Salesforce AI Coding Tools: Recent reports suggest that Salesforce may spend around $300 million on Anthropic AI tokens, with much of that investment linked to coding-related tasks and AI-assisted software development. CEO Marc Benioff had earlier explained that the company would not hire software engineers in 2025 because of productivity gains from AI. Recently, he said that coding agents and AI models are changing how engineers work rather than eliminating them.
The projection highlights how the software company is shifting investment from expanding engineering teams to relying more and more on AI tools to improve efficiency with coding and other tasks. However, even with the hiring freeze, Benioff made it clear that AI is not fully independent and still requires humans in the loop. Salesforce plans to bring on up to 2000 new salespeople to help the customers get the most out of its expanding lineup of AI-powered products. Benioff stated that internal AI tools have boosted developer productivity by 30%.
The Salesforce CEO made the projection on the All-In podcast published on Friday, calling AI coding agents “awesome” and Anthropic “awesome”, before adding that the spending would make everything at Salesforce cheaper to build.
Salesforce AI Token Spending
Salesforce has spent the last few years increasing its focus on AI products and automation. According to Benioff, AI agents have helped Salesforce to achieve “unprecedented” efficiency gains across service, support, distribution, and marketing. In August 2025, he announced that the company had reduced its support staff from 9000 to 5000, thanks to agent-driven productivity. The coding use case, he suggested, is now producing a similar effect on the engineering domain with faster product iteration, lower development costs, and an output rate that was previously unattainable.
Benioff also revealed that Salesforce is now working on technology to make coding easier inside Slack.
“You’re going to see some cool stuff with Slack and code I’m not ready to talk about yet,” he said. “But there’s no question that we are in a new moment in coding.”
Salesforce’s spending on AI would mainly support coding-related activities, making AI-assisted software development one of the company’s biggest priorities. It would further assist employees with code generation, debugging, documentation, and workflow management, thereby increasing efficiency.
Benioff stated in the interview that not every token created by the employees of the company has to be sent to a frontier model like Claude at Anthropic. He called for an “intermediary layer” that could route inputs intelligently, sending complex reasoning tasks to Claude and simpler ones to smaller, cheaper models. He has further stated that Microsoft blocked Salesforce from investing in OpenAI, which redirected the company towards Anthropic. That investment has produced a paper return of more than ten times the original outlay.
Slack and AI-powered tools
Salesforce redesigned Slack in March, revealing over 30 new AI features for Slackbot that transform it from a conversational assistant into an agentic system that is capable of transcribing meetings, monitoring desktop activities, carrying out tasks through third-party tools via the Model Context Protocol, and functioning as a lightweight CRM. All of the new features are powered by Anthropic’s Claude. Benioff has referred to Slack as “the interface to AI” and noted that AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, run their own operations on the platform.
Slack revenue is expected to hit $3 billion this year, and Salesforce’s Agentforce business, its dedicated AI agent product line, reached $800 million in annual recurring revenue as of the most recent earnings, up 169% year-on-year with 29,000 deals closed. From this summer, every new Salesforce customer will have Slack automatically provisioned and AI-enabled from day one.
AI Productivity and the Future of Work
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming part of daily work in the technology industry, especially in software development. Over the recent years, many companies have discussed using AI to improve productivity, automate repetitive tasks, and help employees work more efficiently. Salesforce is now one of the clearest examples of this shift, which indicates AI is now becoming more closely connected to overall business operations. Benioff has further described the ongoing shift as a “digital labor revolution”, with AI reportedly accounting for 30%-50% of Salesforce’s overall workload.
