Salesforce has launched a new part of its business — known as Missionforce — to focus particularly on responding to the needs of defense, intelligence and aerospace agencies, the company announced Tuesday.
“It’s a product portfolio, and it’s a business unit that Salesforce has created and established to deepen our focus here,” Kendall Collins, who has been appointed CEO of Government Cloud, including Missionforce, told Nextgov/FCW. “Today, we have a number of things that we do with these customers already … but I think what we’re doing is answering the calling to do more. We want to help them. We want to accelerate them. We want to serve them, and we want to make the country safer. And I think that by bringing the best of private sector to bear, we just feel there’s an incredible opportunity for that.”
According to Collins, there are three key areas the new Missionforce unit is focusing on: personnel support from recruitment to retirement; logistics and supply chain management; and analytics.
Among the offerings Collins expects to drive significant federal interest, agentic artificial intelligence presents an opportunity to “unlock incredible value and productivity,” he said.
“We’re probably at this point in society where the CEOs of today are really the last CEOs to only manage humans. They’re going to manage agents. I think if you’re in the military today, you are increasingly in a world where you’re going to manage humans and personnel, but you’re also going to manage agents,” said Collins. “I think we’ve kind of reached this moment where we see the maturity happening with agents, and we’re right on the precipice of it happening for the government and for our nation’s defenders.”
For those defense, intelligence and aerospace agencies already working with Salesforce, Collins said there will be no change in the accounts people at the company that they interact with on a day-to-day basis. Rather, the goal of Missionforce is to deepen the commitment to serving national security agencies and the portfolios of products that they offer. That could include tailoring products to better fit the needs of those agencies.
“We think that there are opportunities to do that right now,” said Collins. “The core products and the best of the private sector bring such an incredible value proposition, but we do think that there are things that could be more unique, and we want to be able to partner, obviously, with all of these departments and agencies in order to deliver the best product.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify Kendall Collins’ job title.
