The news
Salesforce (CRM) said on September 15 that Agentforce Coworker, its AI assistant, reached 100,000 activated users within 35 days. Between September 14 and 28, Anthropic, Superhuman and Meta (META) also expanded AI coworker tools, leaving CIOs with overlapping assistants competing for the same work.
Agentforce Coworker is now generally available inside Salesforce's Lightning interface. Salesforce Ben reported that it handles natural-language search and task routing, pulling from Salesforce, email, calendar and Drive, and can be used from Salesforce, desktop, mobile, Microsoft Teams, ChatGPT or Claude. Separately, Slack's chief marketing officer, Ryan Gavin, told SiliconANGLE that Slackbot has 1.5 million monthly active users since January, the fastest adoption of any Salesforce product.
Anthropic moved on September 16, merging its Claude chat and Cowork tools into one interface that routes requests automatically and adds tools for building documents and presentations, TechCrunch reported. The change is rolling out to Pro and Max subscribers first over the coming weeks, with free and Team plans to follow later. Anthropic is also Salesforce's partner for Salesforce in Claude, which puts CRM data inside Claude and is available to all Salesforce customers in beta, Salesforce said.
Superhuman, which says it serves more than 40 million people, bought AI notetaker Fathom on September 14 to feed meeting transcripts into its Go assistant. At Adobe (ADBE), CX Enterprise Coworker, an AI agent for marketing and customer engagement workflows, has drawn more than 1,700 customers and early adopters since it became generally available in June, Adobe said on its September 10 earnings call.
Then, on September 28, Meta launched Meta Enterprise Platform to sell its Muse assistant, a business agent and developer tools to companies, TechCrunch reported, with former MongoDB chief executive CJ Desai leading the effort. TechCrunch's report did not include pricing.
The numbers
- Agentforce Coworker activated users
- 100,000 in 35 days
- Slackbot monthly active users
- 1.5 million
- Superhuman users (company figure)
- More than 40 million
- Adobe CX Enterprise Coworker customers and early adopters
- More than 1,700
Why CEOs should care
CIOs should decide which assistant is the front door for each role before employees decide for them. A seller may live in Salesforce, a designer in Adobe and a knowledge worker in Claude or Microsoft Teams, but paying for three general-purpose assistants per person rarely makes sense. Set a primary assistant by role, treat others as features inside specific apps, and publish a short list of approved tools. Watch activation figures closely: activated users are not the same as weekly active users doing real work.
CISOs face a connector problem. Coworker tools gain value by connecting to email, calendars, file stores and chat, often through broad OAuth grants, the permissions users click to let one app access another. Each new assistant is another copy of access to sensitive content. Audit which assistants hold which scopes, remove unused grants, require admin approval for new connectors and confirm each vendor's data retention and model-training terms in writing.
CFOs should consolidate spend around measured use. Pricing varies across vendors, from per-seat add-ons to Salesforce's usage credits, which makes side-by-side comparison hard. Ask each vendor for usage reports by user, cancel seats that go unused for a quarter, and negotiate the right to swap seats between AI products within a vendor's portfolio.
The bigger picture
The contest is over the first screen employees open each morning. Whoever owns it controls which data the assistant sees and which workflows it triggers. Application vendors are fighting on two fronts: building their own coworkers, and opening their data to rival assistants on their own terms. Salesforce's AIforce layer lets Claude and Slack reach CRM data, while a September 17 help article says calls by third-party agents will consume paid Flex Credits. If other vendors follow Salesforce's lead, buyers could end up paying for access to the data that makes an assistant useful.
The sprawl has a security side as well. Each coworker that takes actions, rather than only answering questions, needs its own identity and permissions. Salesforce's September 17 requirement that agents calling its platform be registered with their own credentials is an early example of platforms forcing that discipline. Companies that have already narrowed their list of approved assistants will find those registration projects far simpler.
What’s next
Workday (WDAY) will show AI agents for HR and finance at its Rising conference, October 12 to 15 in Las Vegas. Anthropic plans to extend its merged interface to Team plans, and Meta's enterprise pricing was not reported at launch. Companies should set their assistant policy before those launches add another round of trials.
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