The Revenue AI Report

Why Salesforce Built Its Own Model, Koa

Large platforms are post-training open weights - often NVIDIA Nemotron - on their own synthetic and domain data, then hosting that model as a product brain they control. Salesforce Koa is the lead case. ServiceNow Apriel and Now LLM, Adobe's Firefly foundation, and the NVIDIA Nemotron substrate show the same move. Gartner's domain-specific forecast (1% of enterprise GenAI models in 2024 to more than half by 2027) is the scale proxy. There is no public Fortune-500 headcount. Do not invent one. The buyer question is build-own versus rent-frontier - not "fine-tune our CRM rows."

TLDR

What this research does. This page documents which platforms now own and operate their own foundation models for revenue work, and which still rent that layer from a frontier provider, with the sourcing for each.

Why it matters to you. Model ownership changes pricing, data flow, and roadmap control on the platforms you already run. This tells you which vendors can reprice or redirect your AI costs, and when.

The short answer

What does the research show about Why Salesforce Built Its Own Model, Koa?

Claude and OpenAI still take most of the enterprise API dollar. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Adobe are also building models they control so the product is not stuck on rented frontier as the only brain. Koa is Salesforce's version. Kill the myth once: Koa is not "Salesforce trains on your CRM." Then ask which of your agent workloads stay on rent and which should run on a platform-owned model.

Evidence

  • Enterprise buyers mirror platforms: which workloads stay on Claude/OpenAI rent, which run on owned weights on Nvidia, which Order Form line pays for each path. Latham is law-domain own-model on firm-controlled Nvidia infra - not a CRM fine-tune story.
  • Kill the myth: Koa is not "Salesforce trains on your CRM." Salesforce IR states no customer data was used to train Koa.
  • Buyer question: which agent workflows stay on Claude/OpenAI rent, which move to a platform-owned model (Koa / Now LLM / peer), and which Order Form lines prove the bill on each path?

Supporting pages

Which big platforms now ship a brain they own, how that sits next to Claude and OpenAI rent, and the spend numbers that make the shift real. Every figure has a publisher and a date.

Claude and OpenAI still take most of the enterprise API dollar. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Adobe are also building models they control so the product is not stuck on rented frontier as the only brain. Koa is Salesforce's version. Kill the myth once: Koa is not "Salesforce trains on your CRM." Then ask which of your agent workloads stay on rent and which should run on a platform-owned model.

Sep 15, 2026. Salesforce and NVIDIA announce Koa, Salesforce's first CRM reasoning model for Agentforce. Base: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super (open weights). Post-train: proprietary synthetic CRM corpus modeled on ~27 years of deployment knowledge (processes, workflows, policies) - not live customer org records. Ownership: Salesforce controls the weights; post-training and inference inside the Salesforce trust boundary. Status: select pilots now; GA expected Winter 2026, U.S. regions. Salesforce IR: "No customer data was used to train the Koa reasoning model." Vendor CRM Bench scores stay UNPROVEN here. Pilot vs GA and Flex Credit detail stays on the live decoder: Salesforce Koa pilot vs GA. Primary: Salesforce IR, Announcing Koa.

This page is about platforms building their own brains. Named vendor evidence. Spend and adoption proxies. Why buyers and platforms open to controlled or owned models. On-prem vs cloud hosting mix. Impact beyond unit price.

This page is not a guide to customer fine-tunes on org CRM rows. Not a RAG how-to. Not Missionforce customer-data post-training as the lead. Not Snowflake Cortex PEFT or M365 Copilot Tuning as the story. Those surfaces exist elsewhere; they are out of frame here.

Figure 1. Named platforms on the vendor-owned brain path

Public sources do not publish a Fortune-500 headcount. Use named evidence. Do not invent one.

  • Salesforce Koa

    Synthetic CRM expertise corpus. Salesforce owns weights. IR: no customer data used to train Koa. Pilots now; GA Winter 2026 U.S.

    Nemotron 3 Super

    High confidence

  • ServiceNow Apriel + Now LLM

    Post-trained with NVIDIA data and ServiceNow domain data. Proprietary Now LLM / Now SLM v2.0 for Now Assist. Customers can still route to Azure OpenAI, Gemini, Claude on Bedrock, or Now LLM.

    Apriel Nemotron 15B

    High confidence

  • Adobe Firefly foundation

    Enterprise creative generative foundation Adobe owns and ships. Enterprise content stated as not used to train foundational Firefly. Customer brand Custom Models are a different product and out of frame here.

    Adobe-owned foundation

    Medium confidence

  • NVIDIA Nemotron

    Koa and Apriel both sit on Nemotron open models. Platforms post-train with their synthetic or domain corpus, host as a managed LLM, and offer it beside Claude/OpenAI/Gemini.

    Shared substrate

    High confidence

What this does not say

This roster is not a complete market census. Absence from the list is not proof a vendor lacks any private model work.

Publisher
Salesforce IR, ServiceNow press and community, Adobe business pages
Sample and method
Named primary sources only. Workday Sana and HubSpot Breeze are not forced into the owns-a-foundation-brain column; no LOCKED primary in the research packet.
Field dates
ServiceNow Apriel May 6, 2025; Now LLM v2.0 rollout from Oct 16, 2025; Salesforce Koa Sep 15, 2026
High confidence

Enterprise own-model peers on Nvidia

Same own-vs-rent move on the buyer side: firm- or enterprise-owned domain models on Nvidia infra, still hybrid with Claude/OpenAI/Gemini rent where needed. Not customer CRM fine-tunes. Latham & Watkins (~$8.3B U.S. #2 by revenue) spent roughly three years buying Nvidia GPU servers, including multiple H200s, and is fine-tuning open-weight Nvidia Nemotron 3 inside a data center only its staff can access. CIO Rene Mendoza (FT): keep sensitive client information off cloud vendors and keep flexibility as AI consumption pricing hardens. Michael Rubin (Bloomberg Law): on-prem open-weight path gives capabilities cloud legal AI tools do not. The firm still uses Harvey, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. FT: first major law firm publicly known to stand up this class of in-house AI infrastructure (Sep 10-11, 2026). Do not invent Latham NIM/NeMo/DGX SKUs, spend, or GPU count. Peers below are named Nvidia case studies/blogs; ServiceNow Apriel is already in Figure 1.

  • Latham & Watkins

    Law, Sep 2026. Nvidia H200 servers + open-weight Nemotron 3 on firm-controlled infra; hybrid with commercial LLMs. Sources: Bloomberg Law (lw.com PDF), FT via Legal IT Insider / Pulse2.

    Nemotron 3 fine-tune

    High confidence

  • RBC Capital Markets

    Nemotron via NIM inside Aiden AI factory; hybrid on-prem + cloud. Nvidia case study.

    Aiden + Nemotron via NIM

    High confidence

  • Eli Lilly (LillyPod)

    Wholly owned LillyPod DGX SuperPOD for protein/genomics/foundation models. Nvidia blog Feb 26, 2026.

    Owned drug-discovery models

    High confidence

  • Revolut

    Own behavioral foundation model family on H100 clusters; Llama-Nemotron-Embed for text fields. Nvidia case study.

    PRAGMA transaction FM

    High confidence

  • Amgen

    Antibody-specific protein LLMs on DGX Cloud + BioNeMo. Nvidia case study.

    Proprietary protein LLMs

    High confidence

  • AT&T

    Ask AT&T agents; NeMo + NIM stack. Nvidia case study.

    Fine-tuned agents

    High confidence

  • Siemens

    On-prem SLM inference on NIM / NeMo; shop-floor data stays on site. Nvidia case study.

    On-prem Industrial Copilot

    High confidence

What this does not say

Do not claim Latham uses NIM, NeMo, or DGX by SKU name. Do not claim Kirkland owns Nvidia servers. Do not invent spend, GPU count, or Fortune-500 headcounts.

Publisher
Bloomberg Law via lw.com; FT via Legal IT Insider / Pulse2; NVIDIA case studies and blogs
Sample and method
Buyer question stays the same as for Koa: which workloads stay on Claude/OpenAI rent, which move to a platform- or enterprise-owned model on Nvidia, and which Order Form line pays for each path.
Field dates
Latham Sep 10-11, 2026; peer Nvidia case studies as published
High confidence

Figure 2. Frontier rent is still the default dollar

Enterprise LLM spend. Platforms building own models is a response to that concentration and that bill, not proof rent is gone. Menlo also: closed-source 87% of enterprise workloads mid-2025.

Nov 2024Mid-20253.5%8.4%
  • Enterprise LLM spend ($B)4.9 pts

What this does not say

Do not mash Menlo's 13% open-source workload share with ETR's open-weight token share. Different metrics, different dates.

Publisher
Menlo Ventures Mid-Year LLM Market Update
Sample and method
n~150 technical leaders; fielded Jun 30-Jul 10, 2025; published Jul 31, 2025. Closed-source 87% of enterprise workloads; open-source 13%. Anthropic 32% / OpenAI 25% / Google 20% usage-weighted.
Field dates
Jun 30-Jul 10, 2025
High confidence

Figure 3. Domain-specific models are forecast to become the majority

Gartner: domain-specific share of enterprise GenAI models. Structural demand proxy for specialized or owned domain models. Not a count of CRM fine-tunes.

Share of enterprise GenAI models that are domain-specific

  • 2024 (actual)1%
  • 2027 (forecast, more than half)51%

    Gartner: more than half

What this does not say

This is not a headcount of companies fine-tuning on CRM rows. It is a forecast of model mix.

Publisher
Gartner PR
Sample and method
GenAI model end-user spend $14.2B in 2025; specialized / domain models $1.1B in 2025. Domain-specific models: 1% of enterprise GenAI models in 2024 to more than half by 2027.
Field dates
Published Jul 10, 2025

Newsroom may bot-wall; keep primary URL. "More than half" charted at 51% for display only.

High confidence
Figure 3. Domain-specific models are forecast to become the majority

Gartner: domain-specific share of enterprise GenAI models. Structural demand proxy for specialized or owned domain models. Not a count of CRM fine-tunes.

Figure 3. Domain-specific models are forecast to become the majority
Share of enterprise GenAI models that are domain-specificValue (%)Note
2024 (actual)1
2027 (forecast, more than half)51Gartner: more than half

Source: Gartner PR. GenAI model end-user spend $14.2B in 2025; specialized / domain models $1.1B in 2025. Domain-specific models: 1% of enterprise GenAI models in 2024 to more than half by 2027. Fielded Published Jul 10, 2025. Confidence: High.

Caveat: Newsroom may bot-wall; keep primary URL. "More than half" charted at 51% for display only.

What this does not say: This is not a headcount of companies fine-tuning on CRM rows. It is a forecast of model mix.

Figure 4. Controlled open-weight tokens are already a real share

ETR via Techstrong. Read as proof buyers will run controlled models for volume work - the same economic logic platforms use when they post-train Nemotron instead of calling Claude/OpenAI for every step.

Share

  • Open-weight share of enterprise AI tokens (now)34%
  • Expected open-weight token share in 12 months41%
  • Enterprises with open-weight in production42%
  • Among those: self-managed cloud hosting46%
  • Among those: on-prem hosting42%
  • Production users citing cost savings69%

What this does not say

Platform-owned brains (Koa, Now LLM) are typically vendor-hosted managed LLMs, not customer-downloadable weights. ETR hosting mix is the enterprise side of controlled weights.

Publisher
ETR survey via Techstrong.ai
Sample and method
n=200; Sep 2026. Security/compliance review incomplete = 62% of pilot blockers.
Field dates
September 2026
High confidence
Figure 4. Controlled open-weight tokens are already a real share

ETR via Techstrong. Read as proof buyers will run controlled models for volume work - the same economic logic platforms use when they post-train Nemotron instead of calling Claude/OpenAI for every step.

Figure 4. Controlled open-weight tokens are already a real share
ShareValue (%)Note
Open-weight share of enterprise AI tokens (now)34
Expected open-weight token share in 12 months41
Enterprises with open-weight in production42
Among those: self-managed cloud hosting46
Among those: on-prem hosting42
Production users citing cost savings69

Source: ETR survey via Techstrong.ai. n=200; Sep 2026. Security/compliance review incomplete = 62% of pilot blockers. Fielded September 2026. Confidence: High.

What this does not say: Platform-owned brains (Koa, Now LLM) are typically vendor-hosted managed LLMs, not customer-downloadable weights. ETR hosting mix is the enterprise side of controlled weights.

Figure 5. Token bills and platform scale both push off pure rent

EY puts token burn on the calendar. Salesforce ships massive frontier-style throughput and a parallel bet on Koa.

  • EY US AI Pulse (5th wave)

    98% of senior leaders using token tools say token costs caused them to reconsider approach; 82% concerned. n=534 SVP+; fielded Apr 24-May 17, 2026; published Jul 28, 2026.

    98% reconsidered

    High confidence

  • Salesforce FY26 Q4

    Agentforce ARR $800M (+169% Y/Y); >19T tokens all-time (5x Y/Y); 2.4B Agentic Work Units. Released Feb 25, 2026.

    $800M Agentforce ARR

    High confidence

What this does not say

Agentforce token volume does not prove Koa replaces frontier rent. Both can be true at once.

Publisher
EY; Salesforce IR
Sample and method
Two independent reads: buyer fiscal scrutiny and one platform's agentic scale while it builds its own brain.
Field dates
EY fielded Apr 24-May 17, 2026; Salesforce period ended Jan 31, 2026
High confidence

Also in the record

Figures that sit alongside these charts.

  • Enterprise buyers mirror platforms: which workloads stay on Claude/OpenAI rent, which run on owned weights on Nvidia, which Order Form line pays for each path. Latham is law-domain own-model on firm-controlled Nvidia infra - not a CRM fine-tune story.
  • Kill the myth: Koa is not "Salesforce trains on your CRM." Salesforce IR states no customer data was used to train Koa.
  • Buyer question: which agent workflows stay on Claude/OpenAI rent, which move to a platform-owned model (Koa / Now LLM / peer), and which Order Form lines prove the bill on each path?
  • Platform-owned brains (Koa, Now LLM, Firefly foundation): vendor hosts. Weights stay with the platform. Enterprise-controlled open-weight (ETR hosting mix) is a different owner of the stack.
  • Name the Order Form line before volume agents go live: rented tokens vs platform credits/AWUs vs fixed infra for self-hosted open-weight.
  • Exit cost: swapping an API key is cheaper than leaving a platform-owned reasoning path baked into the product.
  • Do not invent a Fortune-500 fine-tune headcount. Use named platform evidence plus Gartner/Menlo/ETR proxies.

Questions this page answers

What the data says, in plain language.

What does the research show about Why Salesforce Built Its Own Model, Koa?
Large platforms are post-training open weights - often NVIDIA Nemotron - on their own synthetic and domain data, then hosting that model as a product brain they control. Salesforce Koa is the lead case. ServiceNow Apriel and Now LLM, Adobe's Firefly foundation, and the NVIDIA Nemotron substrate show the same move. Gartner's domain-specific forecast (1% of enterprise GenAI models in 2024 to more than half by 2027) is the scale proxy. There is no public Fortune-500 headcount. Do not invent one. The buyer question is build-own versus rent-frontier - not "fine-tune our CRM rows." Which big platforms now ship a brain they own, how that sits next to Claude and OpenAI rent, and the spend numbers that make the shift real. Every figure has a publisher and a date.
What does the figure "Figure 1. Named platforms on the vendor-owned brain path" show?
Public sources do not publish a Fortune-500 headcount. Use named evidence. Do not invent one. Source: Salesforce IR, ServiceNow press and community, Adobe business pages. Named primary sources only. Workday Sana and HubSpot Breeze are not forced into the owns-a-foundation-brain column; no LOCKED primary in the research packet. Fielded ServiceNow Apriel May 6, 2025; Now LLM v2.0 rollout from Oct 16, 2025; Salesforce Koa Sep 15, 2026. Confidence: High.
What does the figure "Enterprise own-model peers on Nvidia" show?
Same own-vs-rent move on the buyer side: firm- or enterprise-owned domain models on Nvidia infra, still hybrid with Claude/OpenAI/Gemini rent where needed. Not customer CRM fine-tunes. Latham & Watkins (~$8.3B U.S. #2 by revenue) spent roughly three years buying Nvidia GPU servers, including multiple H200s, and is fine-tuning open-weight Nvidia Nemotron 3 inside a data center only its staff can access. CIO Rene Mendoza (FT): keep sensitive client information off cloud vendors and keep flexibility as AI consumption pricing hardens. Michael Rubin (Bloomberg Law): on-prem open-weight path gives capabilities cloud legal AI tools do not. The firm still uses Harvey, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. FT: first major law firm publicly known to stand up this class of in-house AI infrastructure (Sep 10-11, 2026). Do not invent Latham NIM/NeMo/DGX SKUs, spend, or GPU count. Peers below are named Nvidia case studies/blogs; ServiceNow Apriel is already in Figure 1. Source: Bloomberg Law via lw.com; FT via Legal IT Insider / Pulse2; NVIDIA case studies and blogs. Buyer question stays the same as for Koa: which workloads stay on Claude/OpenAI rent, which move to a platform- or enterprise-owned model on Nvidia, and which Order Form line pays for each path. Fielded Latham Sep 10-11, 2026; peer Nvidia case studies as published. Confidence: High.
What does the figure "Figure 2. Frontier rent is still the default dollar" show?
Enterprise LLM spend. Platforms building own models is a response to that concentration and that bill, not proof rent is gone. Menlo also: closed-source 87% of enterprise workloads mid-2025. Source: Menlo Ventures Mid-Year LLM Market Update. n~150 technical leaders; fielded Jun 30-Jul 10, 2025; published Jul 31, 2025. Closed-source 87% of enterprise workloads; open-source 13%. Anthropic 32% / OpenAI 25% / Google 20% usage-weighted. Fielded Jun 30-Jul 10, 2025. Confidence: High.
What does the figure "Figure 3. Domain-specific models are forecast to become the majority" show?
Gartner: domain-specific share of enterprise GenAI models. Structural demand proxy for specialized or owned domain models. Not a count of CRM fine-tunes. Source: Gartner PR. GenAI model end-user spend $14.2B in 2025; specialized / domain models $1.1B in 2025. Domain-specific models: 1% of enterprise GenAI models in 2024 to more than half by 2027. Fielded Published Jul 10, 2025. Confidence: High. Caveat: Newsroom may bot-wall; keep primary URL. "More than half" charted at 51% for display only.
What else sits alongside these figures?
Enterprise buyers mirror platforms: which workloads stay on Claude/OpenAI rent, which run on owned weights on Nvidia, which Order Form line pays for each path. Latham is law-domain own-model on firm-controlled Nvidia infra - not a CRM fine-tune story. Kill the myth: Koa is not "Salesforce trains on your CRM." Salesforce IR states no customer data was used to train Koa. Buyer question: which agent workflows stay on Claude/OpenAI rent, which move to a platform-owned model (Koa / Now LLM / peer), and which Order Form lines prove the bill on each path? Platform-owned brains (Koa, Now LLM, Firefly foundation): vendor hosts. Weights stay with the platform. Enterprise-controlled open-weight (ETR hosting mix) is a different owner of the stack.
Where does this data come from?
Every figure is reproduced from a named publisher: Salesforce IR, Announcing Koa, Salesforce, Koa product page, The Revenue AI Report, Koa pilot vs GA decoder, ServiceNow x NVIDIA press, ServiceNow Community, AI Models v2.0, ServiceNow Community, AI SDLC Part 2. Sample, field date, and confidence are shown on each chart. Sources marked as vendor research are labelled on the page.
What could not be confirmed?
Salesforce CRM Bench claims (3x fewer errors; product-page lifts). Vendor benchmark only until third-party replication. Any public Fortune-500 headcount of companies that built a Koa-class vendor-owned foundation LLM. Do not invent one. Workday Sana or HubSpot Breeze shipping a Koa-class owned foundation LLM as the default brain. No LOCKED primary in the packet.

Cite this page

Permanent URL and suggested citation.

https://www.therevenueaireport.com/research/platform-owned-models-koa-nemotron-vs-claude-openai-rent

Kvarfordt, Jonathan. "Why Salesforce Built Its Own Model, Koa." The Revenue AI Report, Research Library. https://www.therevenueaireport.com/research/platform-owned-models-koa-nemotron-vs-claude-openai-rent

Figures on this page are reproduced from the publishers listed below. Cite the original publisher for the underlying data, and this page for the compilation and framing.

Sources

Every publisher used on this page.

If a metric, model term, or method on this page is unfamiliar, every one of them is defined in The AI and Revenue Dictionary. Sample size, field date, and confidence tags are explained there too.

Could not confirm

What we looked for and did not find.

Claims found during research and not charted

  • Salesforce CRM Bench claims (3x fewer errors; product-page lifts). Vendor benchmark only until third-party replication.
  • Any public Fortune-500 headcount of companies that built a Koa-class vendor-owned foundation LLM. Do not invent one.
  • Workday Sana or HubSpot Breeze shipping a Koa-class owned foundation LLM as the default brain. No LOCKED primary in the packet.

How to cite this research

Written by Jonathan Kvarfordt, Founder and Principal Analyst, The Revenue AI Report. Published under CC BY 4.0.

APA

Kvarfordt, J. (2026). Why Salesforce Built Its Own Model, Koa. The Revenue AI Report. Retrieved from https://www.therevenueaireport.com/research/platform-owned-models-koa-nemotron-vs-claude-openai-rent

MLA

Kvarfordt, Jonathan. "Why Salesforce Built Its Own Model, Koa." The Revenue AI Report, 31 Aug. 2026, www.therevenueaireport.com/research/platform-owned-models-koa-nemotron-vs-claude-openai-rent.

BibTeX

@misc{kvarfordt2026platformownedmodelskoanemotronvsclaudeopenairent,
  author = {Kvarfordt, Jonathan},
  title = {Why Salesforce Built Its Own Model, Koa},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {The Revenue AI Report},
  url = {https://www.therevenueaireport.com/research/platform-owned-models-koa-nemotron-vs-claude-openai-rent}
}

Share this research

Posting to Instagram or TikTok? Copy the link, it carries the title, summary and share image.

Next theme

AI ROI Starts With the Outcome

The evidence points to one sequence: choose the strategic outcome, decompose the metric, inspect the operating system beneath it, test whether AI fits, then choose the OAR ambition and measure the result.

Subscribe

Get the weekly issue built on this data.

Arrives weekly by email. Free. Unsubscribe anytime. By subscribing you agree to our Privacy policy and Terms. We never sell or share the list.