Although there’s no shortage of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms on the market, we’ve built Digital Workers entirely around Salesforce, and that comes down to more than habit or convenience. Salesforce has been named the #1 CRM provider by IDC (International Data Corporation) for the 13th consecutive year running, holding 20.0%* of the global CRM market in 2025, and it’s led the marketing category specifically for 7 consecutive years. When we recommend a platform to a client, we want it to be one that’s proven itself at that scale for over a decade, not one we’re betting on (Salesforce, 2026c).
*Salesforce, 2026c.

That track record is part of why Marketing Cloud Next matters so much to us. MC Next isn’t a bolt-on AI feature added to the old Marketing Cloud, it’s purpose-built natively on the Salesforce Platform itself, which is what lets it reach across Sales, Service and Commerce instead of staying boxed into marketing alone. Its agents are described as working less like a tool you configure and more like a team member who understands the business and takes initiative, activating unstructured data straight out of Data Cloud, so content sitting in Google Drive, SharePoint or Zendesk can actually fuel personalisation instead of sitting unused. It’s also been available to existing customers since July 2025, and it works alongside what a business already has running, so moving to it is convergence rather than a forced rip-and-replace (Salesforce, 2026b).

Loyalty is where this becomes tangible for customers rather than just an architecture diagram. Salesforce Loyalty Management connects natively into MC Next, Commerce, Sales and Service, so a loyalty programme can run across email, SMS, mobile, web and in-store without a business having to stitch those channels together by hand. Loyalty events trigger real-time journeys straight through Journey Builder, so a member’s tier status, points balance or an expiry date can prompt the right message on the right channel, on a native app a customer already has open rather than a separate portal they have to go find. Program design stays flexible too: points-based, tiered, cash-back, visit-based or a hybrid of all of them, and rewards can recognise referrals, reviews and app activity, not just a purchase. Once that loyalty data sits in Data Cloud alongside behavioural and transactional signals, Agentforce can start surfacing next-best-offer recommendations on its own (Salesforce, 2026a).

This is the part where being a service provider actually earns its keep. A platform this capable is only as good as the setup underneath it, and most businesses don’t have the internal bandwidth to migrate cleanly to MC Next, wire Loyalty Management into every native channel, and keep Data Cloud unified while all of that happens. That’s the work we do at Digital Workers: we handle the migration so it’s convergence and not disruption, get loyalty working properly across the channels a customer’s audience already lives on, and make sure the foundation is solid enough that MC Next’s agentic layer has real, unified data to work from instead of guessing.

Life without constraints starts with not having to choose between a platform that’s proven itself and one that’s actually built for how customers behave today. If your organisation is thinking about MC Next or wants loyalty that feels native rather than bolted on, we’re ready to help you build it properly.

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References

Salesforce (2026a) Loyalty Management Software. Available at: https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/loyalty-management/ (Accessed: 28 September 2026).

Salesforce (2026b) Salesforce Announces Marketing Cloud Next. Available at: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/marketing-cloud-next-announcement/ (Accessed: 28 September 2026).

Salesforce (2026c) Salesforce Ranked #1 CRM Provider for 13th Year. Available at: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/idc-crm-market-share-ranking-2026/ (Accessed: 28 September 2026).

In August 2026, Anthropic and Salesforce announced Claudeforce, a deepened partnership that puts Claude and Salesforce inside each other’s products. It isn’t a single new tool. It’s two integrations running in both directions: Claude now works from inside Salesforce, and Salesforce now works from inside Claude.

What it actually is

On the Salesforce side, Claude powers the Atlas Reasoning Engine inside Agentforce, Salesforce’s agentic AI platform. It’s the default model behind Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker, and it runs through Amazon Bedrock inside Salesforce’s own trust boundary, so customer data never has to leave Salesforce’s governed environment to get Claude’s reasoning applied to it. That detail matters more than it sounds: it’s what let Salesforce position Claude as a preferred model for regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and insurance, where data residency and audit trails aren’t optional.

On the Anthropic side, there’s now a “Salesforce in Claude” plugin with dozens of prebuilt sales skills (meeting prep, deal health checks, pipeline analysis, forecasting) built in. It reads context from Salesforce, Slack and other connected systems and generates live dashboards, with every action still routed back through Salesforce so existing business rules, permissions and approval logic still apply. Slack gets folded in too, with Claude becoming the default model behind Slackbot and the newer Claude Tag feature.

Why they partnered

Marc Benioff put it plainly: it’s the world’s number one AI meeting the world’s number one CRM. But the more practical driver, according to Salesforce’s Patrick Stokes, came from watching how customers were already trying to use agents against Salesforce data. When people move from clicking through the Salesforce interface to asking an agent to do the work, usage of the underlying platform goes up, not down. The problem was that early builders kept hitting the same wall: authentication and permission management got messy fast once more than one user’s agent needed to touch CRM data safely. Claudeforce is Salesforce and Anthropic’s answer to that, built once, centrally administered, rather than every customer solving it themselves.

What it means for Salesforce customers

Practically, it means less setup and less risk for teams wanting AI-assisted CRM work. A single centralized configuration replaces account-by-account reconfiguration, and governance rules that already exist in Salesforce (who can see what, who can approve what) carry through automatically when an agent acts on a user’s behalf. For regulated customers, it means frontier-model reasoning becomes usable in contexts that previously ruled it out on compliance grounds alone.

What it means for the wider CRM and IT industry

This is a signal, not just a feature release. It points toward CRM systems being used less through a browser and more through natural-language, agent-driven interfaces, with the system of record and the AI reasoning layer treated as one fused thing rather than a platform plus a bolt-on chatbot. For developers and implementation partners, it changes what “customizing Salesforce” will increasingly mean: less UI configuration, more designing what an agent is allowed to reason about and do on a customer’s behalf.

The bigger picture for AI and software development

Both companies have framed this as evidence that AI-native interfaces and enterprise systems of record are converging rather than competing. The near-term roadmap includes more prebuilt skills and deeper Slack integration, but the direction is clear: reasoning capability (Claude) and business logic plus governed data (Salesforce) are being treated as complementary layers that both sides want to keep improving together, rather than something either company tries to fully own alone.

How we’re bringing this into our own delivery

At Digital Workers, this is directly relevant to how we scope and run Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Data 360 and Loyalty Management engagements. A few ways we expect to use Claudeforce on client work:

• Faster discovery and scoping, using Claude’s reasoning against a client’s existing Salesforce data and Slack history to surface context we’d otherwise spend early sprint time gathering manually.
• Build and QA support, using Claude inside our own delivery workflow to review configuration, catch inconsistencies in data models, and speed up documentation, the same kind of work our recent case studies show taking real hours.
• Safer AI adoption for regulated clients, since the trust-boundary integration means we can bring Claude’s capabilities into client environments (retail, financial services, and others with compliance requirements) without asking them to accept new data-residency risk.
• Ongoing managed service value, where ongoing account teams can use Claudeforce-powered dashboards and summaries to spot issues and opportunities in a client’s Salesforce instance proactively, rather than only at a scheduled check-in.

The goal isn’t to replace the senior-led, sprint-based delivery model we already run. It’s to make each sprint faster and each hour of it count for more, so projects land in less time without cutting corners on governance or quality.

References

Anthropic (2026) Salesforce and Anthropic expanded partnership. Available at: https://www.anthropic.com/news/salesforce-anthropic-expanded-partnership (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

CIO (2026) Salesforce, Anthropic partner to deliver Claudeforce. Available at: https://www.cio.com/article/4214458/salesforce-anthropic-partner-to-deliver-claudeforce.html (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

Salesforce (2026) Salesforce and Anthropic Announce Claudeforce: The #1 AI Meets the #1 AI CRM. Available at: https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/08/26/salesforce-and-anthropic-announce-claudeforce/ (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

Salesforce Ben (2026) Salesforce and Anthropic Announce ‘Claudeforce’ in Q2 ’27 Earnings. Available at: https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-and-anthropic-announce-claudeforce-in-q2-27-earnings/ (Accessed: 21 September 2026).

On 22 July 2026, Salesforce announced that Hyperforce, its cloud infrastructure platform, is now generally available in South Africa. For a lot of South African businesses, especially the regulated ones, that single announcement changes a conversation that’s been stuck for a while: whether Salesforce’s newer products, Data Cloud and Agentforce, can actually be trusted with local data.

Although the announcement itself is fairly technical, what it removes is not, it’s the one objection that’s kept a lot of otherwise-ready organisations sitting on the sidelines.

Hyperforce is the infrastructure layer Salesforce runs its products on, and it’s what decides where your data physically sits, not the application layer on top of it. Before this announcement, running Salesforce in South Africa meant your data was hosted somewhere else, and for a bank, an insurer, a telecommunications provider or a government department, that’s not a small detail. Hyperforce is now hosted locally through the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cape Town region, and with it, the Salesforce Platform, Sales Cloud, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Analytics, Revenue Management and Industry Solutions can all run with data stored inside the country. The Agentforce Trust Layer, the governance and processing layer underneath Salesforce’s AI product, can run on that same local infrastructure too. Data Cloud and the rest of the Agentforce Platform are still on the way, so it’s worth being precise about what’s changed already versus what’s still coming: the foundation is local now, and everything built on top of it inherits that (ITWeb, 2026a).

The reason this mattered enough to stall deals comes down to how POPIA (the Protection of Personal Information Act) treats cross-border data transfers. Section 72 puts the compliance burden on the responsible party, meaning your organisation, not the cloud provider, even for transfers you don’t actively control, and South Africa’s Information Regulator has never published an official list of jurisdictions it considers adequately protected. That’s not a bureaucratic technicality for a bank, an insurer or a government department, it’s a real, ongoing liability question that a CIO (Chief Information Officer) or compliance officer has to be able to answer before signing off on anything, and “the data lives overseas and we’re not entirely sure how the Regulator would view that” was never going to be a comfortable answer to give an audit committee. Over 35 African countries* now have their own data protection legislation on the books alongside POPIA, so the pressure on cloud providers to offer genuine in-region hosting was only ever going to grow, and Hyperforce’s local availability is Salesforce answering that pressure directly for the South African market (CMS Law, 2026; ITWeb, 2026b).

For Digital Workers, this isn’t just an industry update worth sharing, it’s the reason a lot of Data Cloud and Agentforce conversations with regulated or cautious clients can finally move forward instead of stalling at the data residency question. POPIA-aligned processing isn’t something we only build into a client’s Salesforce environment, it’s written into how we operate ourselves: our Ethics and Compliance Policy commits us to handling personal information in line with POPIA’s conditions for lawful processing, limiting access to what an engagement actually requires and using client data only for the purpose it was provided for (Digital Workers, 2026).

What Hyperforce’s local availability means in practice is that the infrastructure argument against Data Cloud and Agentforce, the one about where the data physically sits, no longer holds the way it used to, and organisations that have been waiting on the sidelines have a genuine reason to pick that conversation back up now. Life without constraints starts with knowing exactly where your data lives, and if your organisation has been holding off on Data Cloud or Agentforce for exactly that reason, we’re ready to help you build it properly, in-region, from day one.

References

CMS Law (2026) Managing Cross-Border Data Transfers. (Accessed: September 2026).

Digital Workers (2026) Ethics and Compliance Policy. Digital Workers (Pty) Ltd internal policy document, effective 18 August 2026.

Hypertext (2026) Salesforce’s Cloud Platform, Hyperforce, Now Available in SA. (Accessed: September 2026).

IT-Online (2026) Salesforce Announces General Availability of Hyperforce in SA. (Accessed: September 2026).

ITWeb (2026a) Salesforce Leverages AWS Partnership to Host Cloud Platform in SA. (Accessed: September 2026).

ITWeb (2026b) Data Residency and Sovereignty: What African and EU Firms Must Know. (Accessed: September 2026).

TechFinancials (2026) Salesforce Announces General Availability of Hyperforce in South Africa. (Accessed: September 2026).

Marketing Cloud has become one of the most talked-about product suites in the Salesforce ecosystem, and it’s easy to see why: it promises real-time personalisation, unified customer data and campaigns that actually respond to how people behave, rather than generic messages sent on a schedule. Although most organisations approach it as a technology purchase first and a readiness question second, that’s exactly backwards. Before a business builds anything on Marketing Cloud, it’s worth understanding what the platform actually is, what it does, and what changes once the data behind it is finally unified.

At its core, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a marketing automation and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform built to help teams segment audiences, personalise messaging and optimise campaigns across the full customer lifecycle, and it does this through six connected product pillars rather than one single tool. Data Cloud acts as the CDP (Customer Data Platform) at the centre of the system, pulling customer information from every source into one real-time identity, and Personalisation builds on that foundation to deliver next-best-action decisioning across channels. Engagement is the journey-orchestration layer, built around Journey Builder, that automates multichannel campaigns across email, SMS, WhatsApp and push notifications, while Advertising activates that same first-party data for targeted campaigns and Intelligence ties marketing performance back to actual business outcomes rather than opens and clicks. Loyalty Management rounds out the suite with a no-code system for points, tiers and rewards administration. Although the underlying architecture has recently shifted toward Marketing Cloud Next, a rebuild on Salesforce’s core platform with Data Cloud and Agentforce natively included, Salesforce has been clear that this is convergence rather than a forced migration, so existing implementations aren’t suddenly obsolete.
*TechTarget, 2026; Supermums, 2026; MarCloud Consulting, 2026.

In practice, that suite gets used to orchestrate the everyday moments that make up a customer relationship: a welcome series that moves from email to WhatsApp, a cart-abandonment message sent by SMS, a loyalty tier upgrade triggered automatically once a customer crosses a spending threshold. Personalisation extends into product recommendations and offer decisioning in real time, rather than a name merged into a subject line, and increasingly that expectation is coming from younger customers directly: 63%* of Gen Z shoppers say they want product recommendations from AI agents, not just a static recommendation engine. Advertising and Intelligence close the loop, turning that same customer data into targeted acquisition campaigns and reporting that connects a specific journey to actual revenue, so a business can see not just that a campaign ran, but what it was worth.
*Salesforce, 2026b.

The case for building on Marketing Cloud properly, rather than leaving it partially configured, is best made with numbers rather than adjectives. A Forrester Consulting TEI (Total Economic Impact) study built from five real Marketing Cloud customers found a 299%* ROI (Return on Investment) over three years, more than $5 million* in incremental revenue, a 60%* increase in site conversion by year three and a 35%* increase in AOV (Average Order Value), alongside a 60%* reduction in the time spent building and running campaigns and a 90%* drop in post-campaign reporting effort. It’s worth being straightforward about what that study represents, though: the composite organisation behind those figures was a $500 million-revenue enterprise with a $20 million digital marketing budget, so these numbers describe what’s achievable at that scale, not a guarantee at every scale. A mid-market business should read them as a ceiling worth aiming toward rather than a baseline to expect from day one.
*Forrester Consulting, 2023.

The customer-facing side of that shift is moving just as quickly: 73%* of customers now say brands treat them as unique individuals, up from just 39%* in 2023, which means the bar for what counts as a personalised experience has risen sharply in a short space of time. But the platform alone doesn’t produce that outcome, and this is where the readiness question actually lives: teams with unified customer data are 42%* more likely to respond to customers promptly and 60%* more likely to successfully deploy AI agents at scale, while only 31%* of marketers say they’re fully satisfied with their data unification today. In other words, the return on investment described above gets unlocked once the data behind Marketing Cloud is actually joined up, not the moment the licences are purchased, and that’s the gap an implementation partner exists to close.
*Salesforce, 2026a; Salesforce, 2026b.

That’s the work we do at Digital Workers: closing that exact distance between the platform you’ve bought and the customers you’re trying to reach, because life without constraints starts with a system that’s actually built around your data, not the other way round. If your org is ready to make that shift, we’re ready to build it with you – book a scoping call today.

References

Forrester Consulting (2023) *The Total Economic Impact™ of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.* Commissioned by Salesforce. (Accessed: September 2026).

MarCloud Consulting (2026) *Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next: Is it Time to Move?* (Accessed: September 2026).

Salesforce (2026a) *State of Marketing Report: 75% of Marketers Have Adopted AI Yet Still Use It To Send One-Way, Generic Campaigns.* (Accessed: September 2026).

Salesforce (2026b) *Marketing Statistics: 100+ Insights for 2026.* (Accessed: September 2026).

Supermums (2026) *What is Marketing Cloud and Which Products and Features Are Included?* (Accessed: September 2026).

TechTarget (2026) *What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?* (Accessed: September 2026).