What does Salesforce do? Who uses it & how it changed everything | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

You might say that Marc Benioff and his colleagues — software developers Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez — changed the world when they created Salesforce (CRM) in 1999.

Before that, businesses relied on spreadsheets, handwritten notes, and databases to store their information, which effectively kept everything siloed. Sales reps tracked leads in one place while customer service agents logged complaints in another.

This fragmentation made it difficult for businesses to understand their customers’ behavior — let alone solve their problems.

Enter Salesforce. The world’s first customer relationship management system uses cloud technology to centralize information across business departments, enabling companies to store data, communicate with their audience, and view a “360-degree” profile of their customers.

As of March 2026, Salesforce has over 80,000 employees and offices in 93 cities worldwide, and its stock has averaged annualized returns of nearly 20%. According to Benzinga, if you had bought $1,000 of shares 20 years ago, you’d be sitting on $20,797.11 today.

But what, exactly, does Salesforce do?

What is Salesforce? What does it do?

Salesforce gets asked this question a lot. With its current market capitalization of $185 billion and its dominant role in the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, CRM isn’t just a stock — it’s a mega cap with influence.

According to LinkedIn, 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Salesforce, but so many people have wondered exactly what it does that the company had to add a page to its website to explain it.

This is how Salesforce describes its “agentic enterprise,” which is a combination of manpower and AI innovation. It’s the company’s core model for operations in 2026, one that Salesforce has refined over decades as a CRM pioneer and, more recently, through its expansion into digital labor.

What is Agentforce & how does it work?

In fact, “Agentforce” is Salesforce’s suite of AI agents that are more intuitive than chatbots. Using Salesforce’s Atlas Reasoning Engine, these agents understand context and reason and can even take action — without human oversight.

Business Insider called this technology “so remarkably human-like, it seemed like a vision from the future.”

According to Salesforce, a few of the many tasks its AI agents can autonomously do include:

Creating personalized emails to customers that upsell products
Troubleshoot issues with customers
Elevate customer service tickets (based on certain input criteria)

Over Cyberweek 2025, Salesforce said its AI agents “drove $67 billion in sales … and influenced a staggering 20% of all global orders via personalized product recommendations and conversational customer service.”

It highlighted Pandora, Shark Ninka, and Funko as businesses that witnessed sales grow 32% faster thanks to Agentforce.

Why is Salesforce used by data analysts?

Salesforce is particularly valuable for data analysts, who can create unified datasets from across a company’s sales and marketing operations, resulting in a more complete view of a business’s health.

Salesforce not only helps analysts report on the past—its AI solutions also enable them to build predictive models for the future, through its Tableau Software, which the company acquired in August 2019 for $15.7 billion.

This helps companies make better, data-driven decisions.

Dow company histories:

Does Salesforce own Slack?

Yes, Salesforce acquired Slack on December 1, 2020, for $27 billion, which was one of the largest ever acquisitions in the software industry. Slack is now integrated into the Salesforce cloud.

Salesforce bought Slack so it could better compete with Microsoft Teams and Office 365, thus offering its customers a “digital headquarters” that lets them work and instant message each other on a single platform.