Salesforce Channel Chief Corfield: Partner Ecosystem Growing Alongside AI Demand

‘The critical role the partners play is in identifying and developing those specific use cases, getting really grounded in the ROI of what they’re going to deliver,’ says Salesforce Channel Chief Steve Corfield.

Efforts to grow Salesforce’s partner ecosystem by Channel Chief Steve Corfield and his team have resulted in the San Francisco-based enterprise application vendor now reaching about 16,000 partners, 9,000 of them in consulting—more than 30 percent growth in total partners and around 50 percent growth in consulting partners compared with last summer.

Corfield—whose official title is executive vice president and general manager of global alliances, channels and emerging products—told CRN in an interview that about 61 percent of Salesforce’s fourth-quarter artificial intelligence agent deals were implemented and delivered by partners, showing their importance in bringing Salesforce AI wares to customers.

“The critical role the partners play is in identifying and developing those specific use cases, getting really grounded in the ROI of what they’re going to deliver,” he said. “We have talked to some of our partners about creating this Agentforce factory—how do you take a use case and prove it very quickly such that you can then understand what is the return on the investment?”

[RELATED: Salesforce AI Push Comes With Partner Program Investment, Says Channel Chief]

Salesforce Channel Ecosystem

Salesforce’s partner organization is also leveraging AI to improve the solution provider experience, Corfield said. About 120,000 users per month receive 24-hour support from Salesforce’s partner agent, which can answer questions on gaining more advanced partner tiers, partner benefits and more.

“I want our partners to have a frictionless engagement with us, and I don’t need teams of people trying to field tickets and things like that,” he said. “These technologies just make that much more seamless and frictionless. We’re pretty proud of what we built.”

Natasa Marinkovic, vice president of marketing and alliances at Bozeman, Mont.-based Salesforce partner Atrium, told CRN in an interview that Agentforce is proving a popular platform for customers implementing AI and Data Cloud for modernizing data infrastructure and architecture.

Now three years after the release of ChatGPT ushered in the current AI wave, customers are starting to feel like they are behind competitors who have already been testing AI’s benefits to their business, she said.

“There’s definitely a race to [see] who is going to implement AI the fastest,” Marinkovic said.

Here’s more of what Corfield said to CRN.

How is Salesforce investing in its channel partner motion?

One of the things we wanted to try and do was not just be a central alliances and channels function that manages partners but actually get much closer to the field.

They want to be touching sales and things like that. From our core portfolio, we had a great year last year.

The talk of the town is Agentforce. Huge company pivot for that. CRM has been, what, a $60 billion marketplace? Salesforce can drive a multitrillion-dollar economy now with the agentic piece of Agentforce.

Not only Agentforce, but Data Cloud and Customer 360. And the uptake from the partners has been the fastest and most interested … in forever.

We’ve got 16,000 partners, about 9,000 consulting partners. Between October and Jan. 31, we trained 127,000 people in our AI product. And within that period of time, they built 18,000 agents.

In Q4, 5,000 agent deals, 61 percent of those all implemented, delivered by our partners.

The Salesforce agent environment delivers ROI five times faster and 20 percent cost savings compared to DIY [do-it-yourself AI assembled from a variety of point solutions].

With sales, Salesforce is owning that data layer and that trusted data layer, and all the data that sits within Salesforce. It’s not the internet just being scraped [like with other AI offers]. This is real customer data that wants to be delivered in a trusted fashion.

That puts us in a really, really strong position. The partners really understand that. And we’ve seen just the most unbelievable engagement around it—everybody wants a piece.

Any partners you’d like to shout out for their work?

Like everybody, our top five partners do about 30 percent of everything we do. Top 20 deliver about 54 percent of everything we do.

So obviously we have rotated our resources to that, and we do see the Accentures, the Deloittes, the PwCs absolutely in our top 10 delivery partners.

But what’s been really interesting is seeing companies like NeuraFlash … who’ve just been so fast to be able to move in certain market segments, like midmarket, low end, commercial.

The NeuraFlashes of this world were really fast to get customer agents, live, customers consuming, customers adopting. Typically, we are seeing real great success around the service use case, the sales use case coming through. And now we’re starting to see marketing and commerce and the other use cases really, really come to life.

What do you want Salesforce partners thinking about as AI continues to grow in adoption?

This is the start of this digital labor economy. We do think it is a multitrillion-dollar economy. We do think we are best placed given the data layer and what sits within what we do. We do want people to think about us not just as Agentforce but as a deeply unified platform.

The role of the CIO has changed demonstrably from technical leader to defining AI strategies to. ‘What’s my organizational readiness? How can I create road maps for adoption? What technologies do I even adopt?’

The data strategy piece, the business strategy piece—there’s just so much out there for our partners to go and do, which will make the money and make them successful. But by the same token, while they’re doing that that’s our opportunity to make sure that we’re fully embedded in everything that we do.

One of the challenges we have—and I’m an exec sponsor on a number of accounts—and you go in and’s like, ‘You’ve got two weeks because everybody’s saying that they can solve my world with agents.’

The critical role the partners play is in identifying and developing those specific use cases, getting really grounded in the ROI of what they’re going to deliver.

We have talked to some of our partners about creating this Agentforce factory—how do you take a use case and prove it very quickly such that you can then understand what is the return on the investment?

We’ve always sold software in various different guises, but we’re moving now to consumption. If I’m a CIO, what does that consumption look like? How much is it going to cost me?

And by the way, if I am going to get a 20 percent call deflection rate and it’s very successful, I must get operational gain. I must get a people-cost gain. How do I pull that together?

We talk to our partners around things like agent economics. How do we help with our business value selling team and their smart business value teams around what are the agent economics around these use cases? They’re a massive enabler for us.

Are we still learning what makes an effective business model in the AI era?

This thing is going at such a pace. One of the feedbacks we get from all the partners is speed, access and depth of enablement.

We are learning as we go. And one of the great things that we have created—the partner community has been incredibly helpful here—is this continuous feedback loop.

They’ve been at the forefront of some of the first implementations of this technology. They’ve identified some of the challenges that they’ve had with the customers. And we use that with our product teams to make sure that we’re evolving.

One of the conversations we are having today is, as products evolve and as they change, having this sort of immediacy—not necessarily enablement, but this continuous feedback loop. Incredibly important.

And then how do you make sure that you have depth of enablement, but also at scale?

The 127,000 certified people—by the way, we trained another 23,000 in Q1, so this thing’s going fast—once they are hands on keyboard, how do we support them using our professional services organization, our customer success group, and then have them almost triangulate back to products as well?

At the heart of everything we’re doing right now is customer success. In this new world of consumption, if the use case doesn’t fly, the ROI isn’t there, they don’t consume, we’re not successful.

The role of the partner changes. It’s gone from implementer to actually lifetime value customer success and consumption and adoption.

Whereas our focus was very much ACV [annual contract value]—and obviously we do want to protect our revenue position—the partners have now got a real big responsibility around lifetime value of our customers because adoption is going to be absolutely critical. And consumption.

Are you seeing consulting, services partners look more like ISVs in the AI era?

They’ve got some incredibly smart people, and it’s like–are you going to be just doing strategy? Or are you going to be building large language models, embedding your IP and building those things and then almost delivering those as a service?

A lot of these firms are hiring an awful lot of data scientists right now.

It’s forcing everybody to look at their business models. The way you deliver service has changed. Customers will be expecting you to use AI in service delivery, in project delivery, such that whatever economy of scale that is delivered via using AI, it somehow must have to show up in time-cost-quality to the customer.

We are starting to see that. I haven’t seen it proliferate just yet because when you talk to people, they’re talking about staying fairly in their lanes. But I can imagine as it matures, people are having to reimagine their businesses moving forward. But in a positive way because they want to address this very, very large market position.

Is the macroeconomic environment having any effect on customer investments?

I don't think there's any surprise economically [that customers are’ nervous.

There’s so much going on that it’s very hard to know from one day to the next how businesses should react in this world. The partners we talk to, if they’re going to get investment, these investment cases need to be very, very tight.

Agent economics, they need to be fairly bullet-proof use cases to make people move forward.

People still have a business to run. They still have the standard rate of business change. And now they have this thing called AI and transformation, and the service governance that sits around that is hugely complex and potentially costly.

Partners can help a lot with that as well. How do you move from a steady state to [preparing for] the future? And then the steps in between. All of that has to be a continuous business cycle.

Everything’s going to work, but the end state needs to be better, more efficient, cheaper, more operational, etc.

As everybody says, ‘Look, we know this stuff is good, but there is no magic budget.’ These business cases have to stand on their own two feet.

There are also very different levels of maturity.

Some are still in that first level of digital transformation. They still haven’t quite made that leap. Do they make the leap? Or a second leap?

It comes down to that maturity assessment. And that’s what we hear from our partners.

Do you go in sprints? Is it transformation? What is it?

We’re talking about AI, but should Salesforce partners see non-AI opportunities as well?

We are a $40 billion business that exists on our existing 360 portfolio today. So while we are readying ourselves for these next-generation products and we want to take a market position, and we want to lead that market, 100 percent we can’t push away from it.

We’re at nearly a million certifications across the 360 now.

There’s still a million credentials out there that exist to go across these other products across some 9,000 consulting partners. It’s a huge portfolio. It’s a growing portfolio, and it’s something that we still depend on.

Most of the agentic pieces that we see will start to be embedded, obviously, into the Salesforce portfolio as well.

One of the cool things that we’ve done this quarter, back in March, it’s a first of its kind.

We actually created a partner agent. When you now come into our Partner Community [portal], the first thing you will see is our partner agent. So anything that sits on our [Partner Community] Learn page has been consumed into our partner agent.

I want our partners to have a frictionless engagement with us, and I don’t need teams of people trying to field tickets and things like that. W’ve done it with our own Salesforce.help.com. We now have it in Partner Community. We have 120,000 users per month hitting that 24-by-seven support. It’ll do anything from how do I advance tiers? What are my benefits? How do I access benefits?

All the knowledge has been consumed by this agent. It’s learning every day.

We’ve got 9,000 partners. What does it take to get to 20,000 partners? And one of the things I wanted was, if you’re going have 20,000 partners, what’s the experience?

These technologies just make that much more seamless and frictionless. We’re pretty proud of what we built.

Has Salesforce also invested in training for partners, especially as it continues to acquire more companies?

All of our product leaders are still pushing hard.

We still have product GMs who still have goals, which still have needs. Every product GM has approached me and said, ‘I want to be closer to the ecosystem.’

Every time there’s a world tour it’s ‘Who can I meet? Who can I see?’

We run partner advisory boards every quarter of different products. We actually have the partners come in. We have the product community come in and say, ‘Tell us what you see. Tell us what your customers are saying about our product. Do you need deeper enablement?’ And all that good stuff.

How do we solve for speed, depth and access in a high-quality enablement sort of way?

Any final thoughts for Salesforce partners?

Partners aren’t just delivering Agentforce. They’re using it to transform themselves, which is a really good … indicator for us.

This is not just a product. It is a platform for building the future of work.

We are building a great marketplace community and movement within our AgentExchange.

Super proud that they’re using our products. We are moving to that platform for the future of work, and we’re going to create this amazing marketplace for everybody to play in.