Salesforce $CRM CEO Marc Benioff said on the All-In podcast that his company is on track to spend $300 million on tokens from Anthropic this year, with coding as the primary use case.
Benioff said AI coding agents have unlocked efficiency gains that were previously out of reach, and hinted at new coding tools inside Slack
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Salesforce $CRM CEO Marc Benioff said on the All-In podcast that his company is on track to spend $300 million on tokens from Anthropic this year, with coding as the primary use case.
"These coding agents are awesome. Anthropic is awesome," Benioff said on the podcast, published Friday. "I am going to probably use $300 million of Anthropic this year at Salesforce. Coding. Everything's going to be cheaper to make."
Enterprise customers are billed by AI companies according to how many tokens their usage generates — tokens being the discrete text units that a large language model reads and produces when completing a task.
Across service, support, distribution, and marketing, Benioff told the podcast that the efficiency improvements driven by AI agents have reached levels he described as "unprecedented." For engineering specifically, he said the pace of product iteration has accelerated sharply, and that he can now ship and sell software in parallel — something he described as impossible before AI agents.
Benioff also hinted at forthcoming development work tied to Slack $WORK — the workplace messaging platform Salesforce bought for $27.7 billion in 2021 — that is aimed at lowering the barrier to coding for its users, according to The Next Web. "You're going to see some cool stuff with Slack and code I'm not ready to talk about yet," Benioff said on the podcast. "But there's no question that we are in a new moment in coding."
Benioff also called for what he described as an "intermediary layer" that could route token inputs intelligently — directing complex tasks to a frontier model such as Anthropic's Claude and simpler ones to smaller, cheaper models. Routing all employee-generated tokens through a top-tier model is unnecessary, he argued.
Beyond the token spending, Salesforce holds an equity position in Anthropic that is distinct from its usage costs. That stake — about 1% of the company — was built up through a series of investment rounds starting with the Series C in early 2023, and the total capital committed has now exceeded $300 million, according to The Next Web.
An announcement Benioff made last August noted that headcount in Salesforce's support organization had dropped from 9,000 to 5,000, a reduction he attributed to productivity gains from AI agents.
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