Salesforce's Dreamforce conference next week could offer a glimpse of how its recently announced Claudeforce partnership with Anthropic will play out

Salesforce is expected to host its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Sept. 15-17.

Investors have been buying into the idea of Salesforce as a more formidable artificial-intelligence player, but that new narrative will be put to the test next week when the company hosts its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

The 23% surge in Salesforce's stock (CRM) the day after its earnings report last month wasn't just a referendum on the numbers, but also a vote of confidence in the company's AI strategy. Whether that momentum will continue remains up for debate, according to analysts.

UBS analyst Karl Keirstead wrote in a note that the investor focus at Dreamforce will be on the newly announced Claudeforce, a partnership that integrates Anthropic's Claude directly into the Salesforce platform.

The partnership combines the "reasoning capabilities of [Anthropic's] frontier models with the customer data, workflows, business logic and governance embedded in Salesforce," Keirstead explained.

"The centerpiece of the announcement was the introduction of a new plug-in that allows the frontier lab's users to access and act on Salesforce data directly through their platform," versus going through Salesforce's traditional user interface, or UI, he noted.

Keirstead said that while he views the partnership positively, it's too early to say how impactful it will be to the company's revenue growth for the 2028 fiscal year, which ends in January of that year.

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Needham analyst Scott Berg told MarketWatch that Claudeforce does mark a "strategy shift," but he still has questions over how customers might view the platform with the Claude configuration. Importantly, integrating Claude into Salesforce's platform causes Salesforce to cede control of its user interface layer in some ways; the company must give up control of where users access Salesforce data from, for instance.

"Will Salesforce giving up the UI for customers using Claude to access the Salesforce data negatively change how customers view the Salesforce platform?" Berg asked.

That's a concern for investors, because a negative change in the value of the platform could impact customers' willingness to pay for Salesforce's data and workflows. Another scenario would be that the partnership leads customers to unlock new functionalities and value from Salesforce's data. For now, it's "just too early to tell," Berg said.

Shares of Salesforce were up 2.3% on Friday.

The Dreamforce conference kicks off on Sept. 15.

-Hannah Pedone