Two announcements, one day apart, tell you where enterprise AI is headed in the Philippines. On August 26, Salesforce and Anthropic launched Claudeforce, a deepened partnership that makes Claude the default AI model across Salesforce's products and puts Salesforce inside Claude's chat interface. On August 27, a Data and AI Center of Excellence opened at Novare Technologies' headquarters in Bonifacio Global City (BGC), Taguig — a physical venue for selling exactly that stack to Philippine enterprises, Newsbytes.PH reported.
What Claudeforce actually is
Claudeforce connects Anthropic's Claude models to Salesforce's customer data, business rules, workflows, and permission systems. Claude becomes the default reasoning model for Agentforce — Salesforce's platform for AI agents (software that performs multi-step tasks on its own) — powering the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce Vibes, Agentforce Coworker, and Agent Builder. It runs through Amazon Bedrock inside Salesforce's "Trust Boundary," the compliance setup aimed at regulated industries such as banking and healthcare. Claude also becomes the default model in Slack, behind Slackbot, the Claude tag, and Slack Code.
"We're bringing together the world's #1 AI and #1 CRM," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in the announcement. "The UI is the AI."
Salesforce in Claude: 37 prebuilt sales skills
The partnership runs both ways. A "Salesforce in Claude" plugin ships with 37 prebuilt sales skills that let sellers work their pipeline from inside Claude's interface: preparing for meetings, reviewing deal health, updating records, and analyzing live revenue data pulled from Salesforce, Slack, and connected services. Actions route through Salesforce's existing permissions and business rules, so what a seller can change in Claude is what they could change in the CRM. The plugin is with pilot customers now, enters open beta in September, and gets more skills through late 2026.
The commercial scale behind the deal is notable: Salesforce expects to spend roughly $300 million (around ₱18.6 billion) a year on Anthropic tokens and holds a stake in Anthropic valued at about $5 billion (around ₱310 billion), The Next Web reported. Salesforce says its own Claude-powered Slackbot has generated the equivalent of 8.1 million annualized productivity hours internally.
The BGC center that makes it local
The next day, systems integrator Appistoki, its parent Novare Technologies, and Salesforce opened the Data and AI Center of Excellence at Novare's BGC headquarters. The center hosts customer demonstrations, training workshops, and collaborative builds for Philippine enterprises that want to consolidate their data and deploy AI agents on it. Appistoki CEO Abhijeet Kulkarni framed it as "a space where organizations can experience AI in action."
Real estate is the first target industry — think automated lead management, tailored property recommendations, and AI-assisted customer service — and Ayala Land's chief information officer, Roscoe Pineda, has already said the developer plans to apply AI to the Salesforce data it holds. Salesforce ASEAN general manager Paul Carvouni attended the opening.
What it means for Philippine enterprises and BPO
Salesforce seats are core tooling across Philippine enterprises and the IT-BPM sector, so a default-Claude Agentforce quietly changes what those seats can do: agents that draft, reconcile, and act inside the CRM rather than just autocomplete. For BPO firms, the same capability is double-edged — it is the technology their clients will ask them to deploy, and the one that pressures seat-count pricing models. The BGC center gives local decision-makers a place to test the claims in person before committing. It also extends a pattern we have tracked all year: frontier AI arriving in the Philippines through enterprise channels, from Claude Opus 5's launch to Maya's agentic AI onboarding. No pricing for Claudeforce features has been disclosed yet, and there is no announced timeline for Philippine-specific availability of the Salesforce in Claude beta — the center, at least, is open now.
