Salesforce Customers Brace For New Fees to Use Claude in Its Apps

Salesforce is leading the software industry’s attempt to collect fees from businesses that use Claude and other external AI tools to automate work in enterprise apps.

As soon as next month, Salesforce plans to require companies to register outside AI agents, a step toward charging them each time those agents update or analyze data stored in Salesforce. The fees let Salesforce earn money from customers who use such AI instead of paying for Salesforce’s built-in AI products.

The Salesforce tollgate has implications for the rest of the industry, which is coming to terms with the idea that so-called AI agents may be able to use software firms’ apps more efficiently than humans do, meaning their seat-based or per-user pricing model might not have staying power. The question is whether the new AI tollgates—which Atlassian, Workday, ServiceNow and Datadog are also erecting to various extents—and other pricing shifts will more than make up for an eventual decline in per-seat subscription revenues.

The vast majority of workers haven’t yet outsourced such work to AI, of course, and companies like Salesforce are trying to get more revenue from them as well. They charge fees based on how much they use the apps’ built-in AI tools and are also experimenting with outcome-based pricing, meaning customers only pay when such tools actually complete a task successfully or help the customers make more money.

For now, Salesforce and some other software firms developing tollgates for customers’ AI agents haven’t started charging the tolls. They’re letting customers experiment for free with the technology a little while longer. (The customers still have to pay providers such as Anthropic to use the AI agents in the first place.)

Starting around November, according to the company’s website, Salesforce will require customers to register any externally-made AI agents if they plan to use them to take actions on their behalf in Salesforce apps. Each action an agent takes in Salesforce counts as a billable “interaction,” according to the company. The move has lifted investor confidence in Salesforce recently.

Salesforce describes the registration requirement as a security measure because the company gives each agent its own identity and narrower data-access permissions, compared to humans. It isn’t clear how Salesforce will clamp down on customers using their own AI agents, such as OpenClaw-powered ones that run on a person’s computer and can access any app that runs on it. (Salesforce did not respond to requests for comment.)

Salesforce hasn’t announced prices tied to such agent usage, but customers could eventually end up paying a lot more money than they do now, given how many of them are already using their own AI on top of Salesforce apps and bypassing Salesforce’s own built-in AI tools, according to software consultants and chief information officers.

Nick Hamm, a software consultant, said that most of the 150 enterprises he works with are currently using AI from Anthropic and OpenAI to automate work inside Salesforce apps, for free. But they’re reconsidering that usage in anticipation of the upcoming fees. If the fees are too high, the customers may move their business data outside of Salesforce’s apps so they can use AI to analyze the data without paying an extra cost, he said.

New customers will have a three month grace period after the new pricing is announced to register their AI agents, and the pricing won’t affect existing customers until their contracts are renewed.

In addition to the billable “interactions,” customers have the option to buy unlimited agent usage by purchasing a “headless license,” a Salesforce account executive told Hamm in a LinkedIn message viewed by The Information.

Some customers such as Lumen, a fiber-optic network provider to enterprises and data centers, say they are waiting to test Salesforce’s new connectors until pricing is disclosed.

So far, Lumen has leaned on Salesforce’s built-in AI. A longtime customer of Salesforce’s customer relationship management software, Lumen made a “major” investment in using Salesforce’s AI sales agents in the last 12 months, according to CIO Jim Fowler. The sales agents help with tasks such as collecting customer information and generating sales quotes for the customers to buy fiber connections between data centers, saving Lumen’s human salespeople considerable time, he said.

So far, Fowler said, Salesforce has been “super flexible” about letting Lumen use existing subscription fees to also cover its use of built-in AI features such as the sales agents.

Early customer reactions to the pricing announcement will likely determine how flexible Salesforce is with customers that start renewing their contracts after November. If its past AI pricing efforts are any guide, Salesforce could easily switch things up depending on the feedback, or any blowback, it receives.