Salesforce, Inc. is a cloud-based enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, best known as the global leader in CRM and what it now markets as the "#1 AI CRM." en.wikipedia.org Its Customer 360 platform brings together applications for sales, service, marketing, commerce, analytics, integration, and AI so companies can manage the entire customer lifecycle on a single, multi‑tenant cloud infrastructure.
Founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff along with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez, Salesforce was an early pioneer of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and went public in 2004. Over the past two decades it has grown both organically and through major acquisitions such as MuleSoft, Tableau, and Slack, helping expand the platform beyond CRM into integration, analytics, and productivity. en.wikipedia.org The company has also rebranded its platform around Agentforce and the Agentforce 360 Platform, reflecting a strategic shift toward deeply embedded autonomous AI agents across its clouds. reuters.com
At the product level, Salesforce’s core CRM capabilities are anchored in Sales Cloud (now branded Agentforce Sales), which provides lead, account, contact, and opportunity management, sales forecasting, automation, and AI-powered sales agents that help with prospecting, engagement, and pipeline management. Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and industry clouds build on the same underlying platform, giving organizations a unified data model and extensive workflow automation, analytics, and app development tools. salesforce.com The AppExchange marketplace and robust APIs enable thousands of third‑party integrations and custom solutions, making Salesforce one of the most extensible CRM platforms available. techradar.com
Salesforce operates at massive scale, employing roughly 76,000 people worldwide and serving more than 150,000 customer organizations across industries including technology, financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, nonprofit, and the public sector. en.wikipedia.org It has consistently held the largest share of the global CRM market and is aggressively investing in AI through its Agentforce 360 platform and Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), aiming to make agentic AI and unified customer data central to enterprise operations in the coming decade. itpro.com
