Salesforce adds ChatGPT to rein in DIY data leaks • The Register
Salesforce users running Agentforce with ChatGPT Enterprise or Edu can now update CRM data directly from the bot, a move aimed at curbing home-built integrations that risk spilling data outside the company’s controls.
While the tie-up was pitched as a way to reduce the time users spend toggling between OpenAI’s bot and Salesforce, analyst Vernon Keenan said in a blog post that it is actually security driven.
The move, which was announced last week, is aimed at heading off the DIYers who have assembled their own integrations using model context protocol, or MCP, according to Kris Billmaier, GM and EVP of Agentforce Sales at Salesforce. Think of MCP as a kind of API layer for wiring AI models to tools and data.
Keenan wrote that Salesforce users have been building their own MCP servers using OpenAI’s Apps SDK and exposing Salesforce data to various frontier LLMs in the bargain. That puts the company’s data outside the governance and usage metering of Salesforce.
“The thing that I worry about, and what I wanted to get ahead of, was homegrown MCP servers from customers just spitting out data to OpenAI around the trust boundary,” Billmaier told Keenan. “And with this, we’re actually kind of being full of our destiny as we think about other players emerging in this space.”
In its announcement, Salesforce called the ChatGPT integration “the end of the cut and paste workflow.” It said ChatGPT will now work like a user interface for Salesforce.
“You can simply ask, ‘Show me my new uncontacted leads,’ and the app in ChatGPT pulls a live, interactive list directly from Salesforce. No searching, no filtering, just the answer you need exactly when you need it,” Salesforce wrote.
Salesforce said that its Agentforce Sales app in ChatGPT can prioritize the highest-quality leads for any particular moment based on lead score, pipeline health and “external context such as market or news signals to surface the right lead for that moment in time.”
The Agentforce Sales app will also take over the nurturing of low-priority leads to let humans focus on the big targets, and update the CRM after a call to reflect the status of the deal.
When using the integration, Agentforce Trust Layer protects proprietary data, which is also governed by the company’s security standards, Salesforce said. ChatGPT respects existing permissions and only accesses information the user already has access to in the connected app, Salesforce noted.
Talking with Keenan, Salesforce also took on the question of how this integration relates to Salesforce’s productivity app Slack, which after Dreamforce was expected to take on a more prominent role in its AI strategy.
Nick Johnston, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Salesforce, said in this case, the OpenAI integration will help an individual worker, while Slack is built for when that worker needs to talk with and decide on the next steps with their team.
“We are seeing tools like ChatGPT today being very much the single player experiences,” Johnston told Keenan. “People are working in these tools to help themselves. Slack is multiplayer experience. If you think about where people are doing work with teams, with multiple groups, cross functional organization, plus bringing in agents from all different tools—that is where Slack shines. None of these AI tools are doing that yet.” ®
