Marc Benioff plans to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens at Salesforce this year

Marc Benioff has made clear his strong commitment to the AI coding agent trend and his readiness to direct substantial investment towards it on behalf of Salesforce.

During an episode of the All-In podcast, released on Friday, the Salesforce chief executive stated that his company is on course to spend $300 million on tokens from Anthropic. Tokens are discrete units of information — essentially fragments of words — that a user submits and an AI model processes. AI firms use token consumption as the basis for billing individual users and large enterprises alike.

"These coding agents are awesome. Anthropic is awesome," he said. "I am going to probably use $300 million of Anthropic (tokens) this year at Salesforce. Coding. Everything's going to be cheaper to make."

Unprecedented efficiency across the business

Benioff noted in the same podcast that AI agents have delivered "unprecedented" efficiency gains across Salesforce, citing departments such as service, support, distribution, and marketing as areas that have benefited considerably.

Workforce reduction linked to AI adoption

The chief executive had previously announced last August that the deployment of AI agents had allowed Salesforce to reduce its customer support workforce from 9,000 employees to 5,000 — a significant restructuring attributed directly to the productivity advances made possible by the technology.

New AI features planned for Slack

Encouraged by the productivity gains he has witnessed through AI coding agents, Benioff disclosed that Salesforce is currently developing new features to lower the barrier to entry for code work within Slack, the productivity platform that Salesforce has owned since 2021.

"We're even working on technology inside Slack to make it easier for everybody to code," he said. "You're going to see some cool stuff with Slack and code I'm not ready to talk about yet. But there's no question that we are in a new moment in coding."

A call for smarter token routing

Despite his projection of $300 million in Anthropic token expenditure for the year, Benioff made clear that he does not consider it necessary for every token consumed by a Salesforce employee to be routed to a frontier model such as Anthropic's Claude.

The CEO advocated for the development of an "intermediary layer" — a future mechanism capable of evaluating each token input and determining whether it warrants a frontier model or whether a smaller, more cost-effective model would suffice.