Salesforce unveils AIforce as Benioff takes shot at Microsoft

Salesforce unveils AIforce as Benioff takes shot at Microsoft

Peace Longe

Fri, September 18, 2026 at 7:03 PM GMT+3 4 min read

• CRM -1.57%
• MSFT -0.91%

Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff just made a product announcement at Dreamforce 2026, and he used the stage to directly criticize Microsoft in the process.

The product is called AIforce, an AI connectivity layer that lets employees access Salesforce data and run complex workflows inside third-party AI tools such as Anthropic's Claude and Slack.

CRM stock has rallied about 34% over the past month after a difficult start to 2026, and the stock closed at $255.65 on Sept. 15. The Dreamforce announcement could determine whether that momentum continues into the fourth quarter.

Salesforce is the world's largest customer relationship management software company. It helps businesses manage their sales pipelines and customer service operations through cloud-based tools.

The company generated $11.35 billion in revenue during its most recent quarter, beating Wall Street's expectations on both earnings and revenue.

How AIforce turns Salesforce into an invisible data engine

AIforce acts as a bridge between AI-powered tools and the business data that companies already store inside Salesforce. Instead of employees having to log in and click through dashboards, it lets AI assistants pull up records and trigger multi-step workflows on their behalf.

The system runs on existing permissions and business rules, so employees can only access data they are already authorized to see, and Salesforce guarantees zero data retention by the AI model provider.

"AI is creating an interface revolution," Benioff said during the keynote. "We are combining model intelligence with all the context that customers have built into Salesforce to create an intelligent, dynamic, composable system that is securely governed, built with Zero Data Retention," he added, according to siliconANGLE.

Patrick Stokes, Salesforce's president of applications and marketing, framed the shift even more directly in a pre-event media briefing.

"The value of Salesforce has never been in the UI. It's been in the platform that stores the way our customers encode their business," Salesforce Ben reported.

AIforce launched with three integrations. Claudeforce, built in partnership with Anthropic, brings Salesforce data directly into Claude. Slackforce connects that same data to conversations in Slack. And Agentforce Coworker operates inside Salesforce's own Lightning interface.

Benioff continues his public rivalry with Microsoft

Benioff's public jabs at Microsoft's AI products have become a consistent part of Dreamforce. He framed AIforce as the answer to what he calls the "Fantasyland" problem, arguing that rival AI tools like Microsoft's Copilot lack the reliable business data layer required to safely power a business.

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This line of attack goes back to Dreamforce 2024, when Benioff compared Copilot to "Clippy," Microsoft's widely disliked desktop assistant from the late 1990s.

"We all know now that Microsoft Copilot is basically the new Microsoft Clippy, that customers have not gotten value from it," Benioff said during that conference, according to Fortune.

With AIforce, Benioff is betting that Salesforce can prove the point by making its business data accessible across any AI tool, while Copilot remains restricted to Microsoft's ecosystem.

CRM stock staged a massive comeback after its worst stretch in years

Salesforce stock fell as much as 37% earlier in 2026 after a sector-wide repricing of software companies. Investors feared that AI assistants from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI could eventually replace traditional CRM software, sending it to a 52-week low of $146.32.

CRM rallied about 34% in the past month alone, and closed at $255.65 on Sept. 15.

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Jim Cramer credited the reversal to an exceptional second quarter and Benioff's forceful pushback against the idea that AI would replace traditional software businesses. Benioff "obliterated the shorts," Cramer said.

Salesforce now trades at a P/E ratio of 23.29 with a market cap of $210 billion. Across 38 analysts, the stock carries a Moderate Buy consensus rating with an average 12-month price target of about $267.

What investors should watch before adding to CRM positions

On the same day as the Dreamforce announcement, Salesforce suffered a global service disruption that locked some customers out of their systems.

That kind of outage during a product showcase raises fair questions about whether the infrastructure can handle AI-driven traffic when it scales up.

Investors should focus on Agentforce and Data 360 adoption numbers in the next quarterly report. The combined annual recurring revenue from those products already exceeds $2.9 billion, which is more than 200% growth from a year ago.

If that growth rate holds through the second half of fiscal 2027, Salesforce's transition to usage-based pricing starts to look credible. If it slows, the stock could fall again.

Salesforce still faces competition from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle's cloud AI integrations, and a growing list of AI-native startups, even with the new product launch.

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This story was originally published by TheStreet on Sep 18, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.