Salesforce is increasing its focus on national security. The customer relationship management giant announced the creation of a new business unit called Missionforce on Tuesday. This unit will be dedicated to incorporating artificial intelligence into defense workflows, with a specific focus on three main areas: personnel, logistics, and decision making.
Missionforce will be led by Kendall Collins, who joined Salesforce in 2023 and currently serves as the chief business officer and chief of staff to CEO Marc Benioff. Collins stated that with Missionforce, the company will bring the best of AI, cloud, and platform technology from the private sector to modernize critical areas including personnel, logistics, and analytics. The goal is to help warfighters and the organizations that support them operate smarter, faster, and more efficiently, noting there has never been a more important time to serve those who serve.
Salesforce has held contracts with the U.S. government for years across various federal agencies and multiple branches of the military, including the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The company does not publicly disclose the number of its government contracts or how much revenue it generates from them.
This announcement is the latest in a wave of tech companies building and offering services specifically for the U.S. government. OpenAI launched a version of its ChatGPT designed for U.S. government agencies in January. Later, the company announced a deal to give federal agencies access to its enterprise ChatGPT tier for just one dollar per year.
Other companies quickly followed suit. A week later, Anthropic announced it was giving the U.S. government access to its government and enterprise tiers of its Claude chatbot for one dollar. In late August, Google announced “Gemini for Government,” which offers its AI services to federal agencies for 47 cents for the first year.