Salesforce is preparing for a major escalation of its AI spending, with CEO Marc Benioff projecting hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Anthropic’s models as the company pushes to embed coding agents deeply into its products.
Early adoption and rising AI ambitions
In recent months, Benioff has become an outspoken champion of AI agents, describing how they allow him and Salesforce teams to work faster and make coding easier across the company’s platforms.1 He has highlighted particular gains from AI-powered coding, where agents assist developers and automate routine tasks inside Salesforce’s sprawling software stack.2
The $300 million Anthropic bet
On the All-In podcast, published Friday, Benioff said Salesforce expects to spend about $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026, “almost entirely on coding.”2 Tokens are the units of text processed by large language models, and such a bill would likely make Salesforce one of Anthropic’s largest commercial customers.2 One report framed the move simply: “Marc Benioff said Salesforce will spend $300M on Anthropic tokens.”1
Benioff has argued that, despite the headline cost, the investment will ultimately make “everything at Salesforce cheaper to build,” citing unprecedented efficiency gains from AI agents across service, support, distribution, and marketing.2
Slack as an AI coding hub
Looking ahead, Benioff wants to bring these capabilities directly into Slack, the workplace chat app Salesforce acquired in 2021. He has revealed that the company is working on technology “to make coding easier inside Slack,” signaling a next phase where the app becomes a central interface for AI-assisted software development.2
Salesforce has already overhauled Slack with more than 30 new AI features, all powered by Anthropic’s Claude, transforming Slackbot from a simple assistant into an “agentic” system that can transcribe meetings, monitor activity, and execute tasks via third-party tools.2 Benioff has also floated the idea of an intermediary “routing layer” that would direct tasks between Anthropic’s frontier models and smaller, cheaper systems, aiming to optimize both performance and cost.2
"Marc Benioff said Salesforce will spend $300M on Anthropic tokens"
2. The Next Web
"Salesforce expects to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, and Benioff wants coding inside Slack next"