Salesforce and Anthropic team up as customers get billed by the sip

Key points

• Salesforce reported Q2 revenue of $11.3 billion, up 11 percent year-on-year, beating analyst forecasts.
• The company announced Claudeforce, a joint product with AI model maker Anthropic that combines Claude's capabilities with Salesforce business data and workflows.
• Fifty percent of Salesforce's AI bookings came from existing customers buying more Flex Credits, the company's pay-as-you-go usage tokens.
• Gartner warned in October 2024 that credit-based AI pricing models can expose buyers to unexpected cost increases.
• Salesforce's all-you-can-eat licence deal, announced October 2024, may eventually convert to fixed-quantity contracts, Gartner analysts believe.

Salesforce had a good quarter on paper. The company, best known for its customer-relationship software used by sales teams worldwide, posted $11.3 billion in revenue for the three months ending 31 July. That beat what Wall Street analysts had expected, and shares jumped 12 percent on the day.

The results came packaged with a new product announcement that helped fuel the optimism.

What is Claudeforce?

Claudeforce is a joint product from Salesforce and Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude family of chatbots and AI assistants. In plain terms, it connects Claude's conversational AI abilities directly to the data, rules and workflows a business already keeps inside Salesforce.

The product includes a plug-in with 37 pre-built "sales skills", small automated tasks designed to handle repetitive parts of a sales process without a human clicking through them. It also works inside several existing Salesforce tools, including its Slack messaging platform and Tableau, its data-visualisation product.

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff described a growing family of connected products: Claudeforce sitting alongside a reworked version of Slack, an AI assistant called Coworker, and a feature called Headless 360 that lets workers pull Salesforce data through apps they already use, including WhatsApp and ChatGPT.

For ordinary users, this means the software their company uses for sales and customer tracking could start responding to plain-English requests rather than requiring menu clicks. Whether that works well in practice depends entirely on how each company sets it up.

How does the pricing work, and what should customers watch?

This is where things get complicated, and where independent analysts are raising flags.

Salesforce is pushing a model called Flex Credits. Think of these like tokens at an arcade: you buy a bucket of them upfront, then spend them each time the AI does something. Salesforce President Robin Washington told investors that 50 percent of the company's AI bookings came from customers who had run through their credits and bought more.

Benioff framed multiple payment options as customer-friendly flexibility: pay by consumption, by basic usage, or by a specific business outcome, such as a completed transaction.

Analyst firm Gartner, first reported on this concern by The Register AI, warned buyers in October 2024 that credit-based models across Salesforce, Microsoft and ServiceNow carry real risk. Gartner's note said these schemes "often require upfront usage commitments" with "rates that may change unilaterally by the vendor, exposing buyers to unexpected cost increases." Gartner added it had seen no evidence of vendors lowering prices as usage grows, and told buyers to negotiate volume discounts before signing.

Separately, Gartner director analyst Hannah Decker said in January 2025 that Salesforce's all-you-can-eat licence deal, called the Agentic Enterprise Licence Agreement, would likely convert to fixed-quantity contracts when it comes up for renewal. Salesforce disputes that. EVP Bill Patterson said in a statement: "The claim that we are moving away from capped agreements is inaccurate. Renewals remain flexible."

What should ordinary customers do before signing?

If your employer uses Salesforce and is being offered an AI upgrade, four things are worth checking before anyone signs.

First, ask whether the contract uses credit-based billing, and if so, what happens when credits run out mid-month. Second, ask whether the credit rate can change during the contract term. Third, get any volume discounts written into the agreement upfront, not promised verbally. Fourth, read the exit terms carefully before committing to any multi-year deal.

The product announcements are real, the revenue growth is real, and the Anthropic partnership is live. But the pricing model deserves the same scrutiny as the technology itself.