Salesforce aims to be your enterprise AI harness, touts AIforce

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company's Dreamforce conference is going to feature a heavy dose of AIforce, the company's enterprise harness that has evolved over the last three years.

Benioff, speaking on Salesforce's second quarter earnings call, didn't go into a lot of detail, but said AIforce is designed to serve has a harness that governs enterprise data and workflows to AI agents without integrations.

Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, which is an integration where Salesforce provides the data and context and Claude can answer questions and provide reasoning. The big theme with Claudeforce, enabled by AIforce, is that there's zero data retention--a big issue for enterprises.

For Salesforce, AIforce is also a way to integrate enterprise applications with the AI labs that were supposed to sink SaaS. Details so far are sparse, but Benioff noted that "you're going to hear a lot about AIforce at Dreamforce."

Add it up and AIforce is likely to be the harness that brings together Salesforce's layers. The company has invested in integration and harmonization of data via MuleSoft, Informatica and Data 360. There's also the application layer. And the AIforce harness will include the data, apps, semantics, agents and interface layers. "When it's turned on together, that is when you start to see the true enterprise transformation," said Benioff. "AIforce is that new user interface harness that sits on top of our core systems."

Reading between the lines, the rough sketch of AIforce includes the following:

• Connections between Salesforce's platform and AI with context and permissions that already existed in Salesforce.
• Zero data retention so not model gets your data.
• Packaged agents that understand your business and industry and can work in any interface.