With Salesforce partnership, Anthropic is one step closer to being total organizational intelligence

As SaaS and AI companies race to be crowned the one app that can do everything, Salesforce teamed up with Anthropic to create Claudeforce, a collaboration that allows users to access Salesforce data through Claude.

The partnership gives CROs and sales reps one less app to check in the morning, and seems to show that Salesforce is following the old adage of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

“In the early days of AI excitement, everybody was trying to roll out their own AI. But now you’re seeing that—certainly in the enterprise market—Anthropic and OpenAI are the two dominant providers,” Chris Selland, CEO and founder of market research and strategic consulting firm Differential Factor, told RevenueBrew. “For application companies like Salesforce, should [they] really keep trying to build our own, or should [they] partner with the leaders?”

Plus, in partnering with Anthropic, Selland said, Salesforce is “getting ahead” of the SaaS-pocalypse: As SaaS customers are increasingly less interested in buying seats, Salesforce is now selling something else.

“The market’s moving away from [the SaaS model of selling by] seats anyway,” Selland told Revenue Brew. “Salesforce is smart enough to recognize that.”

And though Salesforce is certainly making a savvy decision, Selland said, the real winner is Anthropic: With default access to Salesforce data, Claude is closer to providing users with complete organizational intelligence.

“[Organizational intelligence is] no longer an app by app thing,” Selland told Morning Brew. “That’s really what AI is bringing to the table, I think, and that’s why it’s powerful.”

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder, also noted that Salesforce is beefing up Claude (and not the other way around) in a statement from the Claudeforce announcement.

“Through this partnership, companies can point Claude at the customer information and business context that they’ve been building in Salesforce for decades, and use it to actually run and grow their businesses,” he said.