What does Salesforce do? Who uses it & how it changed everything

You mightiness accidental that Marc Benioff and his colleagues — bundle developers Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez — changed the satellite erstwhile they created Salesforce (CRM) successful 1999.

Before that, businesses relied connected spreadsheets, handwritten notes, and databases to store their information, which efficaciously kept everything siloed. Sales reps tracked leads successful 1 spot portion lawsuit work agents logged complaints successful another.

This fragmentation made it hard for businesses to recognize their customers' behaviour — fto unsocial lick their problems.

Enter Salesforce. The world’s archetypal lawsuit narration absorption strategy uses unreality exertion to centralize accusation crossed concern departments, enabling companies to store data, pass with their audience, and presumption a “360-degree” illustration of their customers.

As of March 2026, Salesforce has implicit 80,000 employees and offices successful 93 cities worldwide, and its banal has averaged annualized returns of astir 20%. According to Benzinga, if you had bought $1,000 of shares 20 years ago, you'd beryllium sitting connected $20,797.11 today.

But what, exactly, does Salesforce do?

Salesforce gets asked this question a lot. With its existent marketplace capitalization of $185 cardinal and its ascendant relation successful the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, CRM isn’t conscionable a banal — it’s a mega headdress with influence.

According to LinkedIn, 90% of Fortune 500 companies usage Salesforce, but truthful galore radical person wondered precisely what it does that the institution had to adhd a leafage to its website to explicate it.

This is however Salesforce describes its “agentic enterprise,” which is simply a operation of manpower and AI innovation. It’s the company’s halfway exemplary for operations successful 2026, 1 that Salesforce has refined implicit decades arsenic a CRM pioneer and, much recently, done its enlargement into integer labor.

In fact, “Agentforce” is Salesforce’s suite of AI agents that are much intuitive than chatbots. Using Salesforce’s Atlas Reasoning Engine, these agents recognize discourse and crushed and tin adjacent instrumentality enactment — without quality oversight.

Business Insider called this exertion “so remarkably human-like, it seemed similar a imaginativeness from the future.”

According to Salesforce, a fewer of the galore tasks its AI agents tin autonomously bash include:

• Creating personalized emails to customers that upsell products

• Troubleshoot issues with customers

• Elevate lawsuit work tickets (based connected definite input criteria)

Over Cyberweek 2025, Salesforce said its AI agents “drove $67 cardinal successful income … and influenced a staggering 20% of each planetary orders via personalized merchandise recommendations and conversational lawsuit service.”