Product moves Sep 16, 2026

This week · announced September 15

Salesforce launched Koa, its first in-house reasoning model: rather than plugging in another big model vendor, it retrained NVIDIA's open-weight model and holds the weights itself.

Salesforce is one of the largest makers of customer relationship management software. A reasoning model works through a problem step by step before answering and deciding which tool to call. Salesforce and NVIDIA announced on September 15 that Koa is built on NVIDIA's open model Nemotron 3 Super and retrained on synthetic data simulating nearly three decades of enterprise deployment experience; the company says no customer data was used. Salesforce holds the model weights, and training and inference both run on its own systems (Salesforce press release, 2026-09-15). Koa's job is to run multi-step CRM workflows for Salesforce's own AI agents, such as prospecting for leads, qualifying opportunities and handling support cases. The company says that on its own CRM benchmark Koa matches or beats leading models with 3x fewer errors; the tasks measured include updating opportunities, routing support cases and scheduling follow-ups. It is open to a small group of pilot customers now, with general availability in US regions expected in winter 2026. ⚠️ Salesforce designed and ran this benchmark itself; the release doesn't name the "leading models," so we can't check the multiple. ⇒ Large enterprise software vendors are starting to build industry workflow knowledge into models whose weights they hold. Our read: if this path works, the losers are general model vendors selling per-call access, and the winners are those supplying open-weight base models and compute. But Koa is open only to a few pilot customers, so there's no sign of scale yet. Buyers should ask one more question: whose model sits behind this vendor's AI agents, and who holds the weights?