In a strategic move poised to reshape its vast ecosystem, Salesforce has officially opened its Agentforce 360 platform to both Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators, signaling a deliberate shift toward democratizing artificial intelligence development. This initiative is designed to do more than simply offer new tools; it aims to fundamentally transform partners into intellectual property-focused AI product companies. By providing the foundational infrastructure, Salesforce is enabling its partners to build, package, and commercialize their own unique AI agents and applications. This strategic expansion is set to foster a new wave of innovation, allowing specialized domain expertise to be productized and sold directly within the Salesforce ecosystem. The core of this announcement lies in empowering partners to move beyond service delivery and become creators and sellers of sophisticated, enterprise-grade AI solutions, leveraging a platform built to handle the complexities of modern AI development and deployment.
Lowering Barriers to AI Innovation
A Simplified Development Framework
The Agentforce 360 platform dramatically lowers the technical barriers to entry for creating enterprise-grade AI by abstracting away the immense complexity of managing underlying infrastructure. Partners can now construct powerful AI agents natively on the platform, utilizing a library of over 500 pre-built features designed to accelerate development cycles. This approach entirely removes the need for partners to grapple with the operational overhead of managing large language model (LLM) infrastructure, including the intricate processes of model hosting, scaling, and usage optimization. Consequently, development teams can bypass these resource-intensive tasks and focus their efforts on what truly differentiates them: their unique industry knowledge and innovative application logic. By providing a managed, high-level environment, Salesforce allows its partners to channel their resources into building sophisticated AI-powered solutions that solve specific business problems, rather than spending valuable time and capital on foundational engineering challenges that are common across the AI landscape.
Unifying Data with a Zero Copy Architecture
A cornerstone of this strategic initiative is a completely revamped data architecture engineered to solve one of the most persistent challenges in enterprise AI: data fragmentation. Through the introduction of Data 360 and the new Zero Copy Partner Network, Salesforce enables partners to access real-time data across disparate systems without the need to build and maintain fragile and complex extract, transform, load (ETL) pipelines. This innovative zero-copy approach ensures that all teams and the AI agents they build operate from a single, trusted, and “harmonized” customer profile. Instead of duplicating data, which often leads to inconsistencies and latency, this network provides secure, live access to information where it resides. This guarantees that AI models are trained and run on the most current and accurate data available, leading to more reliable insights, more precise predictions, and ultimately, more effective AI-driven applications that can respond dynamically to changing business conditions.
Cultivating a Commercial AI Ecosystem
Streamlining Monetization and Operations
Beyond providing the tools for building AI, Salesforce is creating a robust commercial framework to help partners monetize their creations effectively. A deeper integration with the AppExchange platform automates many of the critical, yet often tedious, back-office processes associated with selling software. This includes streamlined workflows for customer provisioning, license management, and recurring billing, freeing partners from significant administrative burdens. Furthermore, Salesforce is introducing highly flexible pricing models to accommodate the diverse nature of AI solutions. Partners can now offer seat-based, usage-based, or consumption-based pricing, all managed through a novel “Flex Credits” structure that provides customers with greater control over their spending. To ensure partners have clear visibility into their business performance, Agentforce 360 delivers real-time transparency through automated usage statements and detailed consumption data, which are accessible via the App Analytics dashboard, enabling data-driven decisions on pricing and product strategy.
The Strategic Pivot to an Expertise Economy
This series of platform enhancements ultimately represented more than just a product update; it solidified Salesforce’s vision of fostering a new AI economy where specialized expertise became more valuable than code itself. The announcement made it clear that the platform was designed as a foundation for partners to productize their deep, domain-specific knowledge, turning years of industry experience into scalable AI solutions. The planned launch of the Salesforce Partner Marketplace App for the first quarter of 2026 was positioned as the capstone of this commercial ecosystem, promising to offer centralized billing and payments that would further streamline order-to-cash workflows for all participants. With Agentforce 360 and Data 360 becoming immediately available, the initiative sent a powerful message to the market: the future of enterprise software was not just about using AI, but about enabling an entire ecosystem to build and sell it. This move effectively transformed the partner network into a distributed innovation engine for artificial intelligence.
