Marc Benioff is all about the AI coding agent craze and is willing to spend a lot of money on it for his company.
During an episode of the podcast All-In published Friday, the Salesforce CEO said his company plans to spend $300 million on tokens from Anthropic.
Tokens are bits of information, like parts of words, that the user enters and the model processes. AI companies track token usage and bill users and large organizations.
“These coding agents are great. Anthropic is great,” he said. “This year we’re going to spend probably $300 million in Anthropic (tokens) in Salesforce. Coding. Everything is cheaper to make.”
Benioff said in the podcast that AI agents have brought “unprecedented” levels of efficiency to his company, citing areas such as service, support, distribution and marketing.
Last August, the CEO announced that AI agents helped Salesforce reduce its support staff from 9,000 to 5,000.
Benioff revealed on the podcast that in response to productivity gains with coding agents, Salesforce is also working on ways to make it easier to code in Slack, the productivity platform it has owned since 2021.
“We’re also working on technology within Slack to make it easier for everyone to code,” he said. “I’m not ready to talk about the greatness of Slack and the code just yet, but there’s no question that we’re in a new moment in coding.”
Benioff said he plans to spend $300 million on Anthropic this year, but doesn’t believe all the tokens used by employees need to go to frontier models like Anthropic’s Claude.
The CEO asked for a “middle layer” that could decide which token inputs should go to Anthropic in the future, and which token inputs are suitable for small-scale models.