Salesforce to Integrate Agentforce with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2025

Salesforce is aggressively pursuing strategic partnerships in the generative AI space, a move perceived by analysts as an attempt to allay investor concerns regarding the competitive threat posed by the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence to its core business model. The company’s stock has underperformed the broader market this year, highlighting these anxieties.

In a strategic move ahead of its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce unveiled plans to integrate AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic within its Agentforce 360 software. This announcement follows closely on the heels of the expansion of Agentforce beyond text-based interactions to encompass voice call handling, signaling a significant evolution in its AI-powered customer service capabilities. The integration with OpenAI and Anthropic is projected to enhance Agentforce’s ability to automate customer interactions, personalize experiences, and provide real-time insights to agents.

“The paradigm of how users interact with software is undergoing a fundamental transformation,” stated Brian Landsman, CEO of Salesforce’s AppExchange and EVP of Partnerships, in a recent interview. He emphasized the potential for these interactions to occur seamlessly within platforms like ChatGPT or Slack, reflecting a broader industry trend toward conversational AI interfaces.

The collaboration with Anthropic will focus on integrating Agentforce 360 with Anthropic’s advanced AI assistant, Claude providing businesses with expanded and more efficient customer support capabilities. This strategic alliance allows Salesforce to leverage Anthropic’s prowess in natural language processing and contextual understanding, resulting in more human-like and intuitive interactions.

Despite these initiatives, Salesforce shares are down approximately 26% year-to-date, contrasting sharply with the S&P 500’s 13% gain. Wall Street is demanding more substantial revenue growth fueled by the company’s cloud software offerings. Morgan Stanley analysts, while maintaining a buy-equivalent rating on Salesforce, acknowledged that Agentforce revenue remains “modest” in a recent research note. This underscores the pressure on Salesforce to demonstrate tangible financial returns from its AI investments.

The trend of large software enterprises collaborating with leading AI model developers is gaining momentum. Atlassian, Datadog, and Intuit have all previously forged partnerships with OpenAI reflecting a growing recognition of the importance of integrating cutting-edge AI capabilities into existing platforms. Microsoft’s significant investment of nearly $14 billion in OpenAI further illustrates the strategic value placed on securing access to and influence over advanced AI technologies. Databricks’ commitment to spending $100 million on OpenAI models highlights the concrete financial commitments being made in pursuit of AI-driven innovation.

Salesforce’s integration strategy will enable customers to seamlessly access enterprise data within Agentforce 360 as well as create insightful visualizations in Tableau utilizing the ChatGPT assistant, which boasts over 800 million weekly active users. In addition, OpenAI recently released an SDK (Software Development Kit) which encourages the integration of 3rd party applications and services directly into ChatGPT. These initiatives will empower users to leverage the power of AI across their workflows and processes.

Looking ahead, Salesforce envisions facilitating transactions directly within ChatGPT through an instant checkout feature, benefiting companies that leverage both OpenAI and Salesforce technologies. The company plans to specialize its work with Anthropic on products suitable for highly regulated industries with an initial focus on financial services.

OpenAI announced last month that ChatGPT users will be able to seamlessly purchase products from Etsy sellers and Shopify merchants; the ease of integrating e-commerce functionalities into AI platforms continues to blur the lines between retail and AI-driven services.

Internally, Salesforce is utilizing Anthropic’s Claude Code programming in its engineering organization. The partnership aims to give developers AI-assistance designed for software engineering tasks.

Landsman reiterated, “We intend to deepen these partnerships significantly over time,” suggesting that Salesforce’s commitment to integrating and expanding its AI capabilities will be an ongoing process.

Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has proactively defended his company’s embrace of AI. He pointed out how AI companies are running their businesses on Salesforce’s Slack.

“All these next-generation AI companies ranging from OpenAI to Anthropic to everyone are on Slack,” Benioff told analysts. “And it is incredible how they’ve used that as their operating system and as their platform to run their companies.”