Salesforce

The company that pioneered cloud-based customer software. Its platform and AI agents (Agentforce) help businesses manage sales, service, marketing and data. Known for its Trailblazer community and 1-1-1 giving model.

About Salesforce

Salesforce makes cloud software that helps organisations manage their relationships with customers. Its tools cover sales, customer service, marketing, commerce and data, and it owns Slack, the workplace messaging app. It describes itself as an AI customer-relationship-management company, and its AI product, Agentforce, lets businesses build and manage AI "agents" that carry out tasks.

Salesforce was founded on 8 March 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, as a software-as-a-service company, meaning software used over the internet instead of installed on a computer. That was a new idea at the time. Marc Benioff is chairman and chief executive, and the company is headquartered in San Francisco.

Salesforce's stated mission is to help companies connect with customers in new ways. It ranks five values, in order: trust, customer success, innovation, equality and sustainability. It calls its community of employees, customers and partners "Trailblazers", and the Trailblazer Community helps people learn from one another.

The company is also known for its "1-1-1" model, which commits one per cent of equity, technology and employee time to education, equality and the environment. It says thousands of other companies have adopted the model.

In the UK, Salesforce has offices in London and opened a UK data centre in 2014. Our sources give no UK staff numbers, so we have not stated one. For young people, Salesforce offers careers in software engineering, data, sales, customer success, consulting and marketing. Its free Trailblazer learning platform is a useful way to build skills before applying. The pages we read do not describe UK early-careers schemes, so check Salesforce's careers site.

What they do

• {'desc': 'Sales, service, marketing and commerce software.', 'title': 'Customer 360'}
• {'desc': 'Tools to build and manage AI agents.', 'title': 'Agentforce'}
• {'desc': "Brings a company's data together.", 'title': 'Data 360'}
• {'desc': 'Workplace messaging and collaboration.', 'title': 'Slack'}

Key facts

• Founded: 8 March 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez
• Headquarters: San Francisco, USA
• Chairman and CEO: Marc Benioff
• Values: trust, customer success, innovation, equality, sustainability
• UK: London offices; UK data centre opened 2014

Website: www.salesforce.com