Salesforce Proposes New Approach to Customer Relationship Management
Salesforce is proposing a new approach to customer relationship management (CRM) at its Dreamforce 2026 conference. The company argues that CRM may not be the best place for employees to work with customer data, and instead suggests integrating it into tools like Slack and Claude. This would allow employees to access relevant context in the same place where they're discussing a case, potentially reducing switching between systems.
Salesforce is calling this vision 'Slackforce,' and has already integrated its CRM capabilities into Slack. The company also introduced ClaudeForce, which connects Claude Enterprise to Salesforce data, skills, and security controls. This allows employees to ask questions about accounts, deals, or customer history and take authorized actions without working through the standard Salesforce interface.
Salesforce is pairing this interface strategy with a broader Agentforce portfolio of preconfigured, role-specific agents. For CX teams, the key additions are Casey, a customer-service help agent, and Fin, a cross-channel customer agent. Casey supports voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and web chat, with prebuilt support for FAQs, returns, account management, and human escalation.
The company's proposed answer to the governance challenge is its Trusted Enterprise AI Harness architecture, which brings together context, agency, action, governance, security, and models, alongside a new AI Control Plane. This would help businesses manage agents across Salesforce and third-party environments.