{"id":626292,"date":"2026-09-16T09:40:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/626292\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T09:40:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:40:17","slug":"salesforce-and-nvidias-new-reasoning-model-is-everything-the-ai-labs-should-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/626292\/","title":{"rendered":"Salesforce and Nvidia’s new reasoning model is everything the AI labs should fear"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new AI model called Koa<\/a> is one of the biggest announcements from Salesforce this week at its giant Dreamforce tech conference. Koa is the company\u2019s first reasoning model, built on Nvidia\u2019s open-weight Nemotron<\/a> model. The two companies worked together to post-train Koa to excel at sales, marketing, and customer-support-related tasks.<\/p>\n

Koa is a shining example of how the enterprise world\u2019s needs for AI are diverging from what the frontier labs are offering. Proprietary AI labs would rather have enterprises uploading files, code, prompts, and feedback directly into their models and agents, and spending millions<\/a> to do so.<\/p>\n

But with the model, Salesforce is offering its enterprise customers:<\/p>\n

an open-weight alternative to closed frontier models<\/p>\n

a model trained to do specific work tasks (rather than to solve impossible math problems<\/a>)<\/p>\n

one that has not ingested any actual customer data and therefore cannot leak it to others<\/p>\n

a model that helps reduce AI spending, since it uses fewer tokens to do the same work<\/p>\n

one that can be automatically routed through an AI \u201cgateway,\u201d depending on the need<\/p>\n

and a model that follows all of a customer\u2019s data requirements and security embedded within Salesforce<\/p>\n

Koa will be provided as an alternative to the other models Salesforce offers in its Agentforce platform, where its customers build agents to handle rote tasks like answering customer service questions or scheduling appointments.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve built many small task-specific language models, which are part of Agentforce\u2019s portfolio,\u201d Jayesh Govindarajan, EVP of Salesforce AI, told TechCrunch. \u201cBut reasoning has always been something that we\u2019ve relied on the frontier model providers for. Until now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Koa, if an agent needed to reason through a long-running or multi-step task, those prompts would be routed to a frontier model like Claude or ChatGPT through Agentforce\u2019s AI gateway (the system that decides which model handles which request).<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the reasons we hadn\u2019t done this before, train our own enterprise-grade frontier model \u2014 we always wanted to \u2014 but the challenge has always been the lack of a pre-trained base model to start with. Until Nemotron came along, there was no sovereign American pre-trained model that was available, one, and two, that was state of the art, and, three, that had clear data provenance. We have no idea what Qwen trains on,\u201d Govindarajan said, referring to the popular Chinese open-weight model produced by Alibaba.<\/p>\n

Post-training a model like this means taking it from a general-purpose system to one well-versed in sales and customer support knowledge, and to do that, Salesforce and Nvidia did not use any actual data from Salesforce\u2019s customers. Instead, they crafted synthetic data that mimicked customers\u2019 patterns.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe actually simulated a customer service environment with a persona customer service professional, including irate customers that call into the customer service center, all the way to a sales professional who\u2019s trying to close a deal,\u201d Govindarajan described. <\/p>\n

Koa is meant to be better at the work tasks Salesforce customers want an agent to do \u2014 and cheaper, in terms of tokens burned \u2014 than sending those same tasks to Claude or ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

With Nemotron, \u201cwe have a unique architecture for inference to be token efficient,\u201d Kari Ann Briski, Nvidia\u2019s VP of Generative AI Software for Enterprise, told TechCrunch. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of the trifecta of things that you need to have: sovereign AI, time to first token, efficient reasoning, for the tokenomics of it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Salesforce isn\u2019t exactly abandoning Anthropic or OpenAI. It just announced a partnership with Anthropic called Claudeforce<\/a> that allows companies to use Claude as their AI interface, while their data remains in Salesforce\u2019s system of records, secured by its infrastructure.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new AI model called Koa is one of the biggest announcements from Salesforce this week at its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,233,6463,80],"class_list":["post-626292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nvidia","tag-salesforce","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}