Salesforce has expanded its partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and Stripe as the software giant looks to push into the next generation of agentic AI at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
At the 2024 Dreamforce, Salesforce unveiled its generative AI proposition, Agentforce, but taking to the stage at the 2025 conference, CEO Marc Benioff said the firm has seen incredible advances in AI this year.
“But you’re about to see something completely different,” he added during his keynote.
“We’ve gone through cloud, we’ve gone through mobile, we’ve gone through social, we’ve gone through predictive AI,” Benioff said at Dreamforce in San Francisco on Tuesday. “And now we’re entering this new agentic AI revolution … and it is going to be magic.”
In his opening keynote for the event, Benioff outlined his vision for how autonomous, “agentic” AI systems will reshape business operations, from marketing to manufacturing.
Benioff outlined several early adopters of Agentforce – the agentic AI it unveiled at Dreamforce 2024 – including jewellery giant Pandora, delivery firm FedEx, retailer Williams Sonoma, food and drinks firm PepsiCo, and IT behemoth Dell.
Salesforce also noted that of the 12,500 Agentforce deals closed since its launch, roughly 6,000 are paid — a sign that monetisation is still in its early stages.
At Williams-Sonoma, agentic AI is helping shoppers find recipes and video tutorials tailored to previous purchases. Meanwhile, Pepsi has deployed autonomous models to analyse data and identify growth opportunities.
Partnering up
Salesforce also revealed a number of key partnerships with AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Anthropic and Salesforce announced an expanded partnership to make Claude a preferred model for Agentforce, enabling Salesforce customers in financial services, healthcare, cybersecurity, and life sciences to use trusted AI while keeping sensitive data secure.
Additionally, Salesforce is deploying Claude Code across its global engineering organization to help developers build and ship faster, while Anthropic broadens its use of the Salesforce-owned platform Slack.
“Salesforce and Anthropic share a vision for a trusted AI ecosystem that puts customers at the center,” said Benioff. “By bringing Salesforce directly into Claude — and Claude’s intelligence into Salesforce and Slack — we’re giving every company the power to work in entirely new ways.”
“Together, we’re making trusted, agentic AI real for every industry — combining Anthropic’s world-class models with the trust, reliability, accuracy and scale of Agentforce 360, helping customers achieve new levels of productivity, innovation, and growth.”
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, also made a brief appearance during the Dreamforce keynote, as the two companies revealed deeper integrations between their products, which will soon let ChatGPT users pull up Salesforce customer records and build charts and graphs using simple text prompts.
“Our partnership with Salesforce is about making the tools people use every day work better together, so work feels more natural and connected. It’s an important step in how AI can improve daily workflows under our efforts together,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI.
Speaking to the press later, Benioff said that OpenAI is “an incredible company” and he and Sam Altman have known each other a long time.
“For a lot of customers, they’re working with us to consume that technology – but they don’t have the means to deploy it,” he says, noting that Salesforce can help bring OpenAI to others.
In its other new collaboration, Salesforce will work with Stripe and OpenAI to allow merchants using Agentforce Commerce to enhance their shopping experiences and provide a faster path to purchase by incorporating conversational artificial intelligence, the companies said in a Tuesday press release.
The companies will do this by building an Instant Checkout integration guided by the new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) that was co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe, according to the release.
The combination will provide merchants with a complete solution for agentic commerce that includes commerce tools and financial infrastructure, per the release.
