“Crazy nonsense”: Benioff dismisses the SaaSpocalypse and launches AIforce

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff has dismissed months of talk about a “SaaSpocalypse”. “We’ve been hearing all this kind of crazy nonsense about the SaaSpocalypse, especially over the last six months,” he said on Tuesday, opening the Dreamforce 2026 keynote in San Francisco.

“Hasn’t it been wild?” he asked the audience. The SaaSpocalypse, he said, “was not about the end of software, but it may be about the end of software that makes humans do all the work.” Salesforce has published the full keynote on YouTube.

Enterprise software stocks fell sharply earlier this year on fears that AI would disrupt them, CNBC reported. They have been recovering over the past few months. Salesforce shares are up more than 50% from their 52-week low of $146 in late June.

The group rose on Monday after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for AI development to slow down, according to CNBC. Salesforce gained more than 4.5% that day, then gave back some of the rise on Tuesday.

What AIforce is

Benioff’s answer to the SaaSpocalypse is AIforce, which Salesforce launched the same day. The company describes it as a live interface layer. It brings Salesforce’s data, workflows, business logic, permissions and security to any AI interface or agent.

“It’s an interface revolution,” Benioff said on stage. “We’ve seen a lot of interface revolutions. We went from DOS to GUIs, and we went from GUIs to web, and we went from web to mobile.” AI interfaces, he said, will be dynamic, intelligent, composable and “alive”.

He said in the announcement:

“AI is creating an interface revolution. We are combining model intelligence with all the context that customers have built into Salesforce to create an intelligent, dynamic, composable system that is securely governed, built with Zero Data Retention, and designed to work with the core systems that already run your business.”

AIforce covers three surfaces, according to Salesforce:

• Claudeforce, built with Anthropic, puts Salesforce inside Claude through an MCP server with 37 sales skills. A Salesforce plug-in for Claude Code adds more than 40 skills.
• Slackforce covers live interfaces, Slackbot, Slack CRM for managing Salesforce records, and Slack Code, all inside Slack.
• Agentforce Coworker is an AI teammate inside Salesforce’s Lightning interface. Salesforce says 100,000 users turned it on in its first 35 days.

Salesforce says AIforce enforces the permissions and business rules customers already use, with no migration. Benioff also promised an SDK for building AIforce apps, and an AIforce Max Edition that bundles everything into one product.

Salesforce and Anthropic announced the Claudeforce deal in August. Days before the conference, The Information reported that Salesforce planned to drop “Agentforce” from product names.

How Salesforce uses it

Benioff stressed zero data retention, which means customer data does not go into the models. “Regardless of what you’ve heard on media or from other vendors, let me assure you that Salesforce products are built with zero data retention,” he said.

Salesforce already runs its own business this way, Benioff said. It has 7,000 users on Claudeforce internally. Its Hunter sales agent generated $500m in pipeline last quarter, and its Casey service agent has resolved 5 million conversations.

Patrick Stokes, Salesforce’s president of applications and marketing, said the Claude version is in open beta. Customers can request access on AppExchange with their org ID. Salesforce says pricing and packaging may change, and availability varies by region.

Huang: “the end of software is nonsense”

Later in the keynote, Benioff brought Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang on stage. Huang backed Benioff’s view.

“I was the first CEO to come out not in the software industry to say the end of software is nonsense,” Huang said. “This is going to be a layer on top of software.”

“This new layer on top of software is going to be agentic. It’s going to make you use the software so much better.”

Huang said he wants to “Agentforce every company”. If a tool does not work right away, he told the audience, test it again in a couple of weeks. “Don’t give up on the technology.”

“I’m more ambitious than ever,” he said. “The sky’s the limit for our company, the sky’s the limit for every industry, for every single country, so engage AI, don’t get left behind.”

The two men also discussed AI safety, after Benioff’s interview with Amodei.

Koa, built on Nvidia Nemotron

Huang’s appearance followed the launch of Koa, which Salesforce and Nvidia announced on Tuesday. Salesforce calls it its first CRM reasoning model, built for Agentforce.

Salesforce post-trained Koa on Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Super. It used a synthetic dataset drawn from 27 years of CRM deployments. “Not a single byte of customer data was used,” said Rohan Kumar, Salesforce’s new president of platform and engineering.

In Salesforce’s own CRM benchmark, Koa matches or beats leading models with three times fewer errors, the company says. Salesforce controls the model weights and runs inference on its own infrastructure.

Koa already powers an internal Slack agent at Salesforce. Pilot customers include 1-800Accountant, Baxter Credit Union, Engine, Formula 1, UChicago Medicine and Xero. Salesforce expects general availability in US regions in winter 2026.

“AI is creating a much larger opportunity for software,” Huang said in the announcement. “Every company needs useful AI, tailored to its knowledge, expertise, and work.”

An agent for the TSA

On the eve of the conference, Salesforce also announced Ace, an AI agent for the US Transportation Security Administration. Salesforce built it on its Public Sector Solutions platform, and it has been live for several months.

Ace handles about 100,000 routine traveller conversations a month, according to Salesforce. It has resolved 96% of routine questions, such as how to pack liquids, without passing them to a human.

Salesforce also announced deals with Siemens, AWS and Google Cloud on the first day of Dreamforce, which runs until 19 September.