How Claude is swallowing the B2B SaaS experience
The defining characteristic of most B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) experiences is having to toggle back and forth from one application to another.
It doesn’t matter if you make the world’s best expense tracking tool or project management platform. Nobody stays in one SaaS product – and one SaaS product only – all day long.
Toggling has been a tedious but necessary evil, especially since B2B SaaS vendors have tended to try and enhance their solutions with new menus and dashboards. Last week’s partnership between Anthropic and Salesforce, however, suggests that time may be coming to an end.
Claudeforce FTW?
With the release of Claudeforce, those using Anthropic’s popular conversational AI service can access Salesforce directly, rather than visit tools like Sales Cloud. (Disclosure: I provide content marketing services to Salesforce).
To understand how significant this is, imagine a sales rep simply asking Claude for details on a prospect before initiating outreach instead of typing and tapping within Sales Cloud. This could drastically simplify the training Salesforce has typically required and boost reps’ productivity enormously.
I’ve seen this partnership likened to IBM focusing on hardware while allowing Microsoft to dominate the operating system (OS) market, but the analogy only works so well.
Yes, DOS and later Windows become the landscape by which people accessed their favorite applications, but it was really only providing a set of front doors.
Claudeforce is allowing Anthropic to welcome customers through the door and make them comfortable. It changes working with tools like Salesforce from a series of clicks to a series of questions.
I imagine there are many B2B SaaS vendors who have already been hard at work redesigning their interfaces to incorporate conversational AI inputs. Even if those interfaces work well, however, they require customers to continue toggling.
If Anthropic could sway a critical mass of other vendors to follow Salesforce’s path, we might soon see ClaudeZendesk, ClaudeQualtrics and ClaudeServiceNow.
This would make Claude the default environment through which customers experience B2B products and services. Its influence (as well as that of Open AI and Perplexity if they attempted a similar initiative) would be extraordinary.
What might be left of B2B CX
There is more to a successful B2B SaaS experience, of course. Vendors would have to prove they offer more than background plumbing to Claude with enhanced personalization and unique use cases for their applications.
Service and support would also become more critical, because if Claude couldn’t fix their problem, many customers may want to talk to a live expert, not another chatbot.
Some vendors may also develop visualization tools, voice interfaces and even mixed-reality modalities that make conversational AI feel boring or tiresome, but that could take some time.
For now, vendors have some careful decision-making to do around how much they’re willing to cede control to Claude versus proving it’s better to work outside it. That’s one question they probably won’t ask Claude to answer.
