Formula 1 President and CEO Stefano Domenicali has reinforced that the sport has no desire to step away from human drivers, despite the growing rise in autonomous vehicle technology.

"First of all - I start with the easy point - we will never go with a robot driver, the drivers will always be physical - it's non-negotiable,” he told TechRadar Pro at a recent media Q&A session.

However he did recognize the huge role AI could play in helping the sport connect with its growing fan base around the world, particularly younger fans, as well as helping its teams perform more effectively during races.

AI in Formula 1

Domenicali did mention several pertinent use cases for AI in Formula 1, ranging from supporting a team’s decision-making process to manage the race, but also help a race director make the right decision - and even help alert the drivers themselves to potential safety issues on the track.

But he noted there may need to be future controls on how much teams spend on AI technology, as Formula 1 looks to ensure fairness as part of its budget cap, which limits the teams to $215 million per season.

“It's a key point,” Domenicali noted, “we want to have a level playing field where all the teams can have more or less the same kind of financial contribution.”

“We want to make sure that all the AI discussions are beneficial, to make the right decision, prepare the car, simulate the car, but at the end of the day, the differentiating factor in our sport will always be that you are talking about emotions, about the way we connect with the people.”

Recent figures from the organization claim it has around 831 million fans around the globe, and with this showing no sign of slowing down, Domenicali was bullish about his approach to hitting a billion fans.

“It’s a big responsibility,” he admitted, “it goes beyond who we are now, to the fact that F1 is shaping relationships with people…it’s just an incredible opportunity to grow in our society - because we need to think big, that’s why we are here.”

“We are in a sport that is evolving - and without the right people, I know this is impossible,” he noted, “we are in a world where competition is part of our journey.”

“The world of entertainment today is big, and our fans can choose us, or choose other things that are not related to sport itself…without the right way to engage, and the right way to understand how we can capture their attention, it’s impossible.”

“Our people need to be focused on what they need to be focused on - and all the agents’ work is just amazing, so now we need to think bigger.”

Salesforce and Formula 1 leading the way

Domenicali was speaking at the recent Salesforce World Tour London 2026 event, where hailed the company’s long-running partnership with Formula 1.

The organization has embedded the company’s Agentforce platform into its systems, helping it improve engagement with fans across the world, and Domenicali was perhaps unsurprisingly bullish about the relationship between the pair.

“The journey starts, as always, with human relationships...we have to think big, we want to grow the awareness of who we are, understanding our customers, making sure we connect with them,” he told Zahra Bahrololoumi, President & UKI CEO at Salesforce, in her opening keynote at the event.

“We are quite a complicated sport - so we need a lot of agents to make sure that we are able to be effective…the sport is moving in a bigger, ecosystem of entertainers and relationships, and Salesforce is the right technology, with the right people and the right energy to make sure that we can go do it together.”

Salesforce has laid out its continued backing for the UK as a key market in terms of both embracing current AI tools as well as developing new and exciting services and businesses alike.

At its Salesforce World Tour London event, the company's President UKI, Zahra Bahrololoumi, noted how the company was looking to play a key role in the increasingly common Agentic Enterprise.

Top of mind was the company’s new “Headless 360” platform, which will allow users to access all of their Salesforce data from various apps or a terminal, potentially opening them up to huge improvements in productivity and efficiency.

"A very pivotal moment"

“We are at a very pivotal moment - every company, every industry - AI is transforming our lives - but how do we harness that power?” Bahrololoumi declared in the opening keynote at Salesforce World Tour London, “agentic AI doesn't just benefit commercial businesses, it can also elevate citizen services - from policing to food and transport, to health and welfare - our efforts show that when we do good in the word, we can actually do really well.”

“We're redefining CRM again with Customer 360 - it's making your organizations truly customer-centric…(and) this transformational work AI is ushering in a whole new chapter,” Bahrololoumi added, “agentic AI is everywhere, it is in every experience, every industry, every company - it's not just about efficiency, it's about growth...and it is fundamentally changing what is possible when we reimagine enterprises.”

Bahrololoumi outlined the Salesforce’s “incredibly bold” vision for the UK, which includes $6 billion investment committed to the country through 2030, and its role in backing the UK government’s aim to train 10 million UK workers by 2030.

“The UK...is such a vibrant AI market", she added in a later media Q&A session, outlining how Salesforce is “really committed” to educating businesses and partner ecosystems across the country.

“Speaking to customers (about AI) we have gone beyond the pilot stage - we’re now seeing incredible scale,” she said, “agents working hand in hand with humans at the right point…and we know that those who do scale are the ones who have been intentional about orchestrating and organizing their data.”

• Agentforce will get upgraded with Fin's agentic tech and proprietary Apex model
• Fin, formerly Intercom, solves 76% of customer queries with AI agents
• The acquisition will cost 3x what Agentforce brings in annually

Salesforce has announced plans to require Fin, the customer service giant formerly known as Intercom, for around $3.6 billion, as it looks to build its AI-powered customer service tools.

Previously a customer messaging platform under the Intercom brand, Fin now positions itself as an AI-first company with agents spanning live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone and even Slack.

Under the deal, Salesforce would also gain access to Fin's proprietary Apex model, which the company developed instead of relying on third-party models like GPT and Gemini.

Salesforce to acquire Fin (Intercom) and its AI model

"Fin brings proven agent technology, a deep commitment to customer success, and an incredible AI team that will complement Agentforce with powerful service agent capabilities," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said.

It comes at an important time for the company, with its agentic AI platform (Agentforce) now drawing in $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue, marking a 205% year-over-year growth. Fin's agentic technology will strengthen this offering, rather than outright replace Agentforce.

According to the announcement, Fin's agent resolves more than three in four (76%) customer tickets – a welcome statistic for Benioff, who has already removed over 5,000 workers since the start of 2025.

The deal, subject to regulatory approval, is expected to finalize by the fourth quarter of this year.

"By joining forces with Salesforce, we can deploy it far and wide at a rate far faster than we could have ever achieved on our own," Fin CEO Eoghan McCabe said. Salesforce boasted of its "established global customer base," which spans 30,000 organizations.

• Prince William-backed Homewards programme looks to use AI to boost chairty efforts
• Homewards is working with partners such as Salesforce to utilize AI agents and workflows
• Salesforce will be providing AI agent services to help free up time and capacity

A homelessness programme backed by Prince William has revealed new plans to try and tackle the issue with data and technology.

Homewards is teaming up with Salesforce to launch its new Homelessness Data Lab, which will unite over 25 organisations across business, government, and frontline services.

The programme was revealed by the Prince at London Tech Week 2026, as he took to the keynote stage for its official launch, joined by leaders from Salesforce, NatWest and Bloomberg.

Using AI to tackle homelessness

"It's about building a model that shows homelessness is preventable," Prince William said at the launch, "the earlier you deal with the problem, the better."

Founded in 2023, Homewards has big aims when it comes to eliminating homelessnes, attempting to spot the signs suggesting people may be in difficulty before the damage happens.

Homewards says 430,000 people are currently experiencing homelessness in the UK, which is enough to fill Wembley Stadium more than four times over.

But it has high hopes for the Homelessness Data Lab, which Salesforce UK&I CEO Zahra Bahrololoumi explained can help improve collaboration across a whole host of industries and sectors.

"It's such an important project,...there's no one single cause, it can happen for a multitude of reasons," she noted, "if we can make it predictable, we can prevent it...there's such a rich set of data."

Bahrololoumi outlined the need to better support staff to detect risk of homelessness, as Salesforce will be deploying autonomous AI agents with the Homeless Link service to handle the burden of administrative workflows, freeing up frontline workers to really connect face-to-face with those who may be struggling.

"We're really proud to be using AI in that way, to release human capacity and enable these frontline workers," Bahrololoumi noted.

"We can only win from that...AI will help us identify the interventions that will actually work."

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff extols effects of AI at work once again
• Benioff hails efficiency gains, but also cost savings of using AI
• Having AI agents and humans working together can take your company to the next level, Benioff says

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has spoken out again on his vision of the future of AI in software, predicting that the technology will bring forward huge boosts in productivity and efficiency.

Speaking on the All-In podcast, Benioff was unsurprisingly effusive in his praise of AI, particularly when combined with human workers, noting, "Everything's gonna be cheaper to make, it's more efficient."

"I can do things that I just could not do before," he added. "I can go faster than ever before. I can implement my software and sell it at the same time. I can break through obstacles that I've had because I have coding agents and humans working together."

"Unpredecented" effect

Continuing on, Benioff noted that customers would see significant benefits from choosing Salesforce's AI-boosted tools and services, from CRM to Slack.

"What I can do for our customers is unprecedented; it's impossible to describe what we're gonna be able to do for customers. It's gonna be awesome," Benioff noted.

Benioff's bullish approach isn't too surprising, as he has been at the forefront of the fightback against the so-called "SaaSpocalypse" caused by the influx of AI into workplace software.

In February 2026, Benioff noted how AI is actually making Salesforce's platform more valuable by acting as an operating system for AI agents - showing how the technology isn't killing software as the term suggests – merely rewriting it, much like it's rewriting job roles.

"We’ve rebuilt Salesforce to become the operating system for the Agentic Enterprise, bringing humans and agents together on one trusted platform," Benioff said at the time.

The theme of the "agentic enterprise" was announced by Benioff at the company's Dreamforce 2025 event in October of that year, marking a new focus for its AI efforts.

"We want to connect with our customers in a brand new way...the rate and growth of innovation has been awesome," Benioff noted in his keynote at the event.

With Dreamforce 2026 only a few months away, it will be interesting to see how Salesforce positions itself again, with the effects of AI growing stronger every day.

• ShinyHunters breached Anodot, stealing Snowflake tokens
• Attack hit more than a dozen Snowflake customers
• Group claims data theft and extortion, echoing 2024 campaign

A supply chain attack at analytics company Anodot has resulted in more than a dozen Snowflake customers losing their sensitive information.

The ShinyHunters extortion group recently broke into Anodot, an AI-powered, cloud-based analytics platform that hunts for business incidents and anomalies in real-time, helping businesses identify sudden drops in sales, cost spikes, or technical glitches, before they can significantly impact the organization and its customers.

The hackers managed to find Anodot’s authentication tokens, which allowed them to access customer Snowflake accounts. They even tried to access Salesforce accounts but were apparently detected and blocked before being able to infiltrate.

ShinyHunters lay claim

Snowflake told BleepingComputer it detected “unusual activity” that impacted a small number of its customers:

"We recently detected unusual activity within a small number of Snowflake customer accounts linked to a specific third-party integration," Snowflake told BleepingComputer.

"We immediately launched an investigation and, out of an abundance of caution, locked down potentially impacted customer accounts. We also notified potentially impacted customers and provided precautionary guidance to help them further protect their accounts."

Snowflake stressed that its systems were not compromised, and no bugs were leveraged.

Soon after the news broke, ShinyHunters reached out to the publication, claimed the attack, and said they stole data from “dozens of companies”. They also confirmed having tried to breach Salesforce, and failing, and said the attack originated from Anodot. They stated that they’ve had access to that company’s infrastructure “for some time”.

ShinyHunters love targeting Snowflake customers. In 2024, there was a major customer data theft and extortion campaign, in which hackers used stolen usernames and passwords to log into Snowflake customer environments that did not use multi‑factor authentication (MFA). Once inside, they downloaded sensitive data from dozens of companies’ Snowflake instances, including huge datasets from big names like AT&T, Ticketmaster/Live Nation, Santander, Neiman Marcus and others.

They later tried to extort the victims in exchange for deleting the stolen files and apparently, the same is happening now, as well.

• Salesforce wants you to think of Slackbot as just another college that does your heavy lifting
• It can listen in on meetings and proactively raise relevant recommendations for you
• It gets its data from Slack, Salesforce tools and third-party integrations

Salesforce has announced a 'new Slack' where its embedded Slackbot AI assistant can act even more like an autonomous colleague, with the introduction of more than 30 new capabilities.

Rather than framing Slackbot as just another AI tool, Salesforce wants us to see it as a personal AI agent for work.

Slackbot does all the things you'd expect of it – like drafting content, summarizing conversations and answering questions about company data – but it's designed to meet the worker where they are without forcing them into other apps and interfaces to share context.

Salesforce wants Slackbot to be your personal AI assistant

TextSlackbot has access to three primary sources of data and context: messages, channels and files within Slack itself; broader Salesforce systems like CRM; and third-party platforms via integrations.

One of the tool's clearest benefits is when it comes to video calls – which have risen in frequency with the rise of hybrid working per new research. Rather than just transcribing calls and producing notes, Slackbot can proactively surface live recommendations "like pulling up a specific Salesforce record in the chat the moment a customer’s name is mentioned."

Essentially, Salesforce sees Slackbot as being "one interface for your entire AI fleet," marking the end of standalone AI tools and separate apps.

"Slack is the operating system for work, bringing humans, agents, data, and apps together in one trusted conversational interface," CTO Parker Harris explained.

"The bottleneck isn't intelligence," the company explained in another post. "It's shared intelligence." With that, it's bringing skills to users, described as a set of instructions that allow other workers to access similar capabilities without needing the expertise.

Slackbot is currently available for Business+ and Enterprise+ users, but beginning this month, the company is also opening up limited access to Free and Pro plans.

We have all been there. You find a piece of business software that looks like it will solve everything. The demo is polished. The landing page promises the world.

You sign up, pay, get inside - and discover that the feature you actually wanted is locked behind a "Premium" tier. Or an "Enterprise" plan. Or, my personal favorite, a "Contact Sales for Pricing" button that leads to a 45-minute discovery call where someone tries to upsell you on a package you never needed.

It is the universal SaaS trap. And in 2026, the market is finally calling it out.

Wall Street has wiped over $1 trillion in market capitalization from the software-as-a-service sector this year alone. Salesforce, once the undisputed king of enterprise software, has seen its stock plunge 26% after earnings.

Atlassian has cut 10% of its workforce - 1,600 people - while its stock has dropped 84% from its 2021 peak. Forrester calls it the "SaaS-pocalypse." TechCrunch is writing its obituary.

The reason is simple. If an AI agent can do the work of ten people, why would you pay for ten software seats?

A $350,000 Salesforce contract was reportedly terminated for a custom-built alternative. Retool's 2026 Build vs. Buy Report found that 35% of enterprise teams have already replaced at least one SaaS tool with custom software, and 78% plan to build more this year.

I run a media company, not a software company. But when I looked at what we were paying for - and what we were actually getting - I decided to stop buying and start building.

The problem we were solving

Man of Many is Australia's largest independently owned men's lifestyle publisher. But we are a small team operating in an industry under existential pressure.

Meanwhile, every SaaS vendor was knocking on the door with point solutions. One tool for SEO. Another for social media scheduling. Another for analytics. Another for CRM. The average large enterprise now runs over 2,000 applications, with more than 60% not formally approved by IT. That is not a tech stack. That is tool sprawl.

So instead of subscribing to more software, I built an AI operating system.

What we built

Otto OS is an AI Chief Operating Officer that runs our back-office operations through a network of specialized AI agents. It handles editorial workflows, sales intelligence, competitive analysis, financial reporting, content strategy, and business monitoring.

The architecture follows what is called the WAT Framework - Workflows, Agents, and Tools (hat tip to Nate Herk) - which separates AI reasoning from deterministic execution. This separation matters because when AI tries to handle every step directly, accuracy compounds downward. Five steps at 90% accuracy each give you 59% overall success.

I built it using Claude Code as both the builder and the brain. No traditional developers were involved. The initial build took roughly a week of active development.

What it actually does

Every morning, Otto generates a briefing that pulls live revenue data from Google Ad Manager, checks traffic trends from GA4, scans for SEO anomalies, reviews outstanding invoices in Xero, and flags anything that needs human attention. That used to require someone logging into five different platforms and manually compiling the information.

The security architecture uses a traffic-light system. Green zone: read-only access. Amber zone: draft-only access requiring human review. Red zone: any action involving money, public posting, or data deletion requires explicit human approval every time.

What I learned (and what is transferable)

1. Map your tool sprawl. List every SaaS product you pay for. Next to each one, write down which 20% of its features you actually use.

2. Start with the boring stuff. Reporting. Data consolidation. Status updates. Invoice chasing. These are the tasks where automation delivers immediate, measurable ROI.

3. Separate thinking from doing. Let AI handle reasoning and orchestration. Let deterministic scripts handle execution.

4. Use plain text as your database. Simple markdown files are the most effective memory system for AI.

5. Security is non-negotiable from day one. Build the guardrails before you build the features.

6. Document everything as you go. The system should write its own SOPs.

The bigger picture

We are not the only publisher thinking this way. Dow Jones, Business Insider, and Forbes are all investing heavily in internal AI systems. Reuters Institute's 2026 predictions report found that 97% of publishers now consider back-end AI automation "important."

Bain and Company frames this as a fundamental restructuring of the software industry. Dean Shahar, who manages a three billion euro fund at DTCP, put it bluntly: "The SaaS world is dying. Not software itself, but SaaS as a business category."

For us at Man of Many, Otto OS is how a small independent team competes against publishers with hundreds of staff. It cost a fraction of what we were spending on SaaS subscriptions that underdelivered.

The tools to do this are available to anyone, right now. The question is not whether your industry will be disrupted by AI. It is whether you will be the one building the system, or the one still waiting on a vendor to ship the feature you needed six months ago.

Check out our list of best Large Language Models (LLMs) for coding.

• Infinite Campus hit by ShinyHunters via Salesforce account breach
• Names and staff contact info stolen; customer data unaffected
• Group added company to leak site, demanding ransom by March 25 amid wider Salesforce-targeting campaign

Popular student information system (SIS) Infinite Campus has confirmed suffering a data breach at the hands of the infamous ShinyHunters group, who are now trying to extort the company for money.

In a data breach notification letter, shared to affected individuals and subsequently posted on Reddit, Infinite Campus said an unauthorized actor accessed an employee’s Salesforce account on March 18, 2026, but was quickly ousted after IT and security teams were alerted.

However, before they were forced out, the attacker managed to grab names and contact information of school staff. Infinite Campus says most of the data they nabbed is “commonly found on school websites”, and customer information was not targeted or stolen.

ShinyHunters take the blame

While the organization did not name the perpetrators, it did say that they are a “group knThat did not stop the attackers from reaching out and trying to extort the organization for money. “Infinite Campus has not, and will not, engage with the unauthorized actor,” it said, before adding that it disabled some customer-facing services for users without IP addresses.

own for targeting the Salesforce accounts of hundreds of companies,” which hints at ShinyHunters.

At the same time, the group added Infinite Campus to its data leak site, giving a deadline of March 25, 2026 for the payment, or it would release all of the stolen files on the dark web.

They are claiming to have taken Salesforce records with personally identifiable information (PII) and various internal corporate data.

ShinyHunters have been running campaigns against Salesforce customers for several months now, with victims including Cisco, Adidas, Qantas, and Allianz Life.

In the attackers, they would use voice phishing (vishing) to trick employees into granting access, or stealing OAuth tokens, and would then use the access to exfiltrate CRM data. The data is then offered back, in exchange for bitcoin or monero.

Via BleepingComputer

• Salesforce acquired Clockwise's workers, but not the company itself
• Clockwise customers advised to migrate to Reclaim
• Agentforce annual recurring revenue up 169%

Clockwise CEO Matt Martin has announced via a LinkedIn post that Salesforce will be hiring the startup's team as part of its broader Agentforce push.

Because Salesforce is acquiring the workers and not the company, Clockwise has confirmed it will be shutting down from March 27, 2026, leaving customers having to find an alternative.

Martin confirmed that all customer data would be deleted, meaning that Salesforce won't have access to Clockwise's database, and that unused subscriptions will be refunded.

Clockwise closes down as Salesforce acquires workers, not company

"We believe this move will allow us to have even greater impact," Martin wrote, explaining the founding team's success and experience. "We will be bringing our deep expertise building reliable, agentic software to the Agentic Enterprise."

The 10-year-old company has served major customers, like Uber, Netflix and Atlassian, during its time in market, but now users are being directed to rival app Reclaim in light of the near-immediate shutdown. Reclaim will be matching Clockwise's prices to make the transition less painful.

"They're joining my charter to build Agent Interoperability and Orchestration within Agentforce," Clockwise co-founder Gary Lerhaupt wrote in a separate LinkedIn post. Lerhaupt joined the Agentforce team as Product Architecture VP a little over a year ago after around eight years at Clockwise. Martin also spent over two years at Saleforce between 2014 and 2016 before departing to create Clockwise.

Although Salesforce has not commented on how the new recruits might drive Agentforce forward, we can at least expect immense growth. The Agentforce business grew 169% in terms of annual recurring revenue, now accounting for $800 million. Total company revenue for the most recent full year stood at $41.5 billion, up 10% year-over-year.

• ShinyHunters claim Salesforce Aura data theft
• Attackers exploited misconfigured guest user permissions
• Roughly 100 high-profile organizations reportedly impacted

Infamous ransomware operators ShinyHunters have claimed they are behind the ongoing Salesforce Aura data theft assault, and have warned that more attacks are to come.

Starting in September 2025, the crooks spent several months scanning public-facing Salesforce Experience Cloud instances, a platform that lets organizations build web portals connected directly to their Salesforce CRM data.

For the scanning, they used a modified version of AuraInspector, a misconfiguration detection tool originally developed by Mandiant. The tool probed exposed API endpoints to identify portals where guest user profiles had excessive permissions.

Research preview

After identifying vulnerable sites, the attackers used a separate, unnamed custom tool, to bypass the guest user record limits and extract Salesforce CRM data without authentication. The stolen information, including names and phone numbers, was then used for follow-on social engineering and voice phishing campaigns.

Speaking to The Register, a spokesperson for the hacking collective confirmed that roughly 100 high-profile organizations were affected by this campaign:

"Have stolen data from almost 400 websites and about 100 essential high profile companies Snowflake, Okta, Lastpass, Salesforce itself, Sony, AMD, and a lot more," the person allegedly said. Recon and exploitation “has been going on for several months now," they added.

This past weekend, Salesforce warned its customers about a “known threat actor group” that was actively scanning public-facing Experience Cloud sites. It did not want to say how many companies fell victim, or how much data was stolen, but it did say that the crooks were not exploiting a vulnerability:

"This issue is not due to any vulnerability inherent to the Salesforce platform, but rather Experience Cloud sites where a guest user profile has been inadvertently configured with overly broad permissions," a representative said.

However, the group apparently told CyberInsider it was indeed exploiting a flaw in the product. “However, they have decided not to disclose any details about the flaw until the exploitation phase is over,” the publication claims.

So far, the companies ShinyHunters mentioned are keeping quiet, with the exception of LastPass, which said it was looking into the claims.

• Marc Benioff says AI has created another "SaaSpocalypse", just as cloud did
• Salesforce has changed direction to become an agentic AI platform
• Agentic AI could increase company revenue by 50% in four years

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has warned of a "SaaSpocalypse", whereby traditional software vendors are coming under threat from AI tools, and particularly, agentic AI.

The moment "isn’t our first" SaaSpocalypse, Benioff said, referencing previous shifts such as the move from on-prem to cloud.

However, just like the move to cloud, vendors who choose to get in on the action and modernize could actually benefit rather than being left behind.

SaaS is now under threat from AI, not just cloud

Speaking about Salesforce in particular, Benioff noted AI is actually making its platform more valuable by acting as an operating system for AI agents, indicating that AI isn't killing software as the term 'SaaSpocalypse' suggests – merely rewriting it, much like it's rewriting job roles.

But the change has come at a cost, because Salesforce rebuilt itself for the agentic era, and many smaller SaaS providers may struggle to turn things around so quickly.

The company has seen considerable success from its Agentic Work Units (AWUs), shifting away from per-seat billing to instead charge for the tasks that its AI agents complete.

Benioff's observations came during the company's most recent earnings call, where it was revealed Salesforce drew in $11.2 billion in quarterly revenue, up 12% year-over-year, closing the full year with $41.5 billion in revenue, a 10% increase over the previous year.

"We’ve rebuilt Salesforce to become the operating system for the Agentic Enterprise, bringing humans and agents together on one trusted platform," Benioff commented.

Looking ahead, Salesforce has raised its fiscal 2030 revenue target to $63 billion, marking a more than 51% increase, citing agentic AI as a key driver.

• Salesforce SVP and GM confirms Heroku gets deprioritized in an AI-first world
• Agentforce has emerged as an agentic AI development platform
• Heroku will still get important stability and security updates

Salesforce has announced that it will stop developing new features for Heroku, an application building and deployment platform, moving it into a "sustaining engineering" phase.

The decision was announced in early February 2026 by Salesforce SVP and GM Nitin T Bhat, who confirmed the platform will continue to get updated stability, security, reliability and support.

In the immediate term, existing customers can continue to use Heroku and renew their subscriptions with no pricing or service changes, however it's unclear whether Salesforce plans to phase out Heroku over the longer term.

Salesforce has stopped developing Heroku

Although existing customers can continue to use Heroku, Salesforce has ended new enterprise contracts (but existing contracts and renewals will still be honored).

"There is no change for customers using Heroku today," Bhat wrote. "Customers who pay via credit card in the Heroku dashboard – both existing and new – can continue to use Heroku with no changes to pricing, billing, service, or day-to-day usage."

"Sustaining engineering" is tech company speak for no future roadmap and no further innovation, as well as the potential long-term risk of sunsetting.

Adobe recently announced it would be sunsetting Animate, before quickly reversing on what it had said to shift the app into "maintenance mode," which for all intends and purposes, means the same thing.

For context, Heroku hasn't always been a Salesforce product. The company acquired Heroku in 2010, positioning it as a key platform for building custom apps alongside its CRM. But recent years have seen the emergence of Agentforce, a new agentic AI-centric development platform, thus Heroku could be seen as a platform that doesn't meet today's AI standards.

• ShinyHunters use vishing and custom phishing pages to bypass SSO protections
• Stolen MFA codes grant access to platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, and Dropbox
• Other groups mimic tactics; experts urge phishing-resistant MFA and Zero Trust defenses

A highly effective combination of vishing (voice phishing) and customized infrastructure has allowed the dreaded ShinyHunters extortion gang to launch countless single sign-on (SSO) scams in recent times, experts have concluded

A new report from Google's Mandiant experts has explained the modus operandi behind a wave of SSO attacks that hit companies across industries recently, saying it all starts with a phone call.

It found ShinyHunters have perfected impersonating IT staff and tech operatives, calling employees in different positions and telling them their MFA settings need updating.

Extorting the victims

At the same time, they use customized infrastructure: they have created highly modular, customizable phishing landing pages that they can tweak in real time. Therefore, if the victim uses Google SSO, they will be given the appropriate landing page, which can then transform, depending on the type of MFA that particular employee uses.

When the attacker obtains the login credentials and MFA codes, they log into either Okta, Entra, or Google SSO dashboard, through which they can pick and choose what kind of data to steal: Salesforce, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, DocuSign, Dropbox, or a myriad of others. ShinyHunters, apparently, prefer Salesforce, although they won’t pass up on a different opportunity, too.

Finally, after exfiltrating all of the stolen data, they will add a sample to their data leak page and reach out to the victim in an attempt to get them to pay.

To stay safe, businesses should train their employees on the dangers of phishing and educate them on the latest techniques used in such attacks. They should also use phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) wherever possible and deploy Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA).

Via BleepingComputer

• The US Army will use Salesforce for future productivity and agentic AI goals
• The Pentagon is on a roll with tech deals as part of a new software modernization push
• 'Hire to retire' support will include a platform for recruitment, training, benefits and veteran transition

The US Army has signed an Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract worth $5.6 billion with Salesforce to modernize military operations with new collaboration and AI tools, citing three key goals: scaling innovation, reducing costs and increasing mission readiness.

Salesforce's software is hoped to replace outdated legacy tools used by the Pentagon with cloud-based, efficiency-boosting upgrades.

The deal is actually part of a much bigger modernization push – the Pentagon has already formed other alliances with OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's focus on software.

Salesforce has gained a major contract with the US Army

Salesforce has apparently been gearing up for this moment for months, having launched its national security unit (Missionforce) in 2025 and a DoD-compliant version of Slack in December 2025.

Salesforce highlighted four key benefits that the deal will unlock for the Department of War, with the first being 'hire to retire' support, giving the Army a platform that incorporates recruitment, training, deployment, benefits and veteran transition while removing the silos that are currently plaguing the department.

The company also promises to improve access to real-time data for quicker decision-making, more streamlined operations for boosted efficiency and readiness for agentic AI via unified data and connected systems.

It's not the first time the Army has partnered with Salesforce, as Missionforce and Government Cloud CEO Kendall Collins explained: "This new contract, which builds on more than a decade-long relationship between Salesforce and the U.S. Armed Forces, will operationalize Missionforce across the Army and DOW, delivering trusted data and seamless interoperability, and supporting the DOW’s transformation into an agentic enterprise."

"This move will establish faster time-to-value, greater ROI and better mission outcomes across the DOW," Program Vice President Alan Webber added.

The terms stipulate that the contract is broken down into two five-year periods, the second being optional, with a maximum but non-guaranteed $5.6 billion ceiling.

• Salesforce reveals Slackbot is now generally available
• Business+ and Enterprise+ customers can experience the AI tool now
• Slackbot promises a smarter and more effective way to work

Salesforce has revealed its Slackbot AI tool is now generally available to users, promising a new age of productivity and efficiency.

First announced at Dreamforce 2025, Slackbot is now available to all Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, bringing together not only Slack and Salesforce data, but third-party apps and services such as Google Drive and your calendar app.

The company says Slackbot can offer an important advantage to users as it does not simply offer basic suggestions or assistance, but fully understands their conversations and the context in which they happen, and has the ability (and permissions) to scan across systems to get the information needed right away.

Slackbot is here

"Slackbot isn’t just another copilot or AI assistant. It’s the front door to the Agentic Enterprise, powered by Salesforce," noted Parker Harris, Co-Founder, Salesforce & Chief Technology Officer, Slack.

"This brings AI that is grounded in your company’s data, workflows, and Slack conversations, right into the flow of work. It is the crucial step to realizing the future we've been building toward — bringing Agentforce 360 to life with an intuitive, conversational interface, and elevating every human with enterprise-grade AI."

This vision means Slackbot is set to become another member of your team, not just a simple AI agent, but one with access to the context around messages, which understands your files, channels, and even your co-workers - and can be quickly activated and contacted with just a click in Slack.

Salesforce says the tool can be useful across a wide range of tasks, from simple questions such as "find me the file Steve sent me about the Q4 results" or "give me an update on Project Phoenix".

But due to being connected with third-party systems, Slackbot can also help you find time to schedule a meeting with your team, set reminders of critical deadlines, or bring up any missed priorities from the actions list created after your last status call.

This can also be useful when connected with your Salesforce data, as teams can access background information on a customer to help prepare for a pitch or sales call, or spot any account issues and prepare next steps when needed.

Salesforce says Slackbot is rolling out now, and will only expand and get smarter as more systems are integrated with it in the future - we'll look forward to hearing more soon.

• IDrive is launching a Salesforce Backup for extra data protection with unlimited storage
• The solution will cover critical elements of the Salesforce environment
• The plan costs $20/user/seat per year

IDrive is our current top pick for the best cloud backup, and now, there's good news for anyone who uses Salesforce and wants to secure their cloud environments.

IDrive's new Salesforce Backup is a dedicated solution for data protection and safeguarding. As with any other widely used and trusted platform, Salesforce is often targeted in data theft attacks, in which criminals will steal your sensitive data.

To combat this, this new IDrive solution will provide enterprise-grade, automatic backup, and granular recovery, tailored specifically for Salesforce environments - to protect customers from accidental deletions, and configuration errors as well as the ever-growing landscape of cyber-threats.

Enterprise-grade ransomware protection

The IDrive Salesforce Backup covers each critical element of Salesforce's environment, backing up standard and custom Salesforce objects, attachments, and files (including notes, documents, Chatter feeds, and more).

Custom metadata is also covered - like, for example, 'custom objects and fields, Apex classes and triggers, workflows, reports, dashboards, configurations, and more.'

All of this is designed so that you can restore raw data, and also the full structure and logic of your Salesforce deployment.

IDrive Salesforce Backup comes with unlimited storage, and at just $20/user/seat per year, this rivals some of the best backup services out there.

The new solution comes with extra protections, built to protect your data from data loss, human error, and even ransomware.

Ransomware attacks are prolific, and the practice has developed into an industry in itself, with as much as 80% of targeted firms paying a ransom in some form, generating millions of dollars for the criminals and creating further incentive to attack.

To mitigate this, IDrive's 'Ransomware-Ready Disaster Recovery' enacts incremental backups and point-in-time recovery, which helps organizations focus on recovery following an attack without the added stress of data loss.

The IDrive solution also performs daily automated backups of both your production and sandbox environments - which aims to mitigate the risk of data loss through sync disparities, as well as accidental deletions and human error. These backups are triple-layer protected with AES 256-bit encryption, secure cloud storage and 'robust safeguards and enterprise-grade security in place.'

Finally, the Granular restore and export features means IT and admin teams can use a single console to search, restore, compare, and export data across the organization - which makes compliance and data governance a simple and seamless process.

For those in heavily regulated industries, IDrive Salesforce Backup is fully compliant with SOC 2 Type 2, SEC, SOX, and HIPAA standards.

• Customers are apparently loving Salesforce's AELA pricing for AI agents
• Short-term losses don't bother Salesforce, because long-term gains can be made
• Salesforce's long-term strategy is to add more value to AI agents to increase monetization

Salesforce has said it's comfortable losing money in the short term on seat-based licensing for agentic AI, because the company is expecting longer-term gains from monetizing customers in new ways.

The company recently launched an Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA), which offers a flat, seat-based pricing model for its AI tools which customers seem to love.

Speaking at the recent Barclays 23rd Annual Global Technology Conference, company Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Milano alluded to the company's strategy of harnessing its positive customer relationships to boost monetization.

Salesforce is fine with seat-based AI agent pricing

Milano explained Salesforce is willing to take a profitability risk if customers end up heavily using the platform under the seat-based pricing, seeing this high usage as a sign of customer success. Customers will also be happy with the AELA model if they're heavy users, offering them greater value for money.

Pay-as-you-go pricing will still be available, but Salesforce expects most customers will probably prefer pre-committed spends on the AELA model to help them manage cashflows and budgets more clearly.

Then, there's the fact that Salesforce could offer "three or four times or 10 times more value" on agentic AI with upcoming developments, which would make it easier for the company to justify "three times, four times the ability to multiply the monetization on customers."

Milano explained that a high-net-worth customer on the AELA scheme getting extremely positive value for money is great news for the company. Yes, it might be losing money in the short-term, but "then I have another 20 years to monetize that customer... so I'm not worried about that."

Although in the short-term customers will largely be happy with flat, seat-based pricing instead of a fluctuating cost based on usage, critics argue the deeper customers get into an ecosystem, the more likely they are to experience vendor lock-in, which could ultimately end up the costlier route to acquire agentic AI capabilities.

• Salesforce CEO says the company can justify 3-4x price increases with up to 10x more valuable tools
• Customers prefer seat-based pricing for improved predictability
• The company isn't worried about reduced headcounts losing it per-seat subscriptions

Salesforce CEO Mac Benioff has alluded to a return to seat-based pricing for agentic AI, after the company experimented with usage and conversation-based models.

It seems that customers were demanding for predictability and flexibility in terms of pricing, and that they have so far been fond of the company's Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA).

"When we first started with Agentforce, we were talking about, oh, it's going to be so much per conversation... but customers have pushed for more flexibility," Benioff said in last week's earnings call.

What is the future of AI pricing?

Salesforce believes that there are also opportunities to charge more for artificial intelligence – customers could expect "three or four times or 10 times more value" from the company's products, so it could easily justify "three times, four times the ability to multiply the monetization on customers."

However AI comes at a cost, because it seems companies are buying the technology to improve worker output rather than replace them entirely, leaving them with two worker resource bills (human and AI). "In most companies, humans are also going to increase," Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Milano explained.

To this tune, Salesforce doesn't seem to be too bothered about charging on a per-seat basis, because companies aren't significantly dropping workers (and therefore seats).

Moreover, half (55%) of the companies that fired workers to replace them with AI said they regretted their decision in a survey earlier this year, and many leaders have even written off headcount decreases as a result of artificial intelligence.

On the flip side, it's Salesforce's customers who may not reap the rewards of seat-based pricing, with some users barely scratching the surface of the tools available, rendering their seats poor value for money.

Looking ahead, it's unclear how the landscape will play out, but a mix of seat-based and consumption-based pricing could be an effective way to ensure customer value.

Speculation about a revision to pricing strategies broke as the company posted a 9% year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue. Now in its fourth and final quarter of fiscal 2026, Salesforce has also upped its full-year revenue expectations from $41.45 billion to $41.55 billion.

At Salesforce’s World tour event this week at ExcelLondon, the company announced a host of new tools for its Agentforce platform - arriving alongside a quietly positive earnings report for Q3 in 2025.

Salesforce has revealed an impressive revenue of $10.3 billion this quarter - a 9% year-on-year increase. This has prompted a raise in the full-year revenue guidance to $41.5 billion. Unfortunately, this hasn’t translated into investor confidence in the way perhaps Salesforce might have hoped for - with a 29% drop in stock so far in 2025.

A core part of Salesforce’s ongoing strategy is Agentforce, the organization’s agentic AI wing which enables customers to deploy digital assistant-like models to interact with customers at scale. The latest offering is the launch of Agentforce 360 for the design and deployment of AI Agents for enterprise.

“It is an all new platform that connects your customers, your employees, your operations and your agents in a whole new way. We are transforming the enterprise just as we transformed CRM and it's all made possible thanks to a new reimagined Agent Force 360,” explains Zahra Bahrololoumi, UKI CEO at Salesforce in her keynote.

TechRadar Pro sat down with Executive Vice President and General Manager of Agentforce Marketing, Stephen Hammond to find out more.

Agentforce Marketing

“For several decades companies have all been trying to find ways to create a personalized relationship with their customers at scale,” Hammond explains.

“But the challenge is that a lot of that work to determine what would be the right kind of offer or message to put in front of someone, was basically guessed off of propensity modeling or machine scoring. There really wasn't a strong way for the individual to share what their interests were.”

Hammond continues to explain that organizations are often depending entirely on click and search patterns to derive a customer’s interests (archaic, I know). But, a new future is possible, he explains;

“With [AI] agents, they can tell you directly what they're looking for. Then we can have a response back that’s tied back into their profile, product offerings, marketing campaigns, and anything the company is running, even knowledge base as well - and then you can have an educated response back to you know meaningful customer relationships.”

This is, of course, where Agentforce 360 and data 360 come in. Existing customers now get access to this new technology that they can introduce to their platforms - which is now supported by data 360 and ‘intelligent context’.

‘The big message really is that with the addition of agents to marketing, brands can create a connection with their customers at a scale that wasn't possible before,” Hammond continues.

It’s all designed to make the experience as frictionless as possible for both enterprises and consumers. Virtual AI assistants, much like the customer service ‘bots’ we all know and love (!) can be built into a site - but with more autonomy in directing the customer.

A high stakes case study

This means we’ll probably start seeing a whole lot more customer service chatbots, even in industries you might not expect. In fact, Thames Valley police are currently trialing an AI Assistant ‘Bobbi’, for non-emergency questions that the force spends valuable time fielding.

It’s in the very, very early stages - having only been live for 8 days at the time we spoke to them. Simon Dodds, Chief Superintendent & Head of Contact Management for Thames Valley Police explained that they’ve seen very positive results since its rollout.

“Bobby's already helping out with [queries, such as}; ‘I found a phone, what do I do? I want to change my pay address, how do I go about it? And a parcel's been taken off my doorstep.’ Dodds explains.

This raises questions, for me, about the accountability structure. I asked Dodds about the eventuality that the LLM makes a mistake; fails to recognize a dangerous situation, offers incorrect advice to a user, or hallucinates (in a way we’re all familiar with AI doing). After all, proximity to the emergency services means the potential for high-stakes encounters.

‘It's [about] making sure that we've tested it - and we've put it through some quite significant testing. But I do say that our human operators will make mistakes, so Bobbie might make some mistakes and that's why we've got to make sure that we stay on top of the learning.’

This doesn’t, in my opinion, offer much insight into who is accountable if the AI does get it wrong - but the use case is clearly an interesting one that will develop as it is used more frequently.

As cybersecurity threats continue to grow in scale, sophistication and intent, it’s vital for organizations to understand the top actors, emerging risks and evolving techniques shaping the landscape to help strengthen cyber defenses.

A recent report by Bridewell highlights just how dynamic the adversarial environment has become over the past year.

Threat actors have shifted behaviors, refined their tooling and adapted their tactics.

Here are some key takeaways organizations need to know to contend with imminent threats.

The Rise of Data Theft and Extortion

Historically, ransomware tactics were primarily centered around encrypting victim data and demanding payment for decryption keys. However, recent attacks highlight a shift in tactics, with threat actors now prioritizing data theft and extortion by threatening to publish stolen information unless ransoms are paid.

This was witnessed in an attack on UK telecom provider Colt Technology Services, where the Warlock ransomware group exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint to infiltrate the company’s systems.

The attackers stole several hundred gigabytes of sensitive data, including employee salary information, financial records, customer contracts and network architecture details. As a result of not paying the ransom, the group subsequently posted a file list on a Russian Tor forum, offering over a million documents for sale.

Similarly, the Clop ransomware group demonstrated this shift in May 2023 by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the MOVEit file‑transfer software (CVE‑2023‑34362) to exfiltrate large volumes of data from hundreds of organizations, including high-profile companies such as the BBC and Boots. Rather than just encrypting systems, Clop threatened to publicly publish the stolen information via its leak site.

This evolution exploits the growing regulatory and reputational pressures organizations face, particularly in jurisdictions with strict privacy laws. While encryption-based attacks often result in larger individual ransom demands due to the urgency of restoring critical services. Also, improvements in data recovery and backup controls have inadvertently made data theft and extortion a more effective alternative for attackers.

The recent major data theft operations performed by hacker groups such as Scattered Spider and Shiny Hunters, who are related to a collective known as the “Com” or the “Community” have targeted large software service providers such as Salesforce and other companies that integrate with their platform. This has highlighted again the appetite to use data theft and extortion over deploying ransomware to encrypt the victims files.

Exploitation of Vulnerabilities and Edge Devices

Unpatched vulnerabilities in internet-facing systems and edge devices remain a primary attack vector for ransomware groups. Attackers are exploiting flaws in widely deployed technologies including VPNs, remote monitoring tools, and network appliances, to gain initial access into company systems. These vulnerabilities allow mass compromise at scale and are a major contributor to successful ransomware campaigns.

In 2024 infamous ransomware groups, Clop and Termite, emerged as highly proficient actors in carrying out attacks against managed file transfer services. Additionally, earlier this year, Clop targeted Cleo, the enterprise integration and managed file transfer software provider, by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2024-50623) in its integration software.

This attack affected over 80 organizations, primarily in the telecommunications and healthcare sectors, resulting in significant data exposure and operational disruption. More recently, we have seen several threat actors conducting widespread attacks targeting unpatched Fortinet, Cisco and Ivanti devices. This includes access brokers and affiliates associated with Qilin, Akira and Ransomhub ransomware groups.

VMware Targeting, EDR Killers and Offensive Tooling

Ransomware actors continue to target hypervisors such as VMware ESXi environments, with the intention of disrupting critical IT infrastructure quickly. Groups such as VanHelsing and DragonForce have been linked to recent attacks, actively employing this tactic in ongoing campaigns.

Meanwhile, the adversaries are shifting their efforts towards developing capabilities to evade Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems, known as ‘EDR killers’, which is often achieved by the abuse of vulnerable drivers or native software features.

The success of these attacks has been amplified by the increased use of Living-Off-the-Land Binaries (LOLBINs) and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools, another method used to evade EDR tools by enabling threat actors to blend in with normal system or environment operations to remain unnoticed, making detection and mitigation significantly more difficult for organizations.

Offensive security tools remain central to ransomware operations. Despite combined efforts by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), Fortra, and the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) in recent years to combat the use of authorized, legacy copies of Cobalt Strike, it remains the most widely used offensive security tool among ransomware operators.

While Fortra has reported an 80% reduction in unauthorized copies observed in the wild over the past two years, in reality the situation remains a cat-and-mouse game as malicious C2 infrastructure is removed from more reputable hosting providers, operators simply relocate it to less reputable ones.

Even so, this shift still presents some tactical advantages for defenders, as infrastructure hosted on lower-tier providers is more likely to be blocked by security products such as next-generation firewalls and web proxies.

Meanwhile, other offensive tools such as Metasploit, Sliver, Brute Ratel and more recently variants such as Pyramid C2, a Python-based command and control (C2) framework and Adaptix C2 are steadily gaining popularity.

Final thoughts

As we move into 2026, it’s clear that cybercriminals are becoming more agile, more opportunistic and more determined to exploit both technical weaknesses and organizational blind spots. With data‑theft‑first extortion models on the rise, increased targeting of edge devices, and the continued refinement of EDR‑evading tools, defenders face a rapidly evolving challenge that demands equal adaptability.

Organizations must prioritize proactive patching, strengthen monitoring across hybrid environments and invest in threat intelligence that keeps pace with adversaries’ shifting tactics. Those that build resilience now, through preparedness, visibility and robust incident response, will be best positioned to withstand the threats that lie ahead.

Find the best Antivirus Software: expert reviews, testing, and rankings.

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has abruptly ditched ChatGPT for Google Gemini 3
• He made the switch after trying Gemini 3 for just two hours
• Benioff praised Gemini 3’s speed, reasoning, and multimodal capabilities as a major leap forward

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has fallen head over heels for Gemini 3 and has publicly dumped ChatGPT in the process. His announcement left much of the AI world reeling. After just two hours playing with Gemini 3, a top enterprise software leader disavowed the most popular AI chatbot in favor of its rapidly ascending rival.

The post wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t hedged with polite comparisons or neutral optimism. Not only has one of the most visible enterprise figures in Silicon Valley crossed from OpenAI to Google, but he's also made a point of telling the world.

Gemini 3 has attracted plenty of other accolades for its blending of Google DeepMind’s latest advances into a single unified architecture. Gemini 3 supports text, images, code, audio, and video in one interface. Gemini 3 is well-positioned to take ChatGPT's crown for go-to AI chatbot in many ways.

Though ChatGPT's ubiquity made it feel inevitable, Benioff’s post suggests that inevitability has an expiration date. In a matter of hours, one of its most prominent evangelists defected. That says more about the pace of AI evolution than any leaderboard or benchmark can.

AI rivalry heating up

Benioff isn’t just some casual early adopter. Salesforce has deeply integrated AI into its products and business strategy. It was among the first enterprise giants to partner with OpenAI for productivity tools embedded in customer relationship software. When Benioff makes a personal leap like this, it carries the weight of corporate alignment. And if Gemini 3 is now the model he's defaulting to, the software stacks around him may follow suit.

Gemini 3’s strengths seem to match what high-frequency users like Benioff look for in terms of speed, reasoning, and flexibility. Google has been clear that Gemini 3 was built to function as a flexible engine for both consumers and developers, able to power everything from helpdesk bots to video editing suggestions. That breadth may be what tipped the scales for Benioff, whose day likely involves toggling between datasets, dashboards, and vision decks at Silicon Valley warp speed.

It's a good reminder that the AI landscape is getting more competitive. There’s a growing chorus of contenders scrambling to make your AI assistant. For people who casually check in with ChatGPT every so often, nothing has to change overnight. But Benioff’s public conversion offers a peek into how quickly even entrenched preferences can give way to the promise of sharper tools.

• Google Threat Intelligence Group says the Gainsight breach may have impacted 200+ Salesforce instances
• Attack stems from the August 2025 Salesloft breach, where OAuth tokens were stolen and abused by Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters
• SHL claims victims include Atlassian, CrowdStrike, LinkedIn, and others, though none have confirmed compromise

Google’s security experts believe the recent Gainsight breach may have left more than 200 companies, and the data they stored through Salesforce, compromised.

Salesforce recently confirmed seeing “unusual activity” involving Gainsight-published applications connected to its systems. At the time, it said some of the apps may have enabled unauthorized access to certain customers’ Salesforce data”, which forced it to revoke all active access and refresh token associated with Gainsight-published applications connected to Salesforce, and to temporarily remove the apps from its AppExchange.

The media discovered that the attack was the result of the August 2025 Salesloft breach. A group of criminals, known as "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters" (SLH), stole OAuth tokens Salesloft used for its Drift AI chat integration with Salesforce, which gave them direct API access to customers’ Salesforce data. Among this data were Gainsight’s files as well, which led to today’s attack.

Scattered Lapsus Hunters

Now, Austin Larsen, the Principal Threat Analyst with Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, told TechCrunch the company “is aware of more than 200 potentially affected Salesforce instances."

The publication made contact with the group via Telegram, which took responsibility for the attack, and said that it affects Atlassian, CrowdStrike, Docusign, F5, GitLab, LinkedIn, Malwarebytes, SonicWall, Thomson Reuters, and Verizon.

TechCrunch reached out to most of the companies on SHL’s list, and while some did not reply, others simply said they were investigating the claims. None confirmed the breach, but they also did not outright deny it, only stating that there is currently no evidence to support the argument.

Just like the Salesloft attack, the Gainsight incident has little to do with Salesforce, which has stated there is “no indication that this issue resulted from any vulnerability in the Salesforce platform”.

• Gainsight apps enabled unauthorized Salesforce data access, prompting token revocation and AppExchange removal
• Incident linked to August 2025 Salesloft breach, where OAuth tokens exposed 1.5 billion records
• ShinyHunters used stolen secrets to steal Gainsight customer contact and licensing data

The Salesloft Drift incident seems to have trickled downstream into Gainsight, resulting in hundreds more organizations potentially losing their sensitive data to hackers.

Salesforce has confirmed it saw “unusual activity” involving Gainsight-published applications connected to Salesforce.

Salesforce says that some of these apps “may have enabled unauthorized access to certain customers’ Salesforce data”, which forced it to revoke all active access and refresh token associated with Gainsight-published applications connected to Salesforce. Furthermore, it temporarily removed the apps from its AppExchange.

ShinyHunters claim responsibility

“There is no indication that this issue resulted from any vulnerability in the Salesforce platform,” the announcement reads. “The activity appears to be related to the app’s external connection to Salesforce. We have notified known affected customers directly and will continue to provide updates as appropriate.”

Gainsight is a company building a “customer success” platform through which businesses can manage and improve their post-sales relationships with customers (such as onboarding, adoption, retention, or renewal).

The company also builds different apps and integrations, some of which run natively inside Salesforce, while others connect through APIs.

At the same time, BleepingComputer claims the incident is actually a continuation of the August 2025 Salesloft breach.

This saw a group of criminals known as "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters" stole OAuth tokens Salesloft used for its Drift AI chat integration with Salesforce, which gave them direct API access to customers’ Salesforce data.

Using the stolen tokens, they accessed around 760 Salesforce instances, and exfiltrated 1.5 billion records, including passwords, AWS keys, and Snowflake tokens.

Now, a member of that same group, ShinyHunters, told the publication they broke into Gainsight by using secrets stolen in the Salesloft incident.

Gainsight also confirmed that attack, and said the miscreants took business contact details such as names, business email addresses, phone numbers, regional/location details, licensing information, and support case contents.

• Salesforce data finds 84% agree they need a total data strategy overhaul to benefit from agentic AI
• 70% believe their most valuable insights are in siloed/unusable data
• Zero-copy architecture matches AI with data where it resides

New Salesforce data has found three-quarters (76%) of business leaders feel pressure to deliver business value with data, but incomplete, outdated or low-quality data is preventing them from being able to do so.

As a result, most (84%) agree their strategies now need a complete overhaul to succeed with AI.

It’s not just about being able to do more with data, either, because half (49%) of the data leaders surveyed admitted they’ve sometimes reached incorrect conclusions due to poor context.

Yet again, we’re hearing that data is key to AI success

Two in five (42%) noted poor confidence in the accuracy and relevancy of AI outputs, with data leaders estimating that around a quarter (26%) of their organizational data is untrustworthy.

“For organizations ready to execute at scale, this is the moment to shore up data foundations to confidently scale AI to its full potential to deliver real value and ROI,” Salesforce Chief Data Officer Michael Andrew explained.

Around one-fifth (19%) of company data is believed to be siloed or unusable, and yet 70% believe their most valuable insights reside within that 19%.

Among the most severe impact risks of data silos and trapped data are compliance risks, hindered decision-making and a lack of a unified view of both customers and the business.

CEO Marc Benioff described agentic AI as revolutionary. “You’ve got to get your data right,” he stressed.

Salesforce sees value in zero-copy architecture in the future of data, whereby AI can access the data where it resides without having to move, copy or duplicate it.

More than half (56%) say they’ve already started to adopt zero copy, and many are already seeing the benefits. Adopters see customer service quality rise above the industry standard, and many are also ahead of schedule in terms of AI initiatives compared with their counterparts.

“The organizations treating data and AI as an integrated strategy are the ones who will successfully move from pilots to execution to see AI deliver significant impact,” Andrew concluded.

AI is now a common presence in enterprises across the world, helping transform workflows for employees and customers alike, bringing in new levels of productivity and efficiency.

But, in order to unlock these benefits, your business has to still make sure it is utilizing and enforcing AI correctly, not just doing it because everyone else is.

At the recent Dreamforce 2025 event, Salesforce was understandably keen to show off its dominance and expertise when it comes to all things AI - and it seems a lot of this confidence comes from within.

The Agentic Enterprise

"We are expanding into the enterprise in a big way,” Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, President & CTO of Engineering, Salesforce, told me at Dreamforce.

“Previously we were always just relegated to saying you are only doing sales, or service marketing - but now we are going beyond that, we're managing customers, we're managing employees, and we're going to be managing operations...and most excitingly, we're managing agents as well! All managed by our unified platform.”

The theme of Dreamforce 2025 was arguably that of the "agentic enterprise" idea - with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declaring simply deploying enterprise AI models is no longer enough for businesses if these solutions aren't integrated and grounded in proper governance.

Krishnaprasad agrees, noting, “for a SaaS company like Salesforce, we're making AI useful, just like we did making the dotcom useful for the enterprise, and we believe this is the best way to get AI working for the enterprise.”

A large part of that comes from being customer zero for these new agents and AI tools, as Benioff had highlighted how the company “is on the journey” with its customers to the age of the agentic enterprise.

Krishnaprasad highlights the work his team did around the initial launch of Agentforce in 2024, building and launching agents on its help site in just a few weeks - agents which have, in a year, handled more than 1.8 million conversations, freeing up human support workers for potentially more crucial cases.

There have been well-publicized concerns around the effectiveness of AI tools in some areas, with Krishnaprasad noting an MIT study showing 95% of AI projects fail.

“You can't just take an LLM and throw it at a problem,” he notes, “(but) this is a constant fear we all have as humans - when the dotcom came we all feared for our jobs, when Tesla introduced auto driving, we all wondered what would happen - but the reality is - humans are the best at adapting - over millennia, we have adapted to so many different things."

“We used to look back after electricity came in and say, imagine the pre-electricity days - it changed our whole race, right? AI is going to do the same, and we shouldn’t be fearing it, because it’s just going to make us better - because guess what? We have so many drugs left to discover, so many processes we can make better.”

Krishnaprasad does paint an optimistic view of the future where AI agents and systems work alongside humans to maximize the potential of each other. He highlights findings which claims 40% of a developer’s life is maintaining code, meaning these workers are often stuck with maintaining old code rather than creating something new.

“This is where, if AI can really help solve a whole bunch of issues there, imagine what new things we can create in just 20 years,” he says.

“This acceleration is happening because of technology, and with AI, it’s just going to go even faster…we will be able to leave out the drudgeries of maintenance, instead focusing on innovation, new ways of interacting, new ways of helping our human race together.”

At Dreamforce 2025, AI was undoubtedly the main attraction, with the company’s Agentforce platform leading the way.

However another huge presence at the show was Slack, and its upgraded AI assistant, Slackbot, which promises to help unlock productivity for workers at all levels - with increased intelligence and context awareness.

With Slack now a common online collaboration tool in businesses across the globe, how can it utilize this new AI era to become more than just a place to chat and share memes with your co-workers? I spoke to Ryan Gavin, Slack CMO at the show, to find out.

Agents + humans = the perfect match?

“The truth is that it's absolutely, fundamentally clear, with every customer we talk to, every partner we speak with - agents will be core to how we work in the future,” Gavin told me at Dreamforce 2025, “some of the most innovative companies out there right now are completely building out a digital workforce with agents.”

But in order to become smarter and ultimately, more useful, agents need context in order to better understand the information they are being presented with, as Gavin says, “agents are trained on data, but that context is what turns agents into true teammates - and that context lives in conversations, and those conversations live in Slack”

“This is where we start to move beyond the hype cycle - and really see companies who are innovating and building new capabilities,” says Gavin.

When it comes to the possibilities of what AI and agents can do for businesses - this is where Slack comes in. At Dreamforce, the company made a hard pitch to become a true enterprise OS.

Gavin notes many companies are already dealing with tens or even hundreds of apps - which are all likely to give birth to agents imminently, if they haven’t already - and Slack can be the place where these agents live, integrating seamlessly into a familiar interface, removing friction, and boosting productivity for workers.

“The most natural place to bring agents is right next to the humans,” he says, “we talk about Slack being a great host - and part of that is saying, how do I not make you think? How do you get to use these agents at work and not make you think.”

“All those agents need a home - and Slack is a perfect home for them…a place for all of those to come together…a work operating system for your organization, and that means we’re open - so it’s just as easy for me to launch a Teams meeting from Slack as it is for Zoom, as it is for Google Meet - all of those things integrate agents that can work across platforms, and can be great hosts inside of Slack.”

All hail Slackbot

Slackbot was another major announcement at Dreamforce, with Gavin noting that the AI assistant had “gone viral” with all the attention it was receiving.

“The reason is, it knows me,” he says, “unlike all the other AI assistants or even many of the agents out there - Slackbot knows.”

“It makes me instantly smart about whatever subject matter is being talked about in the room…I can say things like, 'what is my team working on right now?' - it has the context, it knows who my team is, they can understand that from the context of the channels that I’m working in, and can then go through and compile insights…instantly I’m getting a true productivity upgrade (and) this is going to be a real game-changer.”

Slack’s Peter Doolan had mentioned “AI superpowers” in the company’s keynote, and Gavin notes how the consumer expectation of how we get things done is now increasingly becoming the norm at work too - “I can’t remember the last time I went to a website to find information - I just expect my phone to be able to tell me,” he says.

“The idea of AI integrated across Slack isn't about whizzbang tools, it's about how do you take these things, and the expectation of work now and bring that seamlessly inside.”

“In the flow of work and Slack, I want native AI right there just to make everything smarter, faster, a little bit easier…it goes back to one of Slack’s fundamental principles from a product perspective, which is, ‘don't make me think’...just work the way you work today, but just do it in a way where AI is here, and it's not a new tool to learn, it’s just right there.”

“Slack brings a new dimension to data...which is the AI gold for agents, as it provides context.”

Ultimately, at the heart of productivity is growth, Gavin notes - and although unlocking this across a whole business can be incredibly tough, the rewards can be huge.

“What you’re seeing now is a democratization of access to capability,” he says, “so you may be incredible with analytics and numbers, but maybe you’re not so creative. Well guess what? Here’s a creative agent that can help you generate, and write that email a little bit better…you still have your capabilities, but now you get to have these superpowers!”

“The businesses that think about how to maximise the potential of their employees are going to be the businesses that grow the fastest.”

Looking forward, Gavin says he’s excited by the fact that some of the world’s biggest and oldest companies are leaning into transformation ideas, and the need to reimagine how they work in order to survive and grow.

“All these AI capabilities are unbelievable, and they’re empowering all of us,” Gavin notes, “we're still filling our time, but what we’re finding is that we're filling our time with that more meaningful work.”

“We’re now seeing the reality - the vision of Slack as the front end for Agentforce 360 platform and CRM, where talking to your data is as easy as you and I having a conversation.”

“I have no doubt the next coolest startups are going to build in Slack.”

With AI now playing a central role in most businesses, the question of where we go next with adoption and evolution is becoming increasingly pertinent for many firms.

Salesforce has been bolder than most in pushing forward the AI revolution, and at its recent Dreamforce 2025 event in San Francisco, agents and the possibilities they offer were top of the agenda.

To find out more about the effects businesses can really expect, we spoke to Salesforce UK&I CEO Zahra Bahrololoumi.

"A profound next chapter"

“The combination of AI with robotics and operational technology in our physical environment will be a profound next chapter,” Bahrololoumi told TechRadar Pro at a media Q&A roundtable at Dreamforce 2025.

Asked by TechRadar Pro if she still backed her claim made earlier in 2025 at the company’s London Agentforce World Tour event that the potential of AI is bigger than that of the Internet, Bahrololoumi agreed wholeheartedly.

“We have to go through that in every innovation cycle,” she said. “We adapt and adjust, and AI is embedded now. I don’t think we will go back, the people who will thrive will be the ones who work with AI responsibly.”

Bahrololoumi has always been a big supporter of skills training and development, and was keen to emphasise the importance of encouraging and building up newcomers to the workforce - even with the risk of AI taking over many of the roles in so-called lower skilled jobs.

This is despite Salesforce as a whole apparently looking to cut human workers in favor of AI tools - with CEO Marc Benioff recently revealing the company has already reduced customer support roles by around 50% as a result of its own internal success with agentic AI tools.

“I think it's interesting why we've seen this surge, because a commercial business or a mid-market business will not have the resources readily available to scale humans,” Bahrololoumi said.

“And yet they are growing because they're taking advantage of the technology that can enable them to grow and decouple that growth from headcount.”

“Our message here is: do not sacrifice your entry-level jobs because you do need people that can work through that function, that process that can work alongside the AI to be able to manage and lead that composition of digital and human capital,” Bahrololoumi added.

“If companies eliminate entry-level hiring, they will not have the right skill profile to be able to orchestrate and manage the duality, or maybe the multimodality, that will be our future.”

Overall, Bahrololoumi had a positive view of Salesforce’s potential in the UK, which she noted is the third biggest AI market, after the US and China - potential boosted by the recent acquisition of Convergence.ai, giving the UK arm an engineering and R&D capability outside of North America locally within the region.

• Slack unveils range of updated tools and services at Dreamforce 2025
• Rebuilt Slackbot is at the center, with conversational inputs and more
• New Salesforce integrations will make it easier to find all the information you need in one location

Slack has revealed a host of new innovations as it bids to become "the agentic operating system" and the home of all your business AI agents.

The online collaboration tool wants to help enterprises integrate AI agents and CRM data to enhance productivity and accelerate business growth - with a completely rebuilt and souped-up Slackbot at the center, giving users unparalleled access to their data.

This will also give users the ability to communicate in conversational tones with Slack, making it easier to get the information or services you need.

"A full reimagine"

"Slack is already an agentic operating system - think about it, it's where your people work," Slack CEO Denise Dresser said in her keynote at Dreamforce 2025.

"This is not a big grandiose vision I'm unveiling - this is a reality," she added, "this is not just about getting work done...this is about a full reimagine."

The new era of Slack looks to be an interface for all your interactions with Salesforce, with new, purpose-built experiences for Agentforce Sales, IT and HR Service, and Tableau.

But it's Slackbot which takes center stage, aiming to be what the company says is your "personalized AI companion", able to look at all the vital context in your business data to give richer and more helpful answers.

Along with other Salesforce platforms, Slackbot can connect to a range of third-party tools, including the likes of Google Drive, Asana and even Microsoft Teams.

When a user opens Slack, they will now be given a list of daily priorities and status reports, but Slackbot can also create a project plan from a canvas or a meeting transcript, find information when you only remember a few details, and help you prepare for meetings like never before.

Also speaking at Dreamforce 2025, Peter Doolan, EVP and chief customer officer at Slack, declared, "we want to make things as simple and pleasant and productive as possible," Doolan notes, outlining its aim to "give every employee AI superpowers".

“Imagine the power of Slackbot across your companies: it gives you the power of context and AI in the flow of work," he added, "This is what AI was meant to be."

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has declared the age of the "agentic enterprise", with AI playing a larger role than ever before for firms of all sizes.

The company co-founder and CEO opened Dreamforce 2025 with a typically rambunctious keynote as he talked through its latest round of updates and releases - top of which was the new Agentforce 360 platform.

But top of mind, of course, was the growing role of AI tools for enterprises, as human workers and agents will have to work together in this mix - which Salesforce calls the 'Agentic Enterprise'.

AI all over

Welcoming attendees to, “the biggest, most exciting Dreamforce ever”, Benioff was in a typically charismatic mood, racing through the huge amounts of new additions to Salesforce’s platforms at a rapid pace.

Benioff noted there is a "very real" divide in using agentic AI, adding that simply deploying enterprise AI models isn't enough, if solutions aren't integrated and grounded in proper governance.

"This agentic divide is split – it's a bifurcation. Your customers are elevated, now what about your enterprise?"

"We want to connect with our customers in a brand new way...the rate and growth of innovation has been awesome," Benioff noted.

However he highlighted that when at home on his phone, “using amazing AI and LLMs”, the experience is “so much worse” when he gets to the office and logs on to AI tools there.

Salesforce wants to play a key role in advancing AI technology, particularly when it comes to Agentforce, Benioff added, saying, “What we realized at Salesforce is we have to be customer zero…we have to be able to go from one, to two, to three, to four, to five and show you what we're doing.”

“We do 11 trillion emails a year at Salesforce, but each of those emails is a one way conversation - but what if each of those emails was a two-way conversation?”

"AI alone is not enough. It's not enough just to have an LLM. It needs (Agentforce) capabilities to connect it, to give it the context, to give it the guardrails, and all of the critical pieces.”

“You have got to get your data right. You have got to get to more integrated solutions. You have got to get the priorities right. You have to get the governance right.”

“We all saw that just making our own models or rolling it ourselves, or DIYing it, isn’t going to do it. We need to be doing our work at Salesforce for you, and we need to all be on this journey together to get to this Better Place. That in our vision, is the Agentic Enterprise.”

"This is the next revolution,” Benioff declared, “we've gone through predictive AI, and we're now entering this new agentic AI revolution."

Benioff highlighted how the company has continued its 1% pledge, where it donates 1% equity, 1% of its time, and 1% of its product to good causes, including a new $30 million committed to education and AI literacy - meaning Salesforce has now given away $841 million, committed to 10 million nonprofit hours, $300 million in reskilling training and $150 million for local schools in San Francisco and Oakland.

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Salesforce has announced Agentforce 360, a new platform designed to help businesses adopt the "Agentic Enterprise".

Covering everything from sales leads to IT tickets, Agentforce 360 uses new levels of AI to improve efficiency and the overall customer experience using the latest agentic technology.

"We've gone faster with Agentforce than we've gone with any of our other technology," said Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO and founder, announcing the launch at the company's Dreamforce 2025 event in San Francisco - a year since the initial release of Agentforce as a product.

Agentforce 360 arrives

The Agentforce 360 Platform is the latest release of Agentforce, designed for building, controlling, and deploying enterprise AI agents at scale. It aims to provide controlled, contextual, and consistent experiences for customer and employee interactions, accelerating the path from AI prototypes to production-scale agents.

It will provide an easier way for companies to build agents and rapidly deploy them across their workforce using a conversational interface, hopefully allowing users to build exactly the services they require.

Working alongside Salesforce's other platforms - Data 360, Customers 360 and Slack, Salesforce hopes the launch will help customers lower costs and become more productive, as it also integrates with a host of third-party tools.

"This is the next revolution...we've gone through predictive AI, and we're now entering this new agentic AI revolution," Benioff added.

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Dreamforce 2025 is officially a wrap!

It was a packed few days - we kicked off with the traditional opening keynote from Salesforce Chair, CEO & Co-Founder Marc Benioff, who also hosted 1:1 talks with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai

If you missed any of the show, you can catch up with our live coverage below.

• "This is the next revolution” - Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff hails the arrival of the 'agentic enterprise'
• Salesforce Agentforce 360 looks to take your company data to the next level
• “This is what AI was meant to be” - Slack reveals major AI boost for Slackbot to supercharge your work

Good morning from San Francisco ahead of our live coverage of Dreamforce 2025!

The event kicks off tomorrow (Tuesday 14) so today we'll be getting prepped and ready, and will try and get some photos of the campground to see what's in store!

Sadly it's a miserable day in San Francisco, lots of wind and rain - so hopefully things will cheer up tomorrow!

We've just been to pick up our badge, but have been told by Salesforce we can't share any pictures of it on here - so you'll just have to imagine it...

The usual "campground" build is taking shape at the Moscone conference center - we'll get some more pictures of it tomorrow morning.

Good morning! After yesterday's apocalytpic rain here in California, we're all set and ready for Dreamforce 2025.

This morning's keynote starts at 10am PT/12pm ET/6pm BST, and we'll try and grab a good spot to hear all the news and announcements from Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff.

For now though...coffee time!

We've made it to the Dreamforce campground - time for some breakfast, then it's off to the keynote.

If you've never been to Dreamforce before, the scale of the event is massive - it takes over most of downton San Francisco.

Our press lounge overlooks the "Dreampark" at the Yerba Buena conference center, to give you some idea of the scale...

We're off to the keynote now, the crowds are already massing, even though we're less than an hour out...

If you're familiar with Salesforce, you'll know they love a mascot - and the full roster is out and in force this morning - Astro, Codey, Appy (no, we haven't made those up) all present and correct.

We're in and seated - it's already busy, with Marc Benioff set to take to the stage in about half an hour...

Next it's time for the traditional Akaka Ohana welcome - another Dreamforce tradition that looks to start the event with a moment of thanks and wellness.

It's nearly showtime - after a few customer interviews to get the crowd warmed up, it's time for a quick look at Slack - but more to come on that later...

Slack CEO Denise Dresser is up next, to talk us through how OpenAI is using Slack.

Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, runs us through how the company was built on Slack, allowing for constant evolution and productivity gains.

"It's the way modern companies work," he notes.

There's a slightly scary robot sitting in the front row opposite us - a taste of things to come?

It's go time - after an introductory video voiced by (who else) Hollywood royalty and Salesforce VIP Matthew McConaghey, marking a year of Agentforce, the lights come up, and Marc Benioff, Salesforce co-founder and CEO, takes to the stage.

"This is going to the biggest, most exciting Dreamforce ever!" Benioff exclaims as he walks right past us.

Benioff runs us through the key values Salesforce was built on - trust, customer success, innovation, equality and sustainability.

He introduces a video from the late Jane Gooddall, who spoke at Dreamforce last year, espousing the values of sustainability.

Benioff highlights how Salesforce still dedicates 1% equity, 1% of its time, and 1% of its product to good causes, including a new $30 million committed to education and AI literacy.

"We want to connect with our customers in a brand new way...the rate and growth of innovation has been awesome," Benioff notes.

But he notes that when at home on his phone, using amazing AI and LLMs, the difference is so much worse when he gets to the office.

"This ia the next revolution...we've gone through predictive AI, and we're now entering this new agentic AI revolution."

Benioff collars Brad Lightcap from OpenAI again to ask about the company's AI plans, then outlines "the agentic divide".

"If you don't have your data right, your're not going to get your AI right," he notes.

"We're going to this icnredible new world...as the technology elevates us not just as individuals, but also as organizations."

"We have to be there to make it work, that's why humans and agents have to drive customer success together."

"We have to be ground zero...and customer zero," Benioff adds, marking the first year of Agentforce, launched at Dreamforce 2024.

He notes how Salesforce Help is powered by Agentforce, and has already powered 1.8 million conversations.

"We've gone faster with Agentforce than we've gone with any of our other technology."

Context is key, Benioff says, allowing companies to get the most out of their data.

Its new Agentforce 360 platform looks to offer a fully connected way to reach customers, employees, operations and agents in a whole new way.

Here's the classic Salesforce wheel - showing off the sheer amount of platforms the company offers - now all underpinned by Agentforce 360.

"What if everyone had the power to build agentic enteprises?" Benioff says, leaving the stage, as it's time for demos.

First up - Agentforce Vibes, which can build anything with Salesforce "from just a description".

"For the first time now, our people, our AI, our business and our ideas all speak the same language," Patrick Stokes tells us.

After Salesforce Vibes, Benioff is back, noting how AI is elevating every aspect of developer's work, and the enterprise as a whole.

"That is what is really exciting right now," he says, "but AI is not enough - you need all these capabilities to connect it, give it the context, give it the guardrails."

We're now looking at five customer examples to see just how the agentic enterprise looks in practice.

Agentforce Voice and Agentforce Builder are among the new tools getting a big shout-out, along with Agent Script, which allows AI to be deterministic when it needs to be.

Another live demo next - we're looking at how Agentforce Service can help improve customer service tickets, making it a much more pleasant experience for everyone involved.

Next up, it's a deeper look at the Agentic Enterprise with jewellery store Pandora, and how it has been using Agentforce Commerce to give customers a personal shopping agent to give more of a personal touch.

Next, it's a look at Pepsico - which needs no introduction - and how it is using Agentforce Sales and Agentforce Field Service to improve marketing, sales and field services.

Next, we hear from FedEx, and how it is using Data 360 - the next generation of Data Cloud, and Agentforce IT Service - and how it is replacing tickets with instant, AI-powered support.

Finally, its time to hear from Dell Technologies, and how it is using Agentforce Supply Chain to speed up deliveries and logistics with AI.

Company founder and CEO Michael Dell is here, and Benioff pulls him up to ask about the future of agentic AI in businesses.

Dell names understanding a company's processes as a key consideration - find out what really matters, and start with the big projects.

Benioff also asks Dell about his inspiration on pushing AI forward, and what he sees for the future of his company.

Dell says AI can help unleash the power of "dark data" that went unnoticed before, so this is a great time to look at the trajectory of change in the industry - moving from calculating and computing, to thinking and machines that are thinking for us.

All companies will have to rethink and reimagine their ways of doing business to stay relevant, Dell says.

Customer stories done - we now turn to look at exactly how you build an agentic enteprise.

The Agentforce Ecosystem numbers a frankly ridiculous amount of companies, so customers should find plenty to work with, Benioff notes.

And that's a wrap! Benioff thanks us all for coming and sends us out into the conference - but we'll be back shortly, with more from Mr Benioff too - so stay tuned for that.

We're back in the press lounge now, but about to be joined by a few special guests - Marc Benioff will be here shortly for a Q&A session alongside a few customers.

Benioff is joined by all of the customers from the keynotes - so it should be an interesting discussion...

"The rate of technology innovation far exceeds the rate of technology adoption," Benioff notes.

After a brief intro, it's into the questions - first up, how do you help customers keep up with this pace of innovation?

Benioff says it's about constant communication with customers to find out their needs, as well as feedback from both humans and agents - something the company didn't even really have this time next year.

"A year ago Agentforce was a product - now, it's a platform," he notes.

"It's beyond our expectation - we are all listening to customers more deeply," he adds.

Next up, Benioff is asked about a...troublesome interview he recently gave, and what he thinks about Trump's recent crackdown on visas, and the need for extra protection in San Francisco.

Benioff says he hopes we're all having a happy and safe time at Dreamforce, and notes the company has brought in outside police to keep things secure.

"That is the number one thing that's on my mind - safety."

Next up, a question about customers not feeling like they are ready for AI - how does Benioff sell it to them?

"This is the moment we are in for technology," Benioff notes, "this is the moment where the technology is outstripping customer adoption...and we want to show them customers who are front-runners in this - their stories are so critical and compelling, that's what we have to profile."

A question about the "agentic enterprise" next - how does Salesforce help push this?

Benioff calls on Pepsico to talk about its experience using the Salesforce ecosystem, noting it wants to be the orchestrator, using a prime partner like Salesforce.

Another Agentforce adoption question - Benioff is asked if the numbers we heard earlier are strictly correct, and he hits back with what he says is the latest figures, claiming impressive, fast growth.

"I've never seen anything grow faster - which means we've had to go faster," he says.

Another tick for the Dreamforce bingo card - a little dig at Oracle, and Benioff's great rival Larry Ellison, as Benioff notes the two companies have clashing conferences this week.

A financials question next - when will Salesforce hit $50bn revenues (Benioff told us it hit $41.3bn this year)?

More details on this will be coming soon, Benioff says.

Next a question about partnerships - particularly OpenAI, what's the situation there?

With a laugh, Benioff answers that OpenAI is "an incredible company" and he and Sam Altman have known each other a long time.

"For a lot of customers, they're working with us to consume that technology - but they don't have the means to deploy it," he says, noting that Salesforce can help bring OpenAI to others.

Benioff bids us farewell, as he's running late to film a segment for Good Morning America, and with that, it's time for lunch here.

Next up, we're in and seated at the Slack keynote, to hear everything new from the online collaboration platform.

Slack announced a host of new additions and services earlier this week, so we'll likely get an update on those - let's see...

Our host today - Slack CEO Denise Dresser - welcomes us in, promising a keynote full of innovation and breakthrough customers.

She says the aim with Slack is "breaking boundaries" in how we all work, with AI bringing in unlimited potential for human workers.

"I've never experienced anything like this," she says, "This takes a completely different mindset, this is about fundamentally reimangining from the ground up"

"Slack is already an agentic operating system - think about it, it's where your people work," Dresser emphasises.

"This is not a big grandiose vision I'm unveiling - this is a reality," she says.

"This is not just about getting work done...this is about a full reimagine," she says, harking back to this morning's keynote.

First customer story of the day - General Motors VP and CISO Mike Hanley is up on stage to talk about its innovation story.

He notes that the company wants a "completely different way of working" that allows for maximized productivity and efficiency - and now boasts 96,000 users on Slack, sending 2 million messages on the average work day.

Dresser moves on to talk about Slack's new features and additions, and to kick this off, introduces Parker Harris, Salesforce Co-founder and Slack CTO to the stage.

Harris notes that every Salesforce cloud is going to be in Slack, with Agentforce set to play a central role going forward.

After a demo of some of Agentforce working in Slack, Harris moves on to Slack's own AI features, and introduces Peter Doolan, EVP & Chief Customer Officer, Slack, on stage.

"We want to make things as simple and pleasant and productive as possible," Doolan notes, outlining its aim to "give every employee AI superpowers".

Slack's aim is to keep users in the platform at all times - bringing in information from platforms such as Google Drive, Asana and even Microsoft Teams in one place.

Slackbot was probably the most striking of all Slack's new launches, linking in to all of your conversations, files and workflows to get you the information you need.

Doolan, playing a manager at Slack customer Anthropic, shows us a demo showcases what Slackbot can do, right from the very start of your working day, with the tool getting to grips with complex work issues and questions.

"Here's how be bring the power of AI forward," Doolan notes, showing how even complex, multi-layered questions can be tackled by Slackbot.

After this, Doolan calls up Rob Seamon, chief product officer for Slack, to look at how Slack can help unify your entire enterprise into one agentic OS.

"We want to be the home for all agents, and we think Slack is the best home for all agents," he notes.

Seaman notes all agents should be able to work in Slack as someone you can DM and add to channels, bringing a whole new horizon to your data work.

After a demo with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Seaman throws it back to Denise Dresser to wrap things up.

"Hopefully you can see you have the power with Slack and Saleasforce to truly build an agentic OS system," she says.

"We are reimagining the future of work together - the future is right now."

And with that, it's a wrap! We're off to get some fresh air and recharge, but will be back shortly.

Good morning from day two at Dreamforce 2025!

We're off to the conference shortly for another busy day, but as a reminder, here's what we saw yesterday...

- "This is the next revolution” - Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff hails the arrival of the 'agentic enterprise'

- Salesforce Agentforce 360 looks to take your company data to the next level

Sadly it's another grey and drizzly day in San Francisco - the perfect weather to be indoors for some tech keynotes, perhaps?

First up - a press Q&A with Slack CEO Denise Dresser, along with Salesforce chief people officer Natalie Scardino.

So, what can AI agents actually do in the workforce?

Scardino notes that low-skilled tasks in sales and services are easy meat for AI agents, allowing human workers to be more productive.

Dresser adds that coding is another key area, allowing engineers and developers to focus on the tasks that really matter without getting distracted by admin or paperwork.

Moving from simply suggesting, agents are all about taking action now, she says.

The new currency for scale and growth is going to be intelligence, Dresser notes - as agents will be able to unlock new levels of potential.

It will also change the way we have to work - AI is a growth imperative, and every CEO should be thinking about how they are going to transform their business.

There's a new vector of growth - one that will reimagine everything, she notes.

"It's bigger than anything we've ever experienced," Dresser notes.

Scardino adds that using AI is no longer a question - "every job is being redesigned," she says.

What's new at Slack? Dresser runs us through a selection of the key announcements this week, and how Slack looked to bring in a new way of intuitive working.

Now, customers have said they want an agentic working platform, she notes, avoiding siloed chaos, as unlocking new capabilities in the age of AI needs such a one-stop shop.

"People want to work in a conversational way," she notes.

Moving to talk about people and HR - how will agents affect these incredibly personal areas?

Scardino notes that new entrants at Salesforce often ask what tools are available before joining the company - and says there are a whole host of new jobs right now which simply didn't exist six months ago.

"Our empolyees don't want to know a thousand agents - they just want one," she says.

What does an entry-level job look like at Salesforce and Slack given its AI focus?

Scardino says new grads are being hired at scale, with 1,000 interns also welcomed over summer 2025. The level of awareness and AI digital skills is on the rise, which is encouraging, she says.

What can agents do better? Dresser says she's very empathetic with them, but says she is looking forward to having a digital human twin soon - having a personal digital assistant with her at all times.

Robotics is also another key growth she says - particularly helping those with disabilities.

That's a wrap here - time for a quick break, but we'll be back soon!

Our final event of the day is a big one - Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff in conversation with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

We're in and seated now - starting soon.

After the usual McConaghey-fronted video about the benefits of AI, Marc Benioff welcomes Dario Amodei to the stage.

Amodei starts with a recap of his career story and upbringing, after spells at Google and OpenAI, before founding Anthropic in 2021.

"The rest is history," he says.

Amodei notes Salesforce is a small investor in Anthropic, with Benioff replying that he's thrilled to be part of the journey.

Anthropic also took over the old Slack building, following Salesforce's acquisition - meaning it's on the Salesforce park estate.

Benioff asks what Amodei's biggest surprise since leaving OpenAI and starting Anthropic with his seven co-founders.

"There's been so many moments," Amodei says, outlining the dichotomy of past predictions of data surges, alongside rising revenues.

"A lot of the things I'm seeing happening, I just never would have expected," he says. "When you start a company, you really see...differentiation - OpenAI has gone in the consumer direction, we've gone in the enterprise direction...it's sort of a natural experiment, both exist in the ecosystem, but the approach they take is different."

Amodei says the jump to being able to truly agentic abilities in quite surprising - the ability to do tasks end to end in a way that was not possible before.

He references coding in particular, but also mentions financial services and health and medical also as possible great use cases for agents.

"The coders are vaulable, they're early adopters - they have kind of given us a glimspe of the future," he says.

Benioff switches to talk about AGI - how far along are we?

Amodei says "the sci-fi sheen" on AGI can be distracting - but there are some things that are real, including the ability to make models that are incrementally smarter - and will soon be smarter than humans.

Claude is being used to build products on top of Claude and to help the next Claude, he notes - and 90% of all code at Anthropic is being written by AI (although a human is still needed to review it).

Benioff asks if this means Anthropic needs less engineers - but Amodei says there still need to be humans in the loop.

If Claude is writing 90% more code - you might need more software developers to focus on the other 10%, he notes - what Benioff says is a "rebalancing" of the work.

It's hard to say when the true tipping point will come, Amodei says, and under pressing from Benioff, says there will be a lot of disruption - "a true labor disruption", within the next two to five years.

"I am concerned, particularly about people's ability to adapt as the jobs are changing so fast."

Think of the models as a second opinion, Amodei says - you don't trust it alone, as it's not always right.

He describes how his sister (and Anthropic co-founder) suffered an immune system infection while pregnant recently, and used Claude to find out extra possibilites on what the cause could be.

It's hard to say what will happen 6 months from now, Amodei notes, especially given how often new models are released.

It's too early to say what the winners will be, he adds, especially in the whole new ecosystems being created by these models.

Where will Anthropic be in 5 years in a dream world, Benioff asks?

Amodei notes there are a lot of concerns with AI - but he is an "incredible believer" in the updsides of AI.

He names the potential to cure diseases, including cancer - "I just think AI is the right thing to cure them."

He adds that financial services and insurance could also benefit - but says "every enterprise" can benefit in some way.

"My vision of Anthropic is a company which serves the world, puts AI at the center of every enterprise," he says.

Alongside financial success, Amodei says Anthropic wants to be known as the company that is reliable and trustworthy.

"Being good stewards is vital," he says.

Benioff asks about building data centers and chips, and the energy they use - how serious an issue will this be? And what will the next generation look like?

Amodei says he knows there will be a huge need for compute - and Anthropic is trying to secure that power wherever they can.

Anthropic is growing faster than any other company in this space, he says - and so if the demand is there, it will benefit everyone.

And that's a wrap - thanks for joining us today, we'll be back tomorrow for the final day of Dreamforce 2025!

Hello from our final day of Dreamforce 2025! The show may be nearly over, but there's still one big special guest to come - more on that shortly.

But now - coffee (Peet's, as any good San Franciscan knows, of course...)

The final session is a big one - Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff will be on stage talking to Sundar Pichai, Google & Alphabet CEO.

It should be a fascinating session, kicking off shortly.

After the usual McConaghey-fronted video, Marc Benioff is here, and introduces Sundar Pichai to the stage.

Benioff starts by inviting Pichai to delve into his upbringing a little, starting with his childhood in South India.

Pichai outlines how his family had to wait years for even basic technology - waiting five years for a rotary phone, which became a local attraction - showing how technology can help build a community.

Giving access to technology can transform local communities - with Pichai noting Google recently invested $15bn in India.

Benioff asks Pichai about how he came to decide technology would be his passion - Pichai said he was always obsessed with Silicon Valley, and was inspired by MIT's One Laptop per Child program, which gives hardware to children across the world - and that this influenced his work in launching Chromebooks decades later.

"AI is the ultimate expression" of giving technology access to everyone in the world - it's a great equalizer, Pichai says.

Pichai remembers how when at Stamford, the sheer range of opportunities available was particularly surprising - but meeting people with the same passions was especially unique - with a desire to make the world better.

Asked when he first heard about Google - Pichai says he was an early user, impressed with the ease of use, and an instant way to give people access to technology.

Starting at Google, he switched from working from semiconductors, to working on the Chrome browser, which he says brought him closer to where technology was impacting people.

The age of Web 2.0, when the internet started to evolve into a content platform, was an exciting time, Pichai says.

Benioff recalls his first meeting with Google, which resulted in the latter forming its charity arm.

Pichai recalls former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warning him off building a browser, but that once it was created, he became its biggest champion.

Benioff asks Pichai what his feelings on his career arc has been.

"Technolgoy is one of the biggest enablers we know...if anything, that journey is accelerating," Pichai says, "our job is to be good stewards of this technology, bring it in a way that really benefits society."

"I think there is no better technology to do that then AI," Pichai adds, noting that he wanted to start Google's shift towards AI back in 2017.

"It's been a journey," he laughs, "it was obvious to be this was going to be the decade of AI."

Benioff harks back to three years ago, when Google was really leading the AI landscape - until ChatGPT arrived on the scene.

What was Pichai's reaction to OpenAI?

"We saw the potential right away," he says, likening it to how YouTube came out of nowhere in 2006, and Instagram surprised Facebook and other platforms.

"I realised this was the biggest opportunity in technology, we were incredibly well-positioned - we had to carpe diem," he adds.

Pichai says the progress has been "extraordinary", and mentions Gemini 3.0, launching soon.

Time to look to the future - Benioff says he's never seen Google go faster - maybe it's good to have competition.

When it comes to future innovation, what does Pichai see as the next step forward? Benioff says there's no-one like Google, surely, on looking to the future.

How do things look in 2035 at Google?

Pichai says you have to be humble when looking at the future - and mentions Waymo's self-driving cars as a good example of something that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable.

He says quantum will undoubtedly be here within the next ten years, and affect everything from cryptocurrency to photography.

"We are definitely to have digital super-intelligence for all of us, that is going to be a reality," Pichai says.

"We are so good at adapting," Pichai adds, again noting the success of Waymo vehicles becoming part of San Francisco life.

"We are such a resiliently adaptive species."

"The technology is going to progress, we should embrace and innovative with it, the benefits are going to be profound," Pichai says.

The power of AI could even mean Google Glass could return soon, Pichai says in reply to a question about direct human/AI interfaces.

Wrapping up, Pichai praises the Salesforce relationship, and its customer focus - and hails the opportunity of the agentic enterprise.

Looking forward, he adds that 2026 will be another great year of progress, bringing smarter and more intuitive agents.

"As enterprises, you want this to work well together," he says, "that is the real opportunity we have."

And that's a wrap - a fascinating chat, and good to hear about the backstory of Pichai. We're off to round up the last bits of Dreamforce 2025, so stay tuned!

• Hackers reportedly leaked data of 5 million Qantas customers after failed extortion attempt
• Attackers exploited Salesloft-Salesforce integrations to access and steal customer data
• 44 companies were affected, including Disney, Toyota, McDonald’s, and Vietnam Airlines

Up to 5 million Qantas customers could be at risk of cyberattacks or scams after hackers claimed to release their stolen data online.

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters say they released the stolen files on the dark web having had no response from Australia’s biggest airline over a ransomware demand.

The archive includes personal records of 5 million Qantas customers, including people’s names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and frequent flyer numbers. Credit card details, financial information, and passport details weren't stolen, it was said.

"Don't be the next headline"

In summer 2024, a group of hackers going by the name Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters broke into Salesforce accounts belonging to hundreds of organizations in different industries - although Salesforce itself was not breached.

The attackers compromised Salesloft accounts that were integrated with Salesforce and exploited the linked API tokens and OAuth connections to pivot into Salesforce environments and exfiltrate customer data.

The group tried to extort Qantas for money, offering to delete the stolen files in exchange. The airline, however, refused to even discuss the matter with the attackers, telling Guardian Australia it “will not engage, negotiate with, or pay any extortion demand”.

“Don’t be the next headline, should have paid the ransom,” the group posted on its data leak site.

However analysts at cybersecurity outfit Intel 471 claim Qantas is reportedly only one of 44 companies whose sensitive customer data ended up on the dark web, with Gap, Vietnam Airlines, Toyota, Disney, McDonald’s, Ikea, and Adidas all affected.

This means numerous cybercriminals have easy access to contact and flight information on millions of people, which they can use for phishing, identity theft, fraud, and other attacks.

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters is a group comprising members of Scattered Spider, Lapsus$, and ShinyHunters. Soon after the Salesloft/Salesforce breach, they announced “going dark”, which the cybersecurity community interpreted as fear of too much publicity. Obviously, it didn’t last long.

Via The Guardian

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• Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters launch data leak site to pressure victims into ransom negotiations
• Attackers exploited Salesloft’s Drift app to access Salesforce customer data, not Salesforce itself
• Victims include Cloudflare, Zscaler, Tenable; Salesforce denies platform compromise or active vulnerabilities

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, a team-up of infamous hacking groups Scattered Spider, Lapsus$, and Shiny Hunters, has apparently created a standalone data leak and extortion page in order to pressure its victims into paying their ransom demands.

Earlier in 2025, news broke that the attackers managed to breach a third-party app - Salesloft’s Drift integration - and steal OAuth and refresh tokens. Then, they used the tokens to call the app customers’ Salesforce APIs and exfiltrate data such as customer contact records, case objects, and similar. Salesforce itself was not breached, but the data hosted by the clients was nabbed anyway.

The list of attacked organizations is quite extensive and includes a number of heavy hitters such as Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Tenable, and others.

"unsubstantiated incidents"

Now, the threat actors are urging victims to reach out and negotiate a deal: “Contact us to regain control on data governance and prevent public disclosure of your data,” the announcement says. “Do not be the next headline. All communications demand strict verification and will be handled with discretion.”

Researchers fromTechCrunch, who claim to have seen the page late last week, say the list on the site misses a few names known to have been breached, and speculates some of the companies may have already paid the ransom demand.

The hackers, however, did not deny - or confirm - these speculations, telling the publication, “There are numerous other companies that have not been listed."

Salesforce, on the other hand, seems unphased by the new development, with a spokesperson saying, “Our findings indicate these attempts relate to past or unsubstantiated incidents, and we remain engaged with affected customers to provide support.”

“At this time, there is no indication that the Salesforce platform has been compromised, nor is this activity related to any known vulnerability in our technology.”

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• “Conversational data is the gold of the agentic era,” Salesforce says
• New upgrades allow Slack to use your unstructured conversations
• Salesforce is also using Anthropic’s MCP server

Few companies have gone so publicly ‘all-in’ on AI agents as much as Salesforce, and the company is now hoping that using agentic AI within its Slack online collaboration platform will help it compete with the likes of Microsoft Teams in new ways.

The company explained that while AI agents rely on a strong data foundation, they thrive off further context, which they have lacked to a certain degree until now.

“Conversational data is the gold of the agentic era, yet it’s been locked away in unstructured messages and chats, largely out of reach for employees, let alone applications,” Salesforce declared.

Slack’s agentic AI is getting a huge boost

Salesforce is adding a new real-time search (RTS) API, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and improved developer tools to Slack to help it evolve from offering generic answers to producing more relevant and accurate responses.

The RTS API unlocks unstructured conversational data within Slack via discussions, files and channels, so that AI tools can interact with customer data without having to formalize it into a structured export and store it securely elsewhere.

With the MCP server (an open standard from Anthropic), Salesforce is also to standardize and simplify integrations across multiple enterprise systems for improved interoperability.

For developers, an updated CLI improves the AI app/agent building process.

“By building AI-powered applications directly in Slack, developers and partners help organizations unify their tech stack – making Slack the 2% of your IT budget that maximizes the return on the other 98%,” Salesforce wrote.

With the upgrades, businesses can unlock the unstructured data they’ve had all along for added intelligence, resulting in faster decision-making (37% quicker team insights and 36% faster customer responses) and boosted productivity (3x higher revenue growth per employee).

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• Snowflake and Salesforce launch the Open Semantic Interchange
• Salesforce likens the initiative to the Rosetta Stone of business data
• AI agents will use more enterprise software than humans by 2030

In recognition of the rise of agentic AI and the shift away from traditional dashboards and reports, Salesforce and Snowflake have teamed up with BlackRock, dbt Labs and RelationalAI to change things for the better when it comes to collaboration.

Together, the group is launching Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), which Snowflake describes as a vendor-neutral framework that allows different platforms to talk to one another in the same language.

The launch of OSI comes as companies struggle with vendor lock-ins, which create silos and limit the potential of AI tools.

The Open Semantic Interchange tackles vendor lock-in

“With the Open Semantic Interchange initiative, we are proud to be leading the charge alongside our partners to solve a foundational challenge for AI – the lack of a common semantic standard,” Snowflake EVP of Product Christian Kleinerman commented.

The initiative’s key goals are to improve interoperability, reduce complexity and boost AI adoption “by standardizing how semantics are defined and exchanged.”

It’s also a futureproofing initiative in more ways than one – Salesforce cited Accenture research predicting AI agents will be the primary users of enterprise software by 2030, ahead of humans.

“These new intelligent workers are only as effective as the data they can access and understand,” Tableau Chief Product Officer Southard Jones explained.

To support bi-directional metadata exchange, the OSI standardizes data metrics, dimensions, hierarchies and relationships.

Snowflake highlighted the five core principles of OSI: standardization (common language and structure); interoperability (easy exchange between tools); extensibility (adaptable to evolving needs); open source (collaborative development); and domain-specific models (to combine data from various sources).

Jones likened the Open Semantic Interchange to the Rosetta Stone for business data: “By co-leading the Open Semantic Interchange with Snowflake and our partners, we’re building the foundation every AI agent and BI application needs: a common semantic framework that preserves meaning across platforms.”

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• Stellantis confirms data breach via third-party platform supporting North American customer services
• Attack linked to ShinyHunters, part of broader Salesforce-related data theft campaign
• Customers warned to avoid suspicious emails and remain alert for phishing attempts

Stellantis, one of the world’s largest automakers, confirmed suffering a cyberattack and losing sensitive customer data.

In a short announcement, Stellantis said the breach did not occur within its infrastructure, but rather in a third party service provider’s platform that supports its North American customer service operations.

“Upon discovery, we immediately activated our incident response protocols, initiated a comprehensive investigation, and took prompt action to contain and mitigate the situation,” the company said in the report. “We are also notifying the appropriate authorities and directly informing affected customers.”

ShinyHunters strike again

The report offered little details, as Stellantis noted the personal information involved was “limited to contact information” and that financial, or “sensitive personal information” was not accessed, since it wasn’t stored on company servers in the first place.

It did not detail who the threat actors were, or what they sought out to achieve, but BleepingComputer claims the attack was carried out by ShinyHunters, and that it was part of a recent wave of Salesloft data breaches.

The threat actors reprotedly claimed responsibility for the attack, telling the publication it stole more than 18 million Salesforce records, including names, and contact details.

Stellantis is yet to confirm or deny these claims, but if they turn out to be true, the automotive giant will be added to a long list of major companies that had their data compromised in the Salesloft issues.

Other companies that suffered the same fate include Google, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoints, Cato Networks, and many others.

In the meantime, Stellantis urged its customers to remain vigilant against potential phishing attempts, and to be particularly wary of incoming communication claiming to come from the automaker.

Furthermore, it warned the customers not to click on any links in emails, or other forms of communication, especially in those demanding urgent activity or response.

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• ShinyHunters claim theft of 1.5 billion records from 760 global companies
• Attackers exploited GitHub secrets to access sensitive Salesforce object tables
• FBI issued warnings as hacker groups announced they were “going dark

ShinyHunters have finally revealed how much data it stole in the Salesloft / Salesforce attack, claiming to have taken 1.5 billion records from 760 companies around the world.

In March 2025, threat actors from three groups: ShinyHunters, Lapsus$, and Scattered Spider, joined forces and breached Salesloft’s GitHub repository, which contained the company’s source codes. Using TruffleHog, they scanned the code for secrets and found OAuth tokens for the Salesloft Drift and Drift Email platforms.

From there, they were able to access different Salesforce object tables, belonging to various companies. These tables, labeled “Account”, “Contact”, “Case”, “Opportunity”, and “User”, contained all sorts of sensitive files which the attackers managed to exfiltrate.

Waiting for confirmation

The majority (579 million) are from the Contact table. Case was the second-largest compromised table with 459 million records, followed by Account (250 million), Contact (171 million), Opportunity (171 million), and User (60 million).

To prove their claims, ShinyHunters shared a text file listing the source code folders. So far, Salesforce has not commented on these claims.

We’ve reached out to Salesforce, and will update the article if we hear back - and a source told BleepingComputer that the numbers are accurate.

Whether or not the criminals bit off more than they can chew, remains to be seen.

Following the incident, the FBI issued a security advisory, warning businesses about UNC6040 and UNC6395 (how it tracks the groups), and sharing known indicators of compromise (IOC).

At the same time, the groups announced they were “going dark”, which some cybersecurity companies interpreted as them being afraid of the increasing attention they have been getting.

If these claims turn out to be true, this would also put the incident on par with the 2023 MOVEit Managed File Transfer (MFT) fiasco, which affected thousands of organizations and millions of users worldwide.

Via BleepingComputer

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• Two threat groups, UNC6040 and UNC6395, are actively targeting Salesforce accounts to steal sensitive data
• UNC6395 exploits integrations like the Salesloft Drift chatbot, while UNC6040 uses phone-based social engineering to impersonate IT staff and gain access
• The FBI warns that follow-up extortion attacks are often carried out by ShinyHunters, linked to Scattered Spider

Two separate threat actors are currently targeting organizations’ Salesforce accounts to steal sensitive data found within. This is according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which recently issued a FLASH advisory to warn businesses about the ongoing threat.

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is releasing this FLASH to disseminate Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) associated with recent malicious cyber activities by cyber criminal groups UNC6040 and UNC6395, responsible for a rising number of data theft and extortion intrusions," the agency said in its advisory.

"Both groups have recently been observed targeting organizations' Salesforce platforms via different initial access mechanisms. The FBI is releasing this information to maximize awareness and provide IOCs that may be used by recipients for research and network defense."

Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters

In recent times there were numerous reports of cybercriminals who compromised company Salesforce accounts through the Salesloft Drift application, an AI chatbot that can be integrated with Salesforce.

The FBI labeled this group as UNC6395 and apparently, it struck some of the biggest tech and security organizations, including Cloudflare, Zscaler, Tenable, CyberArk, Elastic, BeyondTrust, Proofpoint, JFrog, Nutanix, Qualys, Rubrik, Cato Networks, Palo Alto Networks, and others.

The other group, UNC6040, gained access by tricking their victims into sharing the access. They would call them on the phone, posing as IT support employees addressing enterprise-wide connectivity issues.

“Under the guise of closing an auto-generated ticket, UNC6040 actors trick customer support employees into taking actions that grant the attackers access or lead to the sharing of employee credentials, allowing them access to targeted companies’ Salesforce instances to exfiltrate customer data,” the FBI explained.

A threat actor known to have perfected this technique is Scattered Spider. While the FBI did not name that group in its advisory, it did say that the follow-up extortion attacks were usually mounted by ShinyHunters, a group known to have been working together with Scattered Spider. At one point, the groups even merged into an entity they dubbed ScatteredLapsus$Hunters.

Via BleepingComputer

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• Cloudflare confirms losing sensitive customer data from its account
• The attackers moved in after compromising Salesloft's Drift platform
• Cloudflare's infrastructure remains intact

Cloudflare has become the latest tech giant to be added to the growing list of companies compromised through the Salesloft Drift breach.

The content delivery network firm has confirmed the breach, saying it rotated potentially exposed secrets, and notified customers whose data might have been compromised, in response.

104 tokens

In Cloudflare’s case, most of the information stored in the affected account is customer contact information and “basic support case data”, but the company is still warning about hackers potentially using this information in attacks.

“Some customer support interactions may reveal information about a customer's configuration and could contain sensitive information like access tokens," it said in a statement.

"Given that Salesforce support case data contains the contents of support tickets with Cloudflare, any information that a customer may have shared with Cloudflare in our support system—including logs, tokens or passwords—should be considered compromised, and we strongly urge you to rotate any credentials that you may have shared with us through this channel.”

When Cloudflare analyzed the incident from its side, it found 104 Cloudflare API tokens. While it would appear that no one managed to abuse them in the meantime, the company still rotated them, to be on the safe side.

“No Cloudflare services or infrastructure were compromised as a result of this breach,” it confirmed.

Via BleepingComputer

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• The list of victims of the Salesloft/Drift attack keeps growing
• Palo Alto Networks confirmed crooks stole sensitive information
• The company is notifying affected customers

The Salesloft Drift incident is quickly turning into the next MOVEit MFT fiasco, as yet another company confirms losing sensitive data in the third-party attack. This time around, it is the American multinational cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks that confirmed losing customer data and support cases information in the breach.

It all began with the sales engagement platform Salesloft. It uses Drift, a conversational marketing and sales platform with live chat, chatbots, and AI, to engage visitors in real time. Working alongside it is SalesDrift, a third-party platform linking Drift’s AI chat functionality to Salesforce, syncing conversations, leads, and cases, into the CRM via the Salesloft ecosystem.

In early August this year, adversaries managed to steal OAuth and refresh tokens from SalesDrift, pivoting to customer environments, and successfully exfiltrating sensitive data. The theft lasted for 10 days, during which the attackers stole information from different companies, including Zscaler, and Cloudflare.

Hundreds of victims

In a statement shared with BleepingComputer, Palo Alto Networks said it was one of “hundreds” of victims:

"Palo Alto Networks confirms that it was one of hundreds of customers impacted by the widespread supply chain attack targeting the Salesloft Drift application that exposed Salesforce data," the company told the publication. To contain the incident, the company disabled the application from its Salesforce environment, while its cybersecurity arm - Unit 42 - confirmed its products, systems, and services were unaffected.

"The attacker extracted primarily business contact and related account information, along with internal sales account records and basic case data. We are in the process of directly notifying any impacted customers." Support case data held contact info and text comments, it was added.

Ransomware actors ShinyHunters took responsibility for the attack, but not everyone is convinced. Google, for example, believes this to be the work of a separate entity it tracks as UNC6395.

Via BleepingComputer

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• Zscaler confirms losing sensitive customer data from its account
• The attackers moved in after compromising Salesloft's Drift platform
• Some believe this was done by ShinyHunters

We can now add Zscaler to the growing list of Salesloft customers who suffered a third-party cyberattack and lost sensitive customer information after it confirmed data was taken.

In the announcement, Zscaler explained it was a customer of Salesloft, whose AI chat platform, Salesloft Drift, was compromised.

Since this platform connects with Salesforce, the miscreants managed to move laterally, stealing OAuth and refresh tokens, and accessing data from customers such as Zscaler.

ShinyHunters or UNC6395?

The company stressed its systems and products were not compromised, just the data:

“The scope of the incident is confined to Salesforce and does not involve access to any of Zscaler's products, services or underlying systems and infrastructure,” it said.

Still, the attackers managed to steal names, business email addresses, job titles, phone numbers, regional and location details, Zscaler product licensing and commercial information, as well as content from certain support cases.

The company said that so far, there is no evidence of the data being abused in the wild, but it still asked its users to remain vigilant and wary of incoming phishing and social engineering attacks. Zscaler also said it revoked all Salesloft Drift integrations, rotated API tokens, and kicked off an in-depth investigation.

So far, attribution of the attack was rather challenging. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) believes it to be the work of a threat actor it tracks as UNC6395.

ShinyHunters, a known ransomware operator and data thief, also assumed responsibility, a claim confirmed to the media by multiple security researchers.

Via BleepingComputer

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• Salesforce has replaced thousands of workers with agentic AI
• CEO Marc Benioff said he “need[s] less heads” to clear a backlog
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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has revealed the company has nearly halved its customer support workforce, replacing thousands of jobs with AI agents.

In a podcast interview with Logan Bartlett on YouTube, Benioff brutally stated: “I need less heads,” noting how instead of using human power, Salesforce is now using AI to process around 10,000 leads weekly.

Yet in the same interview, Benioff noted a lack of human resources had caused the company to accrue a backlog of 100 million uncalled leads over 26 years.

Salesforce slashes customer service headcount

The 45% drop from 9,000 to 5,000 comes as the company’s own AI platform, Agentforce, now handles around half of all customer conversations (around 1.5 million interactions) – some human workers remain to handle the rest.

The remaining workers aren’t free of AI, either – they’ll be working under what Benioff calls an “omni channel supervisor who is kind of helping those agents and those humans work together.”

“At the start of this year we deployed help.agentforce.com. Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles," Salesforce told TechRadar Pro in a statement.

"We’ve successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success.”

It seems that customer satisfaction scores from AI and human interactions have remained about the same, which could spell out a troubling future for human customer service workers.

Benioff framed AI tools as a way to address labor shortages as well as its cost-cutting benefits – it now handles around 30-50% of work in some areas, like support.

Looking ahead, the CEO (who previously stated that today’s generation of CEOs is the last to only manage human workers) believes that every company is now on a path to become an agentic enterprise.

Despite his preference for replacing human workers with AI, Benioff still criticized companies for not hiring fresh grads, slating them for missing an opportunity. Young talent who embrace agentic AI are among the most likely to succeed.

Clearly, then, it’s about striking the right balance of productivity, with Benioff himself acknowledging both the uniqueness and creativity of humans, and the need for AI guardrails.

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• TransUnion reported a data breach with 4.4 million Americans affected
• The threat actors claim the attack is much larger
• Users should be wary of incoming emails

TransUnion, a major American credit reporting company, suffered a data breach in which it lost personally identifiable information (PII) on more than 4.4 million American citizens.

In a new report, filed with the Maine Attorney General’s Office, the company said it was struck on July 28, 2025, and that it spotted the intrusion two days later.

The data lost in the incident is “limited”, TransUnion said, without detailing the type. It did stress that credit reports and core credit information was not exposed in this attack. It still decided to give affected individuals 24 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection.

ShinyHunters

At the same time, BleepingComputer discovered that the attack was the work of ShinyHunters, who broke into the company’s Salesforce account to steal the information.

“A wave of Salesforce data theft attacks has impacted numerous companies this year, including Google, Farmers Insurance, Allianz Life, Workday, Pandora, Cisco, Chanel, and Qantas,” the publication said. ShinyHunters confirmed with the publication that they stole more than 13 million records, with the 4.4 million mentioned above relating only to US citizens.

The group shared a sample, as well, showing people’s names, billing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and unredacted Social Security numbers (SSN). This type of information can hardly be described as “limited”, as it is more than enough to use in identity theft, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime. Crooks can open bank accounts in people’s names, take out loans, and even apply for tax cuts and returns.

The data also includes the reason for the customer transaction, such as a request for a free credit report, which can also be used to target the victims with convincing phishing attacks, deploying malware or stealing even more information.

ShinyHunters also told BleepingComputer they stole customer support tickets and various messages stored in Salesforce.

TransUnion is one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies in the US (alongside Experian and Equifax). It collects and maintains credit information on individuals and businesses, then provides credit reports, scores, and identity protection services to lenders, businesses, and consumers.

How to stay safe

To mitigate potential risks, users should place a credit freeze (or fraud alert) with all three credit bureaus, preventing new credit accounts from being opened in their name without approval.

They should also monitor their credit reports, and use TransUnion's offer of free identity theft monitoring.

Finally, they should watch their financial accounts closely, and be extra cautious with incoming emails and other communication. Since attackers now know their contact info, they might send convincing fake emails, texts, or calls pretending to be banks, government agencies, or even TransUnion itself.

Via BleepingComputer

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• Gmail users could be affected in the ShinyHunters attack campaign
• Google has warned users to be on guard
• This campaign has targeted a large number of companies

A warning from Google’s Threat Intelligence Report has outlined a prolific hacking group is targeting Gmail to attack users.

Users were urged to be on their guard after the contact information of small and medium sized businesses was accessed.

Google has since notified those affected by the incident via email - but those whose data was compromised should be on the lookout for social engineering and extortion attacks. These incidents typically involve an email or call to employees of victim organizations demanding large sums of bitcoin.

Phishing risk

ShinyHunters is an extremely successful threat group, recently attacking Santander, AT&T, and insurance giant Allianz. But, Google doesn’t think they’re done yet;

“We believe threat actors using the 'ShinyHunters' brand may be preparing to escalate their extortion tactics by launching a data leak site (DLS)” the report confirms.

“These new tactics are likely intended to increase pressure on victims, including those associated with the recent UNC6040 Salesforce-related data breaches. We continue to monitor this actor and will provide updates as appropriate.”

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• Many AI pilots fail real-world operations and 95% of GenAI pilots don’t reach production, Salesforce claims
• CRMArena-Pro lets enterprises stress-test their AI agents with digital twins
• Two new benchmarks are used for stress-testing AI agents

Salesforce says enterprises are struggling with their AI pilots failing in real-world operations, and has launched CRMArena-Pro, a new service to allow businesses to create a digital twin of their operations to stress-test AI agents before they get deployed.

The company cited recent MIT research which found 95% of generative AI pilots don’t even reach the production stage.

CRMArena-Pro evaluates AI agents on real tasks, like customer service, sales forecasting and supply chain disruptions, but using synthetic data that’s been validated by experts.

Salesforce lets you stress-test AI agents using digital twins

“CRMArena-Pro creates a rigorous, context-rich simulated enterprise environment framework with synthetic data, where it can safely evaluate API calls to relevant systems, as well as the ability to safeguard PII data,” the company wrote in an announcement.

By adding real-world noise into the test environment, CRMArena-Pro can better evaluate performance, strengthen resilience and bridge the gap between pre- and post-deployment.

“The result is AI agents that are capable, consistent, trustworthy, and agentic enterprise-ready.”

Companies can also see how AI agents handle real-world challenges like messy data, legacy systems and complex workflows.

Salesforce noted part of the complexity comes from the vast array of models available to choose today, and knowing which specific model or combination of models to use isn’t so simple.

To that tune, the company has published two new benchmarks to measure agent performance: MCP-Eval for evaluation through synthetic tasks and MCP-Universe, which adds real-world tasks and execution-based evaluators to stress-test agents in complex scenarios.

In a previous post, Salesforce noted that CRMArena-Pro “lays the groundwork for the next frontier: Enterprise General Intelligence” - and for now, users can expect “safe, capable and impactful” AI for all organizations.

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• Salesloft was breached when OAuth tokens from SalesDrift were stolen
• Google tracked the threat actors as UNC6395
• ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the attack

Revenue workflow platform Salesloft suffered a cyberattack which saw threat actors break in through a third-party and steal sensitive information.

The company is using Drift, a conversational marketing and sales platform that uses live chat, chatbots, and AI, to engage visitors in real time, alongside its own SalesDrift, a third-party platform which links Drift’s AI chat functionality to Salesforce, syncing conversations, leads, and cases, into the CRM via the Salesloft ecosystem.

Starting around August 8, and lasting for about ten days, adversaries managed to steal OAuth and refresh tokens from SalesDrift, pivoting to customer environments, and successfully exfiltrating sensitive data.

Attack attribution

"Initial findings have shown that the actor's primary objective was to steal credentials, specifically focusing on sensitive information like AWS access keys, passwords, and Snowflake-related access tokens," Salesloft said in an advisory.

"We have determined that this incident did not impact customers who do not use our Drift-Salesforce integration. Based on our ongoing investigation, we do not see evidence of ongoing malicious activity related to this incident."

In its write-up, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said the attack was conducted by a threat actor known as UNC6395.

“After the data was exfiltrated, the actor searched through the data to look for secrets that could be potentially used to compromise victim environments,” the researchers said.

“GTIG observed UNC6395 targeting sensitive credentials such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) access keys (AKIA), passwords, and Snowflake-related access tokens. UNC6395 demonstrated operational security awareness by deleting query jobs, however logs were not impacted and organizations should still review relevant logs for evidence of data exposure.”

Google seems to believe this is a unique threat actor, which is why it gave it a unique moniker UNC6395.

However, hackers known as ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer the attack was actually their doing - although Google begs to differ, telling the site, "We've not seen any compelling evidence connecting them at this time."

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• Agentforce for Public Sector has already achieved FedRAMP High authorization
• It is hosted on AWS infrastructure for maximum security compliance
• AI agents get to work to boost human workers’ efficiency

Salesforce has introduced Agentforce for Public Sector, a new platform powered by agentic AI specially designed to assist in government agencies.

The branch of Agentforce promises to inject AI agents into government workflows where it matters the most, such as handling repetitive tasks, by improving responsiveness, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

It has also already received FedRAMP High authorization to guarantee security standard compliance, so may be a common sight in US Government services soon.

Salesforce's government-approved Agentforce platform

Salesforce noted the “staffing shortages and rising public expectations” faced by government agencies as a key attraction for Agenforce for Public Sector.

The company's recent Global AI Readiness Index claimed 90% of global constituents are open to engaging with AI‑powered government services, but concerns around privacy and security have slowed adoption within the sector. This FedRAMP approved platform hopes to change that.

The City of Kyle, Texas has already started using the platform. “It’s like having every aspect of town hall instantly accessible 24/7, whether you’re a city employee or a resident seeking help,” Assistant City Manager Jesse Elizondo said.

Among the first features to launch are three key systems – Compliance Management, Complaint Management and Recruitment Management. They use agents for summarizing and analyzing constituent complaints and detecting complaint trends, assisting compliance officers with violations and fee calculations, and screening job applications to match candidates with relevant agencies.

Job recommendation, benefit application and complaint filing bots will also become available from October 2025.

In a bid to provide clarity to government agencies, Salesforce stressed that Agentforce for Public Sector runs on AWS infrastructure, which is built to meet stringent security requirements for high-sensitivity organizations globally.

“With AI agents working alongside dedicated government workers and providing 24/7 support for constituents – helping with everything from routine inquiries to complex, time consuming tasks – Agentforce will power a more responsive, agile, and effective government,” Salesforce EVP and GM of Public Sector Nasi Jazayeri explained.

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• Allianz Life was targeted in the ShinyHunters attack campaign
• HaveIBeenPwned now estimates 1.1 million Allianz Life customers were affected
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The number of affected customers from the recent Allianz Life data breach has seemingly been confirmed at around 1.1 million customers, breach notification site Have I Been Pwned has said.

“Allianz attributed the attack to "a social engineering technique" which targeted data on Salesforce and resulted in the exposure of 1.1M unique email addresses, names, genders, dates of birth, phone numbers and physical addresses,” the site confirms.

The insurance firm was targeted earlier in 2025, with the ‘majority’ of the firm’s 1.4 million customers having sensitive data exposed, after an intrusion came through a third party, cloud-based Salesforce CRM system used by the company.

An ongoing campaign

It also now seems likely this breach is connected to a number of other breaches in an ongoing campaign that leverages the Salesforce platform in data theft attacks.

Allianz Life has not confirmed itself that this breach is part of the wider campaign, but the timing and similarities of this breach matches others targeted within the ShinyHunters extortion attacks targeting Salesforce customers.

That being said, Salesforce denies that their platform has been compromised;

“The Salesforce platform has not been compromised, and this issue is not due to any known vulnerability in our technology,” a spokesperson told TechRadar Pro.

“We know how disruptive and stressful these incidents can be, and our teams are fully engaged to support affected customers and help minimize any impact. Our blog provides additional context and guidance on strengthening security posture against social engineering attacks, including best practices, strong access controls, and proactive measures.”

Among those breached in the ShinyHunters campaign are Google, AT&T, Santander, and many others.

Because personal information such as email addresses, names, dates of birth, physical addresses, and phone numbers were accessed during the breach, any consumers concerned should be sure to take a look at the best identity theft protection to keep safe.

Protective measures

For any organizations concerned by the breach, it’s important to remember such incidents reportedly originate from social engineering attacks - so the most crucial thing to implement is a rigorous phishing training programme, and to make sure employees are confident in identifying social engineering attempts with regular testing.

Aside from that, making sure you deploy the best endpoint protection tools can protect your business and respond to attacks faster.

“Once attackers get into third-party platforms like CRMs, they’re not just stealing data but setting up for the next move,“ says Chief Security Officer (CSO) and EVP Information Security (CISO) at ThingsRecon, Tim Grieveson.

“Even if only ‘basic’ details like business names and contact info are taken, those assets are rich fuel for phishing, impersonation, and supply‑chain exploitation. The repercussions cascade down, and businesses need to stop thinking of external tools as someone else’s problem. If your customer data lives there, so does your risk. It’s time to start asking harder questions about where your data goes, who can access it, and how well it’s being protected.”

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• The group apparently snuck into a Salesforce instance

Cybercriminals known as ShinyHunters (UNC6040) recently broke into Google and stole business customer information from one of its corporate Salesforce instances, the company has confirmed.

In a blog post breaking down ShinyHunters’ modus operandi, the company somewhat played down the importance of the incident, noting the miscreants didn’t really grab anything sensitive, or of particular value.

“In June, one of Google’s corporate Salesforce instances was impacted by similar UNC6040 activity described in this post,” the company said, “the data retrieved by the threat actor was confined to basic and largely publicly available business information, such as business names and contact details.”

"Publicly available business information"

ShinyHunters is a threat actor that targets corporate Salesforce instances, by impersonating company staff and calling IT support on the phone.

During the call, they tell the IT technician that they lost access to their work platform and manage to convince them to change the login credentials.

Although it might sound trivial, the technique seems to be working rather well, as multiple organizations have recently reported losing sensitive data to the same group, in the same manner.

Google did not say how many companies were affected by the breach, and declined commenting further. We don’t know if ShinyHunters reached out with a ransom demand in exchange for destroying the stolen files.

Currently, ShinyHunters is one of the most active threat actors, and probably among the most successful ones.

In recent weeks, the group managed to break into both Pandora and insurance giant Allianz Life, and has also taken credit for breaches at AT&T, Santander, Ticketmaster, and many others.

The group does not deploy an encryptor, and is rather just focused on data exfiltration, making it one of several ransomware groups which have recently pivoted away from encrypting files, a process that is apparently expensive and time-consuming.

Via TechCrunch

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