The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which spends about $3 billion a year on IT, uses Salesforce for “pretty much everything” including case management and maintaining its public facing portals and websites, according to chief information officer Sam Berry. But over the last year, the sprawling agency reduced its use of Salesforce for some tasks as it turned to other software suppliers such as enterprise AI firm C3.Berry told me the nearly 100,000-employee agency has let one of its contracts with Salesforce expire in the last year. The software in question enabled the agency to track letters it received from other U.S. agencies, Congress and voters. The cost would have been about $4 million annually for licensing and roughly $2 million in payments to outside consultants, according to Berry, who became CIO of the agency in September 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s DOGE overhaul. (Before, Berry was the CEO of a software startup called White Pine Digital.)Instead, in January the department began a one-year contract worth roughly $9 million to use C3’s software through another vendor, Carahsoft, which resells software from various providers. Berry said C3’s correspondence management software helped the agency use AI to sort through and respond to a backlog of roughly 2,000 unanswered letters that had built up over several years, in two months.
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