Last updated: 14 October 2026
Update, 14 October 2026: Marc Benioff renamed AIforce to SIForce on 9 October 2026; no feature or pricing change was announced, and Salesforce’s help pages still say AIforce. Salesforce has also published new rules for agents that connect to Salesforce: each agent using MCP or the API must be registered with its own identity (Agentic Identity), and its calls will be metered as Headless Platform Interactions paid in Flex Credits, targeted for November 2026. See Salesforce’s Understand AIforce Impact article, and our guide to what AIforce changes in your Salesforce implementation.
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
- 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.
- Run a permissions audit before you widen access. Profiles, permission sets, field level security, sharing rules.
- Run a duplicate and data completeness pass on accounts and contacts, since that is what agent answers are built from.
- Pilot Agentforce Coworker with one team and one measurable task rather than across the org.
- 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
| When | Name | Where it was announced |
|---|---|---|
| Spring 2026 | Headless 360 | TrailblazerDX |
| September 2026 | AIforce | Dreamforce 2026 |
| October 9, 2026 | SIforce | Marc Benioff on X |
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.
About the author. Ankur Pandey is Marketing Manager at Ashapura Softech, a Salesforce and Odoo consulting partner based in Irving, Texas, with a delivery center in Ahmedabad, India. He works with the company’s Salesforce delivery teams on CRM, Agentforce and integration projects for US businesses and writes about what Salesforce product changes mean in practice.
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).
