New Salesforce Partner Network, MCP Tools Target AI Agent Success

‘There’s an amazing opportunity for those types of partners to help with the delivery of all of this innovation to our customers,’ Tyler Carlson, Salesforce senior vice president and head of product for AppExchange and ecosystem, said.

Salesforce has rolled out a Forward Deployed Engineering Partner Network to arm select solution providers with greater technical expertise, and the vendor has made more tools available that can help solution providers bring artificial intelligence agents to life for customers while also detailing a roadmap for more tools to come.

The FDE Partner Network, tools roadmap and a revamped AgentExchange marketplace were showcased as part of Salesforce’s TDX developer conference that ran through Friday in San Francisco.

Tyler Carlson, Salesforce senior vice president and head of product for AppExchange and ecosystem, told CRN during a press conference that the new tools should help Salesforce services partners “build more interesting and more capable solutions and agents.”

AgentExchange should provide the accelerants, the pre-built capabilities, the pre-built tools and vetted MCP servers and skills that they can use to accelerate that delivery, said Carlson (pictured above).

“There’s an amazing opportunity for those types of partners to help with the delivery of all of this innovation to our customers and a lot of opportunity for them to build a business around delivering agentic solutions on this platform,” he said.

Salesforce’s New Forward Deployed Engineering Partner Network

Katie Serniak, a product marketing manager with Bozeman, Mont.-based Salesforce solution provider Atrium, told CRN in an interview that Atrium attended TDX to help promote its Andi full lifecycle developer agent the services provider built to augment its services for customers.

Users tell the agent what to do in natural language and it builds and tests scripts for the user, Serniak said. Atrium, which is also part of the FDE Partner Network, also built the agent so that it doesn’t eat users’ tokens, providing a cost benefit.

“We have a long, long running history of understanding AI,” she said.

New Partner Network Changes Playbook For Agentforce Deployments

Aimed at reducing the execution gap in bringing AI to workplaces, Salesforce’s Forward Deployed Engineering Partner Network brings its own engineering expertise and product roadmap insights to a select global partner network.

CRN 2025 Solution Provider 500 members Capgemini, Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, Accenture, Slalom, Bridgenext and IBM Consulting are among the network partner participants selected for proven Agentforce success, according to Salesforce.

FDE Partner Network members have direct links to internal Salesforce product teams. They receive expert backing at the pace of Salesforce innovation to de-risk deployments and solve complex data challenges, according to the vendor. These partners also have incentives tied to agents reaching production to ensure that every engagement delivers measurable business value.

Network members have driven one-third of all successful Agentforce implementations, according to Salesforce. The network’s delivery model puts specialized, outcome-based teams that work side by side with customers. FDEs start by defining how agents connect to enterprise data, what permissions govern their actions and where compliance controls sit.

They design a blueprint for how the agent behaves in production, mapping every decision, action and escalation path. The FDEs also check trust guardrails and compliance before the build phase.

FDEs work with customers after launch to monitor agentic behavior, resolve issues that only surface in production and fine-tune for sustained performance, according to Salesforce.

Salesforce also has a $50 million Builders Fund with investment, engineering support and go-to-market pathways for those who qualify, according to the vendor. The initiative aims to help partners build faster, adopt new consumption-based business models and bring production-ready AI solutions to market. It’s focused on new partners entering the ecosystem.

The network and builders fund come on the heels of an overhauled consulting track of the Salesforce partner program, which the vendor disclosed in March.

The program now pays these partners based in part on active consumption instead of seat provisioning. The change includes twofold to sixfold increases in certification vouchers and hands-on verification requirements to make sure solution providers can architect and deploy AI agents in high-stakes enterprise environments with security and compliance met.

The track also moves down from four consulting partner tiers to two: Summit for top-tier, strategic growth partners and Select for delivery partners who meet performance standards and takes 170 legacy “navigator” distinctions to 28 core competencies aligned with Agentforce and Data 360, among other adjustments.

Headless 360, MCP Tools Expand How Agents Connect To Salesforce

As part of the product innovations Salesforce unveiled at TDX, one of the biggest changes of importance to solution providers is a new headless architecture to better expose Salesforce to users’ artificial agents of choice.

Headless 360 architecture exposes Salesforce capabilities agents need as application programming interfaces (APIs), Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools or command-line interface (CLI) instructions.

Among the MCP tools Salesforce will provide more access to later this year are a testing center for pre-production evaluation and tuning set for general availability in May, according to the vendor. Custom scoring evaluations are now available in beta. A catalog becomes GA in June. Coming soon are agent telemetry in Slackbot, DevOps research assessment and Agentforce for scale.

Salesforce showed version 2.0 of Agentforce Vibes during TDX. This version gives users Claude Sonnet, GPT-5 and other multi-model support. DevOps Center MCP adds programmatic access to continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Natural Language DevOps allows users to describe what they want deployed for an agent to execute. The goal is to reduce cycle times by up to 40 percent thanks to users no longer needing to context-switch across multiple tools, according to Salesforce.

New native React support allows for custom interfaces and experiences in any design language, interaction model or brand expression, according to Salesforce. The vendor has expanded its Agent Fabric control plane for multi-vendor AI landscapes to make it now available in Canada and Japan and now support for Runtime Fabric deployment for running guardrails on users’ own infrastructure for private clouds and on-premises workloads.

Since launch in September, Agent Fabric has managed and coordinated thousands of agentic instances for customers for agent discovery, orchestration, governance and observation across the enterprise, according to the vendor.

A beta for deterministic orchestration through Agent Broker starts this month, with full general availability slated for June. Agent Script for Agent Broker will allow users to define fixed handoff rules while models handle the reasoning in between. Salesforce hopes that users see more consistent and reliable outcomes from goal-based, autonomous agents paired with trusted, codified workflows.

Full GA will include the visual authoring canvas, a drag-and-drop interface alongside MuleSoft Vibes that maps workflows and human checkpoints. The canvas aims to improve how developers discover best-fit agents and generate project scaffolding. Full GA will also include Salesforce model support, according to the vendor.

New Compliance, Governance Tools

Salesforce has now made AI Gateway, MCP Bridge and Trusted Agent Identity generally available. AI Gateway offers users a way to standardize token management and compliance across multi-model stacks. Users can enforce routing rules, unify access and control costs from a central point. That way, they can ensure data safety and no budget surprises.

MCP Bridge makes existing APIs agent ready and enables MCP at scale with enterprise grade-security and rate-limiting without changing code. MCPs hosted in recent Salesforce acquisition Informatica allow users to pull Informatica data quality and governance MCP servers directly into their workflows. This is automatically available in Agent Registry.

Trusted Agent Identity allows agents to execute actions with specific user permissions. Users can receive mobile approval requests for money movement, legal reviews and other high-stakes tasks. Users also maintain privileged operation verification and the ability to audit, according to Salesforce.

With Agent Fabric’s controlled registration, users can selectively register only the agents and tools that meet business rules. Agent Scanners now has additional support for Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and GoDaddy, with MCP support slated for May and OAuth support expected in June.

Slack Enhancements

And even coming off the recent news of Salesforce revamping its Slackbot virtual assistant, the vendor still had new updates to share about its Slack collaboration and communication platform during TDX.

Coming in late May is the ability to add agents built with AI upstarts Vercel and Lovable to Slack. And Salesforce has opened up the ability for users to participate in the beta of Slackbot MCP Client.

The Slackbot MCP Client will allow users to connect applications and agents and orchestrate work through Slackbot, with Slackbot routing requests and managing multi-step workflows across the stack.

Salesforce is rolling out general availability for Block Kit components. Slack’s developer toolkit for agents is now available at Slack.dev. And agent browser and AgentExchange are now GA.

Block Kit can help users turn AI responses into charts, data tables and other structured, interactive user interfaces (UIs) in Slack.

The Slack Agent Kit will give developers enhanced Bolt frameworks and new command-line interface (CLI) commands for bringing agents into Slack even if they were built in another platform or with another framework.

AgentExchange and the consolidated Slack agent browser aim to centralize discovery and maintain enterprise-grade governance for the agent ecosystem, according to Salesforce.

AgentExchange Updates

The AgentExchange marketplace unifies Salesforce’s AppExchange, Slack and Agentforce and brings users agents from Google, Anthropic, Box and other vendors. AgentExchange has 10,000 Salesforce applications, 2,600-plus Slack apps and 1,000-plus Agentforce agents, tools, and MCP servers.

Updates coming to AgentExchange in the fall include embedded agentic search with conversational discovery, hyperpersonalized recommendations and intelligent app comparisons, according to Salesforce. Also coming in the fall are AI-powered publishing tools for ISVs and enhanced listing pages.

In winter, Agentforce Builder receives a new streamlined installer and seamless install flow plus contextual discovery of AgentExchange agents, which will also come to Slackbot. Winter will also mark the availability of a public offer checkout with AgentExchange Go-To-Market App integration.

The browser allows users to look in AgentExchange for AI-powered apps, manage active agents in one tab and resume recent conversations, according to Salesforce.