What Does Salesforce Do? | Salesforce

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• Salesforce is the world’s #1 AI CRM, helping humans, AI agents, and platforms drive customer success together. 
• With Salesforce, you’re getting 27+ years of rules and knowledge that you can use in the apps and tools your team wants to use — giving you the power of choice.
• With Salesforce, companies can use AI, data, and apps to bring trusted AI agents into every part of their business, including sales, marketing, service, commerce, and more.
• Salesforce is different because it gives AI agents and employees a shared, trusted foundation of business context, rules, and workflows — so agents can act accurately and employees can move faster on the judgment calls that matter most.

Salesforce is the world’s #1 AI customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It unifies your customer and business data, gives you trusted agents that work where your people do, and delivers results that scale. We call this the Agentic Enterprise. When you become one, employees can focus on strategy and relationships while AI agents handle scale — a shift that opens new growth for companies of any size.

There are a lot of great AI models out there that are able to generate good answers. But good isn’t enough when your business depends on it. You need the right answer, which takes into account the deep knowledge and history of your specific company’s rules, data, and workflows, making it correct, auditable, and safe to act on. For example, a model can suggest a price, but it has no sense of your discount policy, margins, approval chain, or prior decisions. Salesforce knows that right answer, because all of that information lives within the Salesforce systems you already use. We’ve spent 27 years building and improving them, which is why you get:

• Customer intelligence in one unified place. Every AI action is grounded in customer, business, and operational data, so that decisions are based on the truth, not guesses.
• Use any AI model. Plug them into our trusted foundation to get agents that act reliably within your enterprise.
• Work in any interface. Take action in any place you already use — like Claude, Teams, Slack — with the knowledge that there’s one platform that’s tying it all together.
• Trust is inherited, not bolted on. Governance, security, and data foundations are already built in. AI extends them without reinventing them.

Salesforce is the only company that owns the customer data, business logic, and trust layer — which allows you to put AI to work safely, at an enterprise scale. So what does this look like? What are companies doing?

• AI agents respond to customer queries 24/7, recommending products, processing returns, and escalating tough questions to human employees.
• Agents autonomously nurture sales leads daily, coach every rep on every deal, and generate quotes in an instant.
• Employees get proactive assistance from agents that have full visibility into your customer, business, and operational data.

These are real use cases taking place at businesses worldwide right now. And Salesforce’s products and services are making it possible. Here’s what it looks like in practice: In the State of Agentic AI in the Enterprise report, organizations that have successfully deployed AI agents achieve ROI in about eight months. They also see 53% employee adoption, 29% CSAT improvement, and 29% reduction in operational costs.

How does Salesforce work?

Salesforce gives every employee, AI agent, and platform a single, shared view of your customer and business data. That matters because it lets agents and employees both work from the same trusted foundation. When that happens, agents can suggest next steps, automate work, and support customers with accuracy. And employees use that same reliable view of your data to move faster and focus on the judgment calls only they can make. It’s all possible because Salesforce’s AI is grounded in real business context, rules, and workflows, so it understands exactly what your business needs and how it operates.

Salesforce is built to be operated by humans, agents, and platforms across your entire ecosystem. We ensure that companies of any size can grow and adapt as their needs change — helping every business on the path to becoming an agentic enterprise. That ecosystem includes:

• AIforce makes every capability your business already uses — data, business logic, workflows, governance — accessible in a live interface, with permissions and policies traveling with it. There’s no browser required, allowing humans and AI agents to build, manage, and execute processes from external surfaces like Claude, Teams, or Cursor.
• Agentforce is your digital workforce — ready-to-deploy agents that handle sales, service, and support work out of the box, plus the tools to build and govern your own agents that act within the guardrails you set.
• Data 360 integrates, federates, and harmonizes all of your enterprise data — connecting data lakes, warehouses, and Salesforce apps into one trusted foundation with zero-copy connectivity (no copied or duplicated data means no added risk).
• Customer 360 is where sales, service, marketing, and commerce apps run, putting 27 years of business logic, workflows, and processes to work and connecting it all directly to unified data and agents.

This ecosystem also reaches directly into the tools your teams already use every day — through Claudeforce in Claude, Slackforce in Slack, and the agents you build and manage with Agentforce. Here’s a closer look at how each one fits into that picture.

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What is AIforce?

AIforce is Salesforce’s live interface layer — it brings all your business data and workflows to any AI interface through MCP servers, APIs, and CLI tools, without complicated and costly integrations.. For decades, enterprise software required users to manually navigate static UI to get work done. Now that agents and people can reach the data, workflows, and rules directly, that same software becomes a live interface wherever it’s needed — no longer locked to one screen.interface.

AIforce extends every Salesforce product beyond the application. It makes your trusted business capabilities available wherever AI agents work. Think of traditional Salesforce like a bank, where you could only access your money by walking into one specific branch. AIforce keeps that same bank, same accounts and same rules, but it multiplies the access points.

The vault didn’t move, the access points multiplied. But their governance stays in place: fraud rules, transaction limits, and authorization checks still apply exactly the same way.

With AIforce, Salesforce’s native permissions, sharing rules, and audit logs travel with the platform wherever it is accessed. This means developers can build with any coding agent, teams can deploy on any surface they already use, and IT leaders can govern and scale securely with native enterprise rules.

Whether it’s a service team resolving customer issues directly inside Microsoft Teams, a developer building a workflow in Claude Code, or a seller getting account updates via Gemini, it’s the same platform, same business logic, and same governance. Only the entry point is different.

AIforce isn’t the removal of the interface. It’s the liberation of the Salesforce platform because while the interface becomes flexible, the enterprise intelligence underneath stays constant. 

So whether you use Salesforce within our platform, or reach it from your interface of choice, you have access to all of the apps, governance, and logic that has defined Salesforce for 27 years. Apps that help you run your enterprise and provide a level of service your customers deserve.

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What is Claudeforce?

Claudeforce is the partnership between Salesforce and Anthropic that brings the #1 AI — Anthropic’s Claude — together with the #1 AI CRM, Salesforce. It makes your trusted business data, workflows, and governance available to the leading AI model at the moment it’s needed, so the most capable AI can reason over what’s actually happening in your business and take action on it — without that data ever being stored or used to train it. 

Claude can reason across Salesforce, ‪Slack,‬ and email to take action on the real state of your business. It works out of the box with your existing Salesforce permissions and business rules. Just turn it on once, and you get:

• Instant grounded intelligence: Ask complex enterprise questions and get live, trusted answers.
• App & Agent Builders: Deploy custom workflows, agents, and secure apps on the fly.
• Action-oriented responses: Trigger live enterprise actions and get work done, not just summaries.
• Ironclad governance: Zero data retention and a full trust boundary, all by default.

Probabilistic models alone can’t run a company and deterministic systems alone can’t reason. Claudeforce fuses Claude’s reasoning with Salesforce’s trusted data and controls to do both.

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What is Slack?

Slack is where work happens. It’s Salesforce’s AI-powered workspace — a searchable hub for communication, knowledge, and work tools, used by humans and AI agents alike. Slack integrates with Salesforce apps, and many other tools, to centralize your team’s activity. With scattered email chains replaced with conversations you can organize by topic, project, department, and more, you can keep track of current progress and find older discussions. But it’s more than just a place to chat.

• It connects to all your CRM data and workflows, so you can direct agents, review outputs, make decisions, and take action without leaving the app.
• With headless architecture, that same conversational interface extends beyond Slack to Teams, voice, or any surface where work happens.
• It’s also the home of Slackbot: Your personal AI  teammate that helps everyone get more done.

Most AI agents only know what you tell them, but Slackbot understands how your business works. Since it lives in Slack, there’s no setup needed. Slackbot already knows each employees’ role, past interactions, and projects, and can access Google Drive, Salesforce, OneDrive, and other tools your team already uses. You simply give Slackbot instructions or ask it a question and it figures out which information and tools it needs to take action. That means every employee has an intelligent assistant to summarize past conversations, draft messages, generate meeting prep documents, automate tasks, and execute workflows.

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What is Agentforce?

Agentforce is Salesforce’s AI agent platform where you can build, test, deploy, and govern AI agents that work 24/7, within the guardrails you set. And, it comes with pre-built agents that address your most pressing business needs right out of the box.

Out of the box AI agents available in Agentforce include:

• Hunter, your outbound sales agent: Help reps and leaders find accounts, engage buyers, manage pipeline, and prep quotes.
• Piper, your inbound pipe gen agent: Engages website visitors live, captures and qualifies leads with CRM data, and books meetings straight onto reps’ calendars.
• Casey, your help agent: Runs on help.salesforce.com and customer sites, notifying a human rep when more help is needed.
• Paige, your IT & HR employee agent: Solves IT requests as soon as they’re flagged, right in Slack and Teams.
• Marshall, your supply chain & operations agent: Generates and orchestrates end-to-end processes across the back office, automating manual work away with an audit record of every action.
• Fin, your customer agent: A voice agent built for high-performing, self-service customer experiences, newest addition to the agent family.
• Carter, your shopper agent: Helps customers discover products, get answers, and check out right in the chat, with no extra tabs needed.

Because agents are powered by secure data, their actions are always relevant to the needs of your company and your customers. Agents adapt in real time as new information flows in, while operating within your business guardrails.

That real-time adaptability depends on Salesforce being reachable wherever agents actually work — not locked inside a single interface.

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Salesforce for customer service

Service Cloud connects customer service, field service, and employee service on one platform — uniting AI agents, human expertise, and trusted data for one seamless experience.

Autonomous agents increase productivity by providing 24/7 customer service and generating responses to customer queries. And with Agentforce Voice, customers can now have complex conversations with agents that know the full context of past interactions. When needed, these agents can hand off to a human rep, together with call notes that get reps instantly up to speed. Now, you can resolve cases faster, provide instant support, and have a complete and informed view of your customers at every interaction across self-service, field service, chat, SMS, and social messaging — all from one platform. 

Let your team do what only they can do; Service Cloud handles the rest.

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Salesforce for sales

Sales is in our name. It’s how we got started, and we’ve never stopped finding ways to empower sales teams. Sales Cloud gives sellers agents that provide deal insights and sales coaching. It also has Piper, a pre-built AI sales rep that engages website visitors, qualifies leads, and books meetings around the clock — chatting with buyers by text, voice, or video. It works right inside Salesforce, keeping sales reps in the loop through Slack. Those agents also engage leads, answer questions, and book meetings automatically, so sellers can spend less time on busywork and more time closing deals. 

Our platform simplifies and manages the entire sales cycle from prospecting to deal close to upsell and cross-sell. With Sales Cloud, you get the full sales tech stack ready to automate and scale all your manual sales processes, inspect your pipelines and forecasts with precision accuracy, and connect all customer touchpoints for the best buying experience.

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Salesforce for marketing

Ever wish you could turn a single click into a real conversation? Marketing Cloud makes that happen. Powered by autonomous agents that can support campaign planning, content creation, and execution, learning with each touchpoint to deliver relevance for every customer in real-time. Regardless of where your customers are – email, web, mobile, SMS – turn any marketing moment into a two-way dialogue, not a one-off blast.

Pair that with conversational marketing analytics and AI-driven insights, and you’ll know exactly where every dollar is going, what’s actually moving the needle, and how to act on that insight immediately.

A unified data foundation lets you stop guessing and start working from a unified customer profile — so you can send messaging that feels relevant instead of random, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale.

AI doesn’t just save time, it sharpens every marketing effort across every one of your channels with agents like Piper, the #1 AI SDR agent, converting and qualifying leads, around the clock.

And with the playbook shifting, marketers are looking for answers on how they show up on surfaces they don’t own, like AEO. With Palmata from Salesforce, now you don’t need to guess.  See exactly how your brand is being perceived, how you’re being considered by answer engines, and what you can do to be part of the conversation.

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See an example of Salesforce in action

We have many customer stories to share, but let’s look at just one example of how Salesforce helps deliver success. 

PepsiCo’s food and beverages are enjoyed more than a billion times a day in over 200 countries. Running a business at that scale is complex, especially when half your customers are small businesses. At the same time, “AI is reshaping our business in ways that were once unimaginable,” said Ramon Laguarta, Chairman and CEO. To make the most of it, PepsiCo is using Salesforce. 

With the Salesforce Platform, PepsiCo is building agents that replicate the level of service reps provide to large retailers, giving every small business the ability to reach out via live chat or over the phone using Agentforce Voice. Next, they’ll deploy Agentforce across their global network of over 100 contact centers.

“The more efficient we can be with our operations, the better,” said Dave Dohnalik, SVP, Technology Strategy & Enterprise Solutions at PepsiCo. With Consumer Goods Cloud, the team has a single place to manage promotion timing, pricing, and product mix for top retailers like Walmart and Target. The app also helps make every rep visit count by providing specific merchandising instructions, share-of-shelf metrics tracking, and more.

The powerhouse of PepsiCo’s global operations is Data 360. With the help of MuleSoft, they are able to harmonize data from across Salesforce apps and products with internal solutions like consumer and store DNA, and household panel data from spreadsheets. With a complete view of each customer and store, and the ability to segment based on preference, location, or buying habits, “we know where our consumers are and we know what’s moving,” says Dohnalik. Then, they can quickly use Marketing Cloud to take action on those segments, and push out personalized marketing messages to consumers via SMS, WhatsApp, and email.

Looking to the future, PepsiCo worked with PwC to design a five-year roadmap with Salesforce at the center. This collaboration and co-innovation led PepsiCo to shift from standalone tools to adopting a full-suite Salesforce ecosystem. The integration journey includes multiple use cases for AI-driven service — from equipment servicing to next-generation marketing analytics and personalization — that will help them continue to drive their business forward.

Salesforce isn’t just for enterprises. It’s also the CRM for small businesses with great ambition.

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Salesforce for small business

Running a small business means wearing a dozen hats. Salesforce for Small Business is built to take a few off your plate. It’s a scalable CRM platform with sales, customer service automation, and real-time analytics tailored to how SMB teams actually work. 

Getting started is easy: Free CRM gives you sales, service, marketing, commerce, and Slack capabilities for up to 2 users at no cost, so you can see what’s possible before you spend a dime. When you’re ready to grow, Starter Suite puts AI to work from day one. With turnkey automation that already knows your business, it connects seamlessly with your third-party apps, so every part of your business stays in sync as you scale — no ripping and replacing systems later.

Here are benefits that SMBs are seeing from using Salesforce:

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Salesforce for IT

Whether your team is tech-minded or not, the Salesforce Platform can help your entire organization automate workflows, build intelligent apps, and enforce access and compliance controls. It’s also where you can design, test, and deploy AI agents in a single, conversational workspace. 

With Data 360, you can bring together all of your data from data lakes, warehouses, and Salesforce apps to build real-time, unified customer profiles with context. And it all runs on our Trust Layer, a secure architecture built into the Salesforce platform. The Trust Layer sits between your data and any AI model, masking sensitive data, filtering out toxic or unsafe content, and enforcing zero data retention — so AI can safely act on your business data without it ever being stored or used to train outside models.

Salesforce gives IT teams a trusted, unified, and open platform to automate and secure operations across the business. Our no-code, low-code, and pro-code tools let admins and developers build together, reduce custom maintenance, and streamline support.

Integration is easy because our platform is metadata-driven and AI-first. Configuration, updates, and extensions flow naturally, so new solutions can be created quickly without disrupting existing systems. With MuleSoft and built-in APIs, Salesforce connects to legacy systems, data lakes, AI models, and services, enabling data to flow seamlessly. 

And perhaps most important: Security, governance, and compliance are built in at every layer.

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Retail has changed — shoppers now start their journey on TikTok, Instagram, or even ChatGPT before they ever make it to your website or app. Salesforce helps you meet them wherever they are with omnichannel commerce. Whether you’re building digital storefronts or self-service portals, our tools connect every touchpoint to grow revenue, keep customers engaged, and tie commerce directly to the rest of your business.

Commerce Cloud brings the experience of your best sales associate by answering product questions, offering personalized suggestions, and completing sales in chat. These omnichannel commerce experiences are available across both B2C and B2B buying journeys.

Commerce Cloud customers see:

Easy to implement and adapt, our tools remove friction from the buying journey  even when a customer starts shopping on one channel and finishes on another. 

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Why Salesforce

Anyone can bolt AI onto a workflow. What’s harder, and what actually matters when your business is on the line, is AI that knows your customers, your rules, and your history well enough to act on your behalf, safely, at scale. That’s the difference Salesforce brings: 27 years of trusted business logic, unified data, and governance that no model or point solution can replicate overnight.

This is why the agentic enterprise isn’t a future state — it’s already running at companies like PepsiCo, and it starts with Salesforce as the foundation underneath every agent, every interface, and every decision. As AI reshapes how work gets done, the businesses that win won’t be the ones with the flashiest model. They’ll be the ones whose AI can be trusted to act — and Salesforce is built to make that trust possible everywhere your business shows up.

Explore how Salesforce can help your business unlock that potential and continue your learning journey with these free resources:

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*Source: 2026 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights. Data is aggregated from 3,887 customers across 9 countries.