Salesforce said on Sept. 15 local time it launched Koa, an AI model specialised in customer relationship management (CRM) data reasoning, in collaboration with Nvidia at its annual Dreamforce conference.

The company said Koa is based on Nvidia's Nemotron model and supports AI agents within the Agentforce platform in reasoning through complex multi-step tasks to carry out specialised work based on CRM data.

SiliconANGLE reported that Salesforce's chief platform engineering officer Rohan Kumar (로한 쿠마르) explained Koa was developed using a large synthetic dataset drawn on 30 years of in-house CRM buildout experience, rather than using vast customer information accumulated in CRM systems.

He said, "The knowledge built up over 27 years of building CRM is enormous," and added, "Koa starts from a domain-specialised model approach that further trains an already intelligent model on more task-specific information."

Salesforce stressed it trained Koa to accurately carry out multi-step tool calls by combining fine-tuning, reinforcement learning and policy optimisation techniques. It added that in benchmark tests, Koa matched or outperformed major general-purpose models on CRM tasks while producing about one-third the errors.

Salesforce said it expects Koa to be useful for corporate customers seeking to automate complex procedures that require expertise, such as renewing sales opportunities and validating leads.

It is currently available only to some customers under an expanded pilot programme within Agentforce, and will be released to the public this winter, the company said.