The Scene
If you can’t beat ’em, hook up your data to a chatbot.
Salesforce this week announced “Claudeforce,” a partnership with Anthropic that lets salespeople look up customer records and check on deals by typing requests to Claude, instead of clicking through a Salesforce dashboard.
The massive software solutions company is the latest to roll out new plugins that allow customers to access their data directly through chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT — taking users off of legacy websites and into AI interfaces, where work is increasingly getting done.
The rush among software firms to open their platforms to AI agents comes in part out of fear that if they don’t, AI-native companies will emerge offering solutions that will threaten to wipe them out. Concerns about the software industry’s obsolescence fueled a massive sell-off earlier this year as investors bet AI agents would crush the sector’s business models. Now, many companies, which have charged users by subscription to their data, are shifting to AI interfaces without a clear industry-wide playbook for how it will change their revenue strategies.
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Companies unveiling these connectors position them as proactive strategies to meet customers where they are, as white-collar work grows more agentic. And they’ve projected confidence that the chatbot integrations won’t come at the cost of their legacy interfaces.
“You want to make sure you are disrupting yourself as opposed to being disrupted by others,” said Cristina Pieretti, the head of digital content and innovation at Moody’s.
The technical term MCP, or “Model Context Protocol,” has entered the mainstream vernacular in boardrooms and earnings calls — it’s a standardized way for AI models to plug into external software, allowing data to stream from a company’s systems directly into a chatbot.
“Nowadays, you can’t have a discussion about AI without tripping over MCP multiple times,” said Patrick Starling, who helps lead AI strategy at FactSet, adding that adoption of the company’s connector has taken off “like a hockey stick” since being launched last year. S&P Global said more than 500 customers have connected to the company’s MCP as of last quarter.
Since Anthropic first introduced MCP in 2024, mentions of the term on corporate earnings calls among businesses globally have steadily gone up every quarter, according to data from AlphaSense.
J.D.’s view
The SaaSpocalypse fears are often overstated: The MCP-ification of Wall Street shows that a firm’s proprietary data — rather than their websites — is what makes it valuable. Sure, I can vibe code my own app to organize my schedule and documents; I can’t replicate S&P Capital IQ Pro.
Figuring out the monetization aspect, though, will make or break this pivot. Unlike the prior era of per-seat billing, there isn’t yet a standard way for financial data companies to charge for access to their data through AI chatbots. One hedge fund analyst can now use agents to exponentially multiply the amount of queries they could ordinarily run.
Commercialization is still “evolving” for FactSet, Starling said. S&P Global’s Peter Licursi, who spearheads AI strategy at the company, similarly described pricing as “an evolution that we are actively discussing with our customers at all times.” It’s still “pretty early,” Pieretti said, noting that Moody’s currently charges based on what it expects a customer’s approximate usage will be.
Salesforce didn’t release pricing details for its new Claude integration.
Virtually every large business is grappling with surging AI token costs. And with chatbot plugins like MCPs, the end user — a business paying for the Salesforce-Claude integration, for example — bears the extra token costs that come with the tools. That adds an extra challenge for financial services companies, which are trying to get their customers to pay for add-ons that will also add to their token spend.
Room for Disagreement
Some businesses might not need to charge for new AI integrations. Upwork, the freelance work platform, launched an MCP server in August for free, allowing any user to search the company’s job database while staying in Claude or ChatGPT. Upwork acts as a marketplace that only gets a payout after a transaction is made, so AI chatbots serve as “acquisition channels of the future,” CEO Hayden Brown told me.
That integration was also partly a defensive play: Brown said they noticed users sending their AI agents to the Upwork site that tried to go through the hiring process. “Once we started seeing this behavior change, that was kind of the first light bulb,” she said.