VA signs $1.6B Salesforce AI agents contract

The US Department of Veterans Affairs awarded Salesforce a $1.6 billion, three-year contract to put VA Salesforce AI agents and related software into the department’s operations. The deal gives Salesforce a large federal reference customer for its Agentic Enterprise License Agreement, a commercial model the company has been promoting as application vendors try to price AI agents beyond standard SaaS seats.

Salesforce said the agreement will give VA employees access to agentic AI, integrated data and collaboration tools meant to reduce administrative work. Kendall Collins, CEO of Salesforce’s defense and government business, said the aim is to connect VA staff, data and workflows so employees can find information faster and spend more time on care and benefits work. Salesforce did not disclose how many VA employees are covered by the agreement, what usage caps apply, or what performance metrics the department will use to judge the rollout.

What will VA use Salesforce AI agents for?

One planned use is a 24-hour virtual contact center that places AI agents inside existing VA workflows. Salesforce said those agents are intended to pull up information during live calls, triage cases and automate benefits verification.

The agreement is also expected to support an “agentic operating system” built on Slack, according to Salesforce. That system is already in use in some VA hospitals, the company said. The description leaves open a central procurement question: whether the VA’s initial use cases stay close to call-center and workflow automation, or expand into broader clinical and benefits operations over the three-year term.

Salesforce announced the Agentic Enterprise License Agreement in October 2024 as the software industry debated how to sell AI agents without tying every customer deployment to unpredictable metered usage. The company describes AELA as a flat, seat-based arrangement, and says customers have responded well to the model.

Gartner warned earlier this year that such agreements could shift into defined-quantity contracts near renewal, particularly if unmonitored use becomes expensive. Salesforce has rejected the idea that it plans to abandon capped plans, saying renewals will remain flexible. For buyers, the issue is less the branding of an “agentic” license than whether usage, liability, service levels and integration work are clear before the tools spread across departments.

The Salesforce award lands while the VA is still working through another large enterprise technology program. Oracle is rolling out a new electronic health record system for the department under a $9.99 billion agreement signed in 2018. Further deployments were suspended in April 2023 after patient-safety concerns, then restarted in February 2024 under the original contract.

Oracle also won a separate federal software deal this week. The US Department of Defense signed an Enterprise Software Agreement with the company worth nearly $7 billion over as many as 10 years. The department estimated that consolidating fragmented one-off purchases under that agreement will save taxpayers at least $441 million over its lifetime.

Taken together, the Salesforce and Oracle agreements show federal agencies continuing to buy enterprise software at platform scale, even as AI procurement terms remain unsettled. For Salesforce, the VA contract is a high-profile test of whether agentic software can be sold as a department-wide license rather than a narrow automation project.

This story draws on original reporting from The Register.