Salesforce executives discussed the company’s expanding AI agent portfolio and a pricing shift toward outcome-based models at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on September 9, 2026.
Bill Patterson, president and chief commercial officer, and Rob Seaman, executive vice president and general manager of Slack, participated in a session moderated by Goldman Sachs’ Gabriela Borges. The pair addressed everything from AI orchestration products to whether Slack could become an ad platform.
Two weeks before the conference, Salesforce announced "Claudeforce," an integration of Anthropic’s Claude model woven directly into its Agentforce platform. The product is available inside Agentforce, Piper — a marketing agent from Qualified that qualifies leads and books meetings — or Fin, a purpose-built customer-service agent. Customers purchasing Claude through Agentforce do not need to manage a separate token budget, unlike those buying directly from Anthropic.
Agentforce acts as the orchestration layer coordinating work across these specialized agents, alongside developer-built tools. The Agentforce 1 Edition bundles Claudeforce, Agentforce, Data Cloud, Tableau analytics, and Slack integration, priced at $550. Salesforce reported that roughly 5% of its installed base has migrated to premium SKUs, which carry a 60% to 80% uplift over base offerings.
Patterson said the company is moving away from purely seat-based pricing toward consumption and outcome-based models tied to results such as qualified leads or booked orders. "I’ve not yet met a CFO that says, 'I’m not willing to give you a dollar if you’re actually going to help me make three,'" he said.
Seaman addressed Slack usage patterns at so-called frontier labs such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Vercel, where employees operate entirely in public channels — including individual "notebook" or "brain" channels — to think out loud. This model flattens organizations and allows both human employees and AI agents, such as Shopify’s River coding agent, to learn from shared context. He also ruled out ads on the platform: "If it were a consumer app, it would be a great place to put ads, but we will never put ads in Slack, so do not expect that to come from us."
Slack data showed the average user has the app open 10 hours a day and actively uses it for about two hours daily. The total addressable market for knowledge workers numbers approximately one billion globally.
Salesforce shares closed regular-session trading at $244.16, down 1.99% from the previous close of $249.12, with after-hours trading little changed at $244.14. The stock has traded between $146.32 and $269.11 over the past 52 weeks.
