific check:

• Duplicate account and contact rate
• Percentage of open opportunities with a past close date
• Percentage of open opportunities with no activity in 30 days
• Fields that are mandatory in process but optional in the schema
• Profiles and permission sets with broader access than anyone remembers granting

That last item becomes materially more important under Claudeforce. Permission inheritance is a feature only if the permissions are correct. Our Agentforce readiness checklist sets out the full assessment, including the thresholds to measure against. Most orgs we assess through CRM data and platform work have at least one profile that grants view-all on a standard object because it was the fastest fix during go-live years ago. That was survivable when access required logging in and knowing where to look. It is less survivable when a model can be asked a question in plain English.

Days 30 to 60: pick one workflow, not a platform

Choose a single skill with a measurable before-and-after. Meeting prep and pipeline review are the obvious candidates because both have an existing time cost you can measure this week. Instrument it: minutes per rep per week before, minutes after, and an accuracy check by a sales manager on a sample of outputs.

Resist the urge to enable everything in beta. A pilot that proves one workflow converts into a budget line. A pilot that enables 37 skills at once produces anecdotes. We have written before about where the measurable returns sit in Sales Cloud ROI work, and the discipline is identical here: one workflow, one baseline, one number.

Days 60 to 90: decide your interface posture

This is the strategic question, and it belongs to the RevOps or CRM owner rather than to IT. If sellers begin their day in Claude or Slack rather than in Salesforce, three things follow:

• Adoption metrics change meaning. Salesforce login counts stop being a proxy for usage.
• Training changes shape. You are teaching prompting and verification, not navigation.
• Governance moves down the stack. Anything you enforced through UI design has to be re-enforced in validation rules, flows and the sharing model. That is Salesforce DevOps territory, and it needs version control and a release process rather than ad-hoc changes in production.

If you are in a regulated industry

Get your security and compliance teams into the Trust Boundary architecture now, while you are pre-purchase and have leverage. Ask for the data flow diagram for each of the three deployment paths (Agentforce via Bedrock, the Claude plugin, Slack), and ask what is logged, retained and where. Teams running Salesforce Health Cloud or a financial services org already have this muscle from EHR and core banking integrations. Use the same review template.

If you are a Salesforce partner or implementation firm

The delivery mix shifts. Less time building interfaces, more time on data readiness, permission architecture, MCP and API design, and consumption forecasting. Firms whose value proposition was “we build the screens” have a repositioning problem within 18 months. Firms that can do data engineering and governance have a larger addressable scope than they did last week, and the constraint becomes delivery capacity rather than demand, which is where offshore delivery capacity starts to matter.

The evidence for this is already visible in delivery work. In our Salesforce CPQ and Agentforce rollout for a custom furniture retailer, the agent configuration was the fast part. Product data, pricing rules and approval logic were where the schedule went. Claudeforce does not change that ratio. It raises the cost of getting it wrong, because a clean interface no longer hides a messy model.

Claudeforce brings Salesforce into Claude. Inside Salesforce itself, the matching piece of AIforce is Agentforce Coworker in the search bar, which also reaches Slack, Teams and ChatGPT. Our Agentforce Coworker guide covers what it can access, what it costs and how to turn it on.

Frequently asked questions about Claudeforce

What is Claudeforce?

Claudeforce is the name of the expanded partnership between Salesforce and Anthropic announced on 26 August 2026. It covers a Salesforce plugin inside Claude with 37 prebuilt sales skills, Claude as a reasoning model inside Agentforce, Claude as the default model for Slack, and mutual adoption of each other’s products.

When will Salesforce in Claude be available?

It has been in open beta for Salesforce customers since 15 September 2026, the first day of Dreamforce. Salesforce has not given a general availability date. Skills for clouds other than Sales are listed as coming soon.

How much does Claudeforce cost?

Salesforce has not published a price. Marc Benioff has said customers need a premium edition, and TD Cowen analysts reported that Salesforce in Claude is included in the Max edition at $550 per user per month. Your Claude plan from Anthropic is billed separately.

Is my CRM data safe if it is accessed through Claude?

The plugin inherits each user’s existing Salesforce permissions and routes actions back through Salesforce, so sharing rules, validation and audit trails still apply. For Agentforce, Claude runs through Amazon Bedrock inside the Salesforce Trust Boundary, meaning inference happens within Salesforce’s cloud rather than at a public endpoint. Confirm the specific data flow for your region before rollout.

What are the 37 Claudeforce skills?

They are prebuilt sales skills in six groups: daily and weekly workflows, deal strategy, customer management, growth, meeting preparation, and actions and governance. Salesforce has named 15 of them, including daily-briefing, close-plan, call-prep and sfdc-hygiene-check.

How is Claudeforce different from the Anthropic partnership announced in 2025?

The October 2025 partnership made Claude available inside Agentforce for regulated industries and added a Slack MCP server. Claudeforce goes further: Claude becomes the default reasoning model across Agentforce and Slack, and Salesforce ships a first-party plugin that runs a seller’s daily work inside Claude.

What is Headless 360 and why does it matter for Claudeforce?

Headless 360, announced on 15 April 2026 at TDX 2026, is the set of APIs, MCP servers and CLI tools that let external agents call Salesforce data, workflows and governance rules without a Salesforce interface. It is the architecture that makes the Claude plugin possible. Salesforce says MCP access requires no separate SKU on Enterprise Edition and above; calls use your existing API limits, and Flex Credits apply when an Agentforce action, a Data 360 query or a prompt runs.

Does Claudeforce replace Agentforce?

No. Salesforce positions Agentforce as autonomous work that touches end customers, and Salesforce in Claude as knowledge-worker assistance for internal teams such as sellers. In practice the two will overlap, and the boundary is likely to move.

Will Salesforce still need admins after Claudeforce?

More than before, and in a different way. When the interface stops being the control surface, correctness has to live in the data model, the sharing model, validation rules and flows. That is admin work, and it becomes harder to skip.

Can we build our own Claudeforce skills?

Salesforce has not said yet. The 37 skills are prebuilt by Salesforce, and more are due from late 2026. Ask about custom skills and how they are governed before you widen a beta rollout.

Do Claudeforce skills respect Salesforce permissions?

Yes, according to Salesforce. Every answer and action runs under the user’s existing Salesforce permissions, and writes route back through Salesforce so business rules still apply. Test this with a restricted user during the beta.

Where Claudeforce actually lands

Salesforce has made a defensible bet. Its moat was never the screen. It was 27 years of data model, permissions, business logic and audit trail, and none of that is reproduced by pointing a model at a database. Letting Claude be the interface while keeping governance on the Salesforce side is a reasonable way to stay essential in an agentic world.

The risk is equally clear. If the interface commoditises, pricing power tends to move to whoever owns the intelligence. Salesforce is betting it can hold the data and governance layer while the reasoning layer belongs to someone else. That is a bet on the durability of enterprise plumbing, and it is not an obviously wrong one.

For customers, none of that changes the near-term work. The organisations that will get value from Claudeforce in the first year are the ones whose CRM data is clean, whose permission model is deliberate, and whose business logic sits in the platform rather than in the habits of the people using it. That work was worth doing before this announcement. It is now worth doing on a deadline.

Sources and further reading

• Salesforce and Anthropic Announce Claudeforce, Salesforce press release, 26 August 2026
• Claudeforce product page, Salesforce
• Salesforce Delivers Record Second Quarter Fiscal 2027 Results, Salesforce investor relations
• Salesforce FY27 Q2 product releases and corporate announcements, Salesforce
• Anthropic and Salesforce expanded partnership, Anthropic, 14 October 2025
• Salesforce just put its entire CRM inside Claude, VentureBeat

Ashapura Softech is a certified Salesforce implementation partner. If you are evaluating vendors for agentic work, see what to ask an Agentforce implementation partner before the commercial conversation starts. If you want a read on whether your org is ready for agentic workflows, book a CRM health check covering data quality, permission architecture and automation debt. You can also browse our full range of Salesforce cloud services or see the delivery work in our case studies.

If you are planning agents on top of this, our Agentforce consulting team can scope the first use case and the data work it depends on.