AIforce is not something you buy, and it is not new. It is the name Salesforce attached at Dreamforce ’26 to a set of platform capabilities it had already shipped five months earlier under a different one. Go into Setup looking for a toggle marked AIforce and there is nothing to find. Search the documentation for the word and you land on pages titled Headless 360.
Salesforce has published three definitions and they do not agree
This is the root of the confusion, so it is worth laying the three side by side rather than picking whichever is most convenient.
| Where | How it is defined | What it is called there |
|---|---|---|
| Salesforce newsroom, 15 September 2026 | “a live interface layer that brings the full power of Salesforce to wherever people and agents work” | AIforce |
| salesforce.com/headless | “an architectural transformation that exposes every capability Salesforce has built over 25 years directly as an API, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool, or a CLI command” | Headless Toolkit — the page’s own copy never uses the name AIforce |
| Salesforce Help | “Headless 360 is a marketing umbrella term for a group of platform capabilities. It is not a single product or SKU.” | Headless 360 |
That third sentence is the most useful thing Salesforce has published on the subject, and it sits in Help under the name Headless 360. That architecture was announced at TDX ’26 in April, five months before the keynote that renamed it. The rebrand has reached the stage and the marketing site. It has not reached the documentation, which is why searching Help for the new name gets you very little and searching for the older one gets you the reference material.
The translation that actually helps
Three terms, three different kinds of thing, and knowing which is which saves an hour of reading in circles:
- AIforce is positioning. It names the idea that your org’s data and logic should be reachable from whatever interface someone is already working in.
- Headless Toolkit is the capability set: MCP servers, APIs, plug-ins, CLI tools. This is what a developer builds against.
- Headless 360 is the name in the docs, and the specific MCP server carrying that name has its own release status.
If you are trying to evaluate this, read the second and third. The first is a story about where Salesforce thinks interfaces are going, and it is a coherent one, but it is not something you can put in a project plan.
GA in the umbrella does not mean GA in the piece you want
Salesforce Help lists the Headless 360 capabilities as generally available from TDX ’26: Platform Hosted MCP Servers, the Headless Experience Layer playground, Agentforce Vibes 2.0, the Tableau and MuleSoft and Data 360 MCP servers. Read quickly and the whole thing sounds shipped.
The Headless 360 MCP server itself, the one that exposes the breadth of the platform through a single connection, is documented as beta in Salesforce’s Hosted MCP Servers reference. So is Salesforce in Claude. Check the status of the specific component you need rather than the status of the umbrella, because the umbrella is GA and the interesting parts under it are not.
Where the brand lands: three surfaces, three maturities
| Surface | What it is | Status at announcement |
|---|---|---|
| Claudeforce / Salesforce in Claude | Your org reachable from Anthropic’s client, with 37 prebuilt sales skills | Beta; piloted by Deloitte, GitLab and Legora |
| Slackforce | Slackbot in channels, plus Slackforce Surfaces — interactive views of pipeline, forecast or case backlog built from a conversation, under the asking user’s permissions | Available |
| Agentforce Coworker | The same idea inside Lightning | Available; Salesforce reports 100,000 users activated in its first 35 days |
Only the first two are AIforce in the sense the keynote meant, which is Salesforce showing up somewhere it does not own. Coworker is the familiar direction of travel with new branding, and counting it inflates the story.
Four tools, about a hundred skills, and most of them are for admins
Underneath the branding the shape is small. The Headless 360 MCP server exposes four tools rather than thousands: Discover runs a semantic search across an index of available APIs and skills, Describe returns the technical contract for one, Dispatch invokes it and enforces access checks, and Dispatch Read Only does the same for reads. An agent moves through them in that order. For the protocol itself, MCP explained for Salesforce covers the mechanism.
This lands on admins before it lands on sellers. Salesforce says the beta launches with roughly a hundred skills behind that server, and the majority are Setup operations. The keynote sold 37 sales skills in Claude. The MCP library is pointed at org configuration. Those are different audiences. Admins were not on stage, and their daily work is closer to what the first release actually does.
AIforce is not Agentforce, and the difference is direction
Agentforce runs agents inside your org against your data. AIforce exposes your org so agents running outside it can call in. Same permissions model, opposite direction, and most organisations will end up with both because they solve different problems.
That reversal is a permissions problem before it is an AI one. Every grant nobody ever tightened becomes reachable by a caller that will actually use it. I have written it out separately in AIforce, Claudeforce and MCP, which covers what to check before you pilot anything. Per-user authentication holds, and sharing and field-level security apply to every tool call. So an untidy permission model does not stay internal once an outside agent can call in.
What the name cannot tell you: what it costs
Nothing has been published. Every release in this set carries the line that pricing and packaging are subject to change, and you contract with Anthropic separately for the model behind Salesforce in Claude. That makes it hard to scale past a pilot. Someone will ask what it costs, usually before the beta ends.
Who needs to care this quarter
Admins. The first real skill library is aimed at Setup, and your permission model is the control surface for all of it. That work is useful whether or not you ever connect an agent.
Developers building integrations. Read the Headless 360 server docs now. The four-tool pattern is a genuine design decision worth understanding before you write another custom middleware layer that does the same job worse.
Everyone else. Nothing. There is no configuration change waiting for you, no deadline, and no migration. If a headline is all you have seen of it so far, you have not missed anything.
What I have not verified
I have no access to the Salesforce in Claude beta and have not run the Headless 360 MCP server against an org. Everything above comes from Salesforce’s own newsroom, Help and developer documentation, read on 22 September 2026 and linked so you can check the wording rather than take mine. The three conflicting definitions and the Help article that never uses the word in its own title are what I found by reading. The claims about how the server behaves under load, in an audit trail, or against API limits are not mine to make yet.
Frequently asked
Can I buy AIforce? Not as a line item. You buy or enable the pieces: Salesforce in Claude, Slack, the hosted MCP servers. AIforce is the word for the category they belong to.
Do I need to do anything today? No. Nothing in your org changed when the name was announced. The wider Dreamforce ’26 status table has the handful of dated items that do want a calendar entry, and none of them are this.
Is this replacing the Lightning UI? No, and the framing that it might is the keynote’s, not the documentation’s. Headless 360’s own summary is that the API is the UI, which is an architecture claim about what is reachable without a browser, not a deprecation notice.
Why do the docs say Headless 360 when the keynote said AIforce? Because the capabilities predate the brand by five months. Expect the documentation to keep saying Headless 360 for a while. Engineering names in this platform usually outlive the marketing ones, and you will get better search results using the older term.
Is Claudeforce the same as AIforce? No. Claudeforce is one surface on the layer, covered in what Salesforce and Anthropic actually announced. Slackforce is another. More will follow, which is the whole point of describing it as a layer.
