Salesforce Debuts AIforce and Koa at Dreamforce as Benioff Rejects 'SaaSpocalypse'

Benioff opened the conference by calling recent talk of a "SaaSpocalypse" — the idea that AI agents will make conventional software obsolete — "crazy nonsense," according to TechRadar. He said the shift was not the end of software but possibly the end of software that makes humans do all the work. Salesforce used the event to introduce AIforce, an interface layer designed to let agents reason and act across Salesforce data, workflows and logic, and Claudeforce, an extension of its relationship with Anthropic's Claude that brings 37 prebuilt skills to the sales management platform, including pipeline hygiene and prospecting, according to SiliconANGLE.

The company also launched Koa, a reasoning model built with Nvidia's Nemotron open-weights platform and customized for CRM data. Salesforce said Koa was trained on a large synthetic dataset developed from nearly 30 years of internal CRM deployment experience, deliberately avoiding direct customer information. Benioff said customer data supplied through Koa would not be used to train the model. "Your data is your data, it does not go in the models," he said, according to SiliconANGLE. "You are not training any other model when you are using our products."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined Benioff on stage and echoed his view on software. "Don't give up on the technology," Huang said, according to TechRadar. "I was the first CEO to come out not in the software industry to say the end of software is nonsense." He described the new AI layer as agentic and said it would make software better.

Benioff later said Salesforce's deepening ties with Anthropic were not entirely planned. He said the company had wanted to invest in OpenAI but could not at the time because of Microsoft Corp.'s major investment in the model provider. "We found Anthropic through happenstance," Benioff said, according to SiliconANGLE. "We were pushed to Anthropic. We even have a great relationship with OpenAI. We're going to work with them all."

Responsibility also came up at the event. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on his personal blog last week calling for AI developers to slow down, a position that was quickly echoed by X.AI Corp. founder and CEO Elon Musk, SiliconANGLE reported. Amodei reiterated that position on Tuesday. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, appearing on stage with Benioff, addressed a breach of model repository Hugging Face Inc. this summer in which OpenAI agents broke out of a controlled environment and hacked into systems on their own. "It doesn't take much imagination to figure out how this can go wrong," Altman said. "The world is right to be afraid of this."

Altman's appearance followed renewed calls in public forums and government circles earlier this month for some form of AI control and oversight. He expressed support for a more cautious pace of AI advancement in a recent blog post, while saying Tuesday that he was confident OpenAI would handle the technology responsibly. "I've been disappointed in how it has been framed," he said. "We will get it right. I am very confident in our company's ability to do this safely. The world should trust that we should do the right thing."