alesforce is now making its own AI model. So is Crowdstrike. So is Thomson Reuters.
On Tuesday at its Dreamforce 2026 event in San Francisco, Salesforce announced Koa, its own domain-specific reasoning model that's purpose-built to enable agents to handle business tasks more effectively while keeping your data private. Koa has performed well in early benchmarks, including the LLM benchmark for CRM created by Salesforce AI Research to measure performance based on real-world enterprise tasks and used across the industry over the past couple years.
Salesforced reported, "Koa already matches or exceeds leading model performance on CRM actions with 3x fewer errors."
That tracks with the results of other domain-specific models, which typically reduce token costs and hallucinations because they are focused on a narrower set of expertise. They also tend to have increased performance for the same reason.
Salesforce built Koa, the name of a Hawaiian tree used to make canoes and ukuleles, by post-training Nvidia's open model, Nemotron 3 Super. Koa was specifically trained on synthetic data from almost three decades of business knowledge and was tuned to focus on knowledge work. As a result, Koa "is designed to support long-running agents that execute multiple tasks and complete complex outcomes," said Rohan Kumar, chief platform and engineering officer at the Dreamforce keynote on Tuesday.
The company doesn't see this as a vehicle for job or SaaS replacement, but as an enterprise empowerment tool that is more precise, more secure, and more tailored to the AI needs of companies that use Salesforce. One of the big promises of AI has always been that it will automate away grunt work and processes that don't add as much value. That's what Salesforce is trying to deliver here."The SaaS-pocalypse was not about the end of software, but it may be about the end of software that makes humans do all the work," CEO Marc Benioff said during the Tuesday keynote.
Salesforce also made a series of other AI announcements on Tuesday at Dreamforce, led by:
- AIforce : This is a new interface that, instead of going to the traditional Salesforce UI, lets you ask questions, run complex queries, assign tasks, and create exactly the dashboards you need by simply interrogating your company's Salesforce instance directly.
- Claudeforce : This basically turns Claude into a front-end for Salesforce and ships with 37 pre-built sales skills at launch that include functions such as deal review, pipeline hygiene, prospect research, account management, and more.
- Headless 360 : Salesforce is allowing its customers to have access to all of the elements of their platform through APIs, MCPs, plugins, and skills so that they can access their Salesforce data from the platforms of the choice without ever having to go to salesforce.com or use any of Salesforce's own tools, if that's what they prefer.
Our Deeper View #
The next stage of enterprise AI is shaping up to be companies owning their own intelligence. As the models get smarter and smarter, intelligence is likely to encapsulate the greatest value inside an organization. Outsourcing that layer would mean losing control of your most important asset and potentially sending the most proprietary information about your business to another company, one that might also be serving your competitors. It's easy to see why companies like Salesforce, Crowdstrike, and Thomson Reuters have decided their need to build their own models. But it's also easy to see why they don't necessarily want to become frontier labs, when they can use open models like Nvidia Nemotron and use post-training to customize them and save a lot of time. And since Salesforce is a platform company, it will be interesting to see if it eventually helps other enterprises build their own AI models so that they can also capture more value and ROI from their investments in AI.
Disclaimer: Jason Hiner's travel to Dreamforce 2026 was paid for by Salesforce. The Deep View's coverage is editorially independent from the companies we cover.