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CRM
Benioff just opened the AI wallet
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff went on the All-In podcast and basically said the quiet part out loud: the company is planning to spend around $300 million on Anthropic this year, mostly on coding. That’s not pocket change, even for a cloud giant — it’s a “we are very serious about this” kind of check.
Why investors should care
Benioff’s pitch is simple: coding agents let Salesforce move faster, ship faster, and sell faster. In his words, he can now implement software and sell it at the same time, which is either a beautiful AI-era productivity flex or a sign that enterprise software is getting rewritten in real time.
The subtext: CRM wants to be the AI-native incumbent
This comes while Salesforce shares have been under pressure from the broader “SaaSpocalypse” trade, where investors worry AI could commoditize classic software. But Salesforce is clearly trying to flip that narrative:
- it’s using Anthropic’s tools internally
- it launched Headless 360, an API-first platform for AI agents
- it wants Claude and other agents plugged into its enterprise stack
Big picture: if Salesforce is willing to spend hundreds of millions on AI to make its own teams more efficient, that’s both a bullish signal on the tech and a reminder that the AI bill is very real.