A new AI model called Koa is one of the biggest announcements from Salesforce this week at its giant Dreamforce tech conference. Koa is the company's first reasoning model, built on Nvidia's open-weight Nemotron model. The two companies worked together to post-train Koa to excel at sales, marketing, and customer-support-related tasks. Koa is a shining example of how the enterprise world's 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 to do so. But with the model, Salesforce is offering its enterprise customers: 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.
"We've built many small task-specific language models, which are part of Agentforce's portfolio," Jayesh Govindarajan, EVP of Salesforce AI, told TechCrunch. "But reasoning has always been something that we've relied on the frontier model providers for. " 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's AI gateway (the system that decides which model handles which request).
"One of the reasons we hadn't done this before, train our own enterprise-grade frontier model — we always wanted to — 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," Govindarajan said, referring to the popular Chinese open-weight model produced by Alibaba.