Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised AI coding agents along with Anthropic.
The CEO noted that agents have helped him iterate on products more efficiently and quickly.
He added that Salesforce will roll out technology to simplify coding directly inside Slack.

Marc Benioff is fully embracing the rise of AI coding agents and plans to invest heavily in the technology for his company.

Appearing on the All-In podcast released Friday, the Salesforce CEO revealed that the firm expects to spend $300 million on tokens from Anthropic this year.

Tokens are small units of data, such as word fragments, that users input and models process. AI providers monitor token consumption to manage billing for customers and large enterprises.

"These coding agents are fantastic. Anthropic is fantastic," he said. "I expect to consume $300 million of Anthropic tokens this year at Salesforce. Coding. Everything will become less expensive to build."

Benioff told listeners that AI agents have delivered remarkable efficiency gains across service, support, distribution, and marketing teams.

Last August the CEO disclosed that AI agents had allowed Salesforce to shrink its support workforce from 9,000 to 5,000 people.

Buoyed by the coding productivity improvements, Benioff said the company is now developing features that will make coding simpler inside Slack, the collaboration platform it acquired in 2021.

"We are even building technology inside Slack to make coding accessible to everyone," he said. "You will see some exciting capabilities with Slack and code that I cannot discuss yet. Still, there is no doubt we have reached a new era in coding."

While forecasting the large Anthropic spend, Benioff stressed that not every token needs to reach a frontier model such as Claude. He called for an intermediary layer that can intelligently route inputs to either advanced or smaller models depending on the task.