Salesforce and Nvidia’s new reasoning model is everything the AI labs should fear

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:

• an open-weight alternative to closed frontier models
• a model trained to do specific work tasks (rather than to solve impossible math problems)
• one that has not ingested any actual customer data and therefore cannot leak it to others
• a model that helps reduce AI spending, since it uses fewer tokens to do the same work
• one that can be automatically routed through an AI “gateway,” depending on the need
• and a model that follows all of a customer’s data requirements and security embedded within Salesforce.