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Salesforce is the company behind the world's most used CRM and, since 2024, a platform where people and AI agents work together on a company's customer data. It was born in 1999 in San Francisco as a cloud CRM, and today it sells sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, data, integration, analytics and Slack, all on the same platform. In this article we explain what Salesforce is, what each product does, what Agentforce and AIforce are, and why a whole ecosystem of partners and professionals has grown around Salesforce.
Salesforce sums it up in this video:
Salesforce in numbers
What a CRM is and what Salesforce's CRM does
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the system where a company records and manages its relationship with customers: who each one is, what they have bought, what is being negotiated and what conversations have taken place. Salesforce was born as a CRM for companies that sell to other companies (B2B), and today it is used just as much by businesses that sell to consumers (B2C).
The Salesforce CRM is built on a relational data model: tables linked to each other, which Salesforce calls objects. Each object stores data and also comes with rules and automations. These are the main ones:
Leads: potential customers
The process starts with leads, interested people or companies usually captured by marketing. Before handing them to sales, they have to be qualified: do they fit, and are they ready to talk to a salesperson?
Accounts, contacts and opportunities
When a lead is qualified, it is converted into three records: the account (the company), the contact (the person) and the opportunity (the deal). Keeping them separate avoids duplicates and keeps the information organized.
A lead is converted into an account, a contact and an opportunity.
- Account. The customer company, with its tax details, industry, size or revenue.
- Contact. Each person at that company, with their role, email and phone. An account has several contacts.
- Opportunity. Each open deal, with its stages, amount and expected close date. It is linked to an account and to the contacts involved.
Campaigns
Campaigns hold marketing or sales actions, for acquisition or loyalty. Leads and contacts are added to each campaign as members, and opportunities can be linked too, so you can measure the revenue each campaign generates.
Campaign members can be leads or contacts.
Activities, reports and dashboards
Activities are each salesperson's tasks and meetings. The difference from any calendar is that each activity is linked to its account, contact or opportunity, so the CRM keeps the full history of the customer relationship.
Events and tasks are linked to the contact.
And from the start Salesforce has included reports and dashboards to analyze all that data without writing code.
From CRM to platform: the Agentforce 360 Platform
Salesforce stopped being just a CRM years ago. Today it is a platform, which it calls the Agentforce 360 Platform, that runs all its products and on which each company builds its own apps, workflows and AI agents. What makes it different:
- Low code. Much of what is built in Salesforce is done by configuring objects, fields, rules and automations, without programming. When code is needed, there is Apex.
- Multi-tenant. All customers share the same infrastructure and the same version, like neighbors sharing the facilities of a building. Today that infrastructure is Hyperforce, which lets companies choose which region of the world their data is stored in.
- Metadata. Each company's customizations are stored as metadata, so the three yearly releases reach everyone without migration projects and without breaking what each customer has built.
- APIs and integration. Salesforce connects to the rest of a company's systems, and for complex cases it has MuleSoft.
Multi-tenant, metadata and API, the foundations of the platform.
From the org to the records: how an app is built without code.
Salesforce products in 2026
Salesforce groups its offering by business area. Since 2025 several products carry the Agentforce name because they come with AI agents built in, but they are the same products you knew:
On top of this come industry solutions such as Financial Services Cloud or Health Cloud, and thousands of partner apps on AppExchange. For marketing, we explain the biggest change in What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next?, and for data, in What is Salesforce Data 360?
Agentforce: Salesforce's AI agents
Agentforce is Salesforce's AI agent layer, introduced at Dreamforce 2024. An agent does not just make suggestions: it understands the request, looks up customer data in Data 360, follows the rules and permissions the company already has in Salesforce and carries out tasks, such as answering a support case, preparing an opportunity or launching a campaign. It combines a language model's reasoning with the usual business logic, and everything goes through Salesforce's trust layer, which decides what data each agent can see.
AIforce: Salesforce beyond Salesforce
At Dreamforce 2026 Salesforce went one step further: AIforce. The idea is that nobody has to log into the CRM to work with it. Salesforce data, workflows and permissions show up wherever each person works: in Claude, in Slack, in Microsoft Teams or inside Salesforce itself with Agentforce Coworker. We explain it in What is Salesforce AIforce?, and the Claude piece in What is Claudeforce?
Joaquín País, CEO of ShowerThinking, explains it on video:
The Salesforce ecosystem
A large part of Salesforce's success is not in the software but in the people who work around it.
- Partners and AppExchange. Consultancies and integrators that implement Salesforce, and companies that sell apps on AppExchange, the Salesforce marketplace.
- Trailhead. Salesforce's free learning platform, with paths for business users, admins, developers and architects.
- Certifications. Official exams that accredit professionals, from admin to architect, and now in Agentforce too. We cover them in Salesforce Certifications.
- Community. Almost any question about Salesforce already has an answer in forums, user groups or the Trailblazer Community.
IDC, in a study commissioned by Salesforce, estimates that between 2022 and 2028 the Salesforce ecosystem will create 11.6 million jobs and $2.02 trillion in new business revenues worldwide.
A 27-year history, in two lines
Salesforce started in 1999 with an idea that sounded strange at the time: selling business software as a service over the internet, with no installations, under the slogan "No Software". From there it became a platform, bought MuleSoft, Tableau, Slack and Informatica, and today it is competing to be the foundation of the agentic enterprise. The full story is in The Salesforce History, from a garage to the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco.
Salesforce FAQ
What is Salesforce in a nutshell?
An American software company that makes the world's most used CRM and a cloud platform to build apps and AI agents on customer data.
Is Salesforce just a CRM?
No. The CRM is still at the center, but Salesforce includes customer service, marketing, commerce, data (Data 360), integration (MuleSoft and Informatica), analytics (Tableau), Slack and Agentforce.
What is the difference between Sales Cloud and Agentforce Sales?
It is the same product. Salesforce calls it Agentforce Sales now that it includes AI agents built in; the same has happened with Service Cloud, now Agentforce Service.
What is Agentforce?
Salesforce's platform of autonomous AI agents. The agents work with Salesforce data and permissions and carry out tasks in sales, service, marketing and commerce.
How do you pay for Salesforce?
By subscription, usually per user per month depending on the product and edition. There is nothing to install and no servers to buy.
How can I learn Salesforce?
Start with Trailhead, which is free, and sign up for a free developer org to practice. Then you can prepare for an official certification.
Sources
How ShowerThinking can help
ShowerThinking is a Salesforce partner. We help companies choose the products they need, implement them and put AI agents to work on their data. If you are considering Salesforce or want to get more out of it, get in touch and we will go through it in a 30-minute session.
