Salesforce boasts: 50% of bookings were from 'customers refilling the tank... they consume Flex Credits, they want more'

Announcing upbeat financials and a new offering with AI posterchild Anthropic, Salesforce has begun to drip-feed plans for how it might get customers to spend more as they deploy AI.

The CRM giant has been among the victims of the so-called SaaSpocalypse, which sees widespread business application software replaced or diminished by AI models which interact directly with business data.

Flawed or not, the notion has tanked Salesforce’s share price by more than 20 percent this year, but its Q2 results, for the period ending July 31, caused some cheer, at least among shareholders.

As well as trumpeting revenue of $11.3 billion, up 11 percent on a year ago and beating analysts' expectations, the CRM giant announced a new tie-in with AI model builder Anthropic.

The two companies have teamed up to announce Claudeforce, which claims to bring Claude’s services together with Salesforce’s enterprise data, workflows, governance and business logic.

It offers a Plugin with 37 prebuilt “sales skills” the companies say help sellers and agents automate sales pipelines for example.

As well as using Claude for the UI, it can be embedded in Salesforce products AIforce, Headless 360, Data 360, Tableau, and Slack.

Together with the financial results, the news caused a 12 percent jump in the company’s value.

That’s all very well for investors, but customers will be asking whether it works and how much they pay for it.

Both will depend on the implementation strategy, but Salesforce did offer some clues about its expectations while speaking to investment analysts.

For a start, there are so many products which seem to overlap, customers may be forgiven for being a little confused.

Co-CEO and founder Marc Benioff said products would use “not only Claudeforce, but a new version of Slack, as well as Coworker,” an AI powered assistant built in its Agentforce platform.

That adds to the Headless 360, which allows customers to access all of their Salesforce data from Cursor, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Claude, or a terminal.

Slack is also being reworked as the UI for CRM and other applications through SlackBots, which can fetch and query data from a range of applications.