‘It’s going to be an incredible opportunity for’ Salesforce services partners, CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said.
Salesforce’s new AIforce surface area and Headless Toolkit for building experiences with Salesforce-owned applications and third-party tools are opening up new opportunities for solution providers, Tyler Carlson, Salesforce’s senior vice president and head of product for AgentExchange and partner experience, told CRN in an interview.
Carlson compared the opportunity for solution providers to the wave of activity generated when Salesforce launched its cloud-based Force.com platform in 2008.
“You can build your cockpit or your dashboard or your app on top of Salesforce data. And then you can take that and publish it back to Salesforce as the runtime for the React app that you built on the platform [for example],” Carlson said. “Then all of the SI partners can go and do that kind of custom work and implementations for all their customers.”
[RELATED: Salesforce Dreamforce 2026: CEO Benioff Touts New AIforce Interface Layer]
Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff stressed in his Dreamforce keynote an “interface revolution” akin to the movements from command-line interfaces (CLI) to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in the 1980s to the adoption of web interfaces in the 1990s and mobile interfaces in the 2000s.
“You are going to see AI interfaces that are dynamic and intelligent, that are composable and alive,” Benioff said in his keynote, “and that work with you in the fundamental administration of the applications, can work with you in building the applications, and work with you in operating the applications. Because the interface itself is alive. Some people say the interface is living.”
In a brief interview with CRN during Dreamforce 2026, Benioff said that the vendor’s investments in AI innovation and deepening partnership with Claude maker Anthropic should translate into wins for its services partners.
“It’s going to be an incredible opportunity for them,” Benioff said. “Wait until you get your hands on Claudeforce. It’s going to be awesome.”
Sean Catlin, executive vice president and global head of strategy at Québec-based Salesforce solution provider OSF Digital, told CRN in an interview that Salesforce’s investment in headless architecture, which decouples Salesforce’s back-end data and business logic from its traditional browser-based user interface, is an important evolution for users who want to keep data in the vendor’s products and maintain guardrails and workflows but use a third-party interface such as Anthropic’s Claude.
Some users may find complementary use cases for Salesforce’s own communications application Slack alongside Claude and other third-party AI chatbots, Catlin said. He pointed to the Claude Tag integration with Slack where Slack users can tag the chatbot in Slack and delegate tasks to it while it builds context and remembers relevant information.
“That headless strategy was offensive rather than just purely defensive,” he said. “This Claudeforce thing is actually a stroke of genius. … It’s going to unlock so much value for customers.”
AIforce Creates New SI Opportunities
One of the biggest themes out of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, which ran through Thursday in San Francisco, is the vendor’s value beyond its user interface and as an interaction layer for company data.
The possibility that AI tools such as Claude and ChatGPT could reduce demand for traditional software-as-a-service applications and licenses has loomed over companies such as Salesforce during the AI era.
AI tools actually extend the value of Salesforce’s more traditional products, creating new ways for users to interact with company data while reinforcing Salesforce’s position as business-process infrastructure for AI, Carlson said. The vendor is leaning into interface flexibility through its Headless Toolkit and other recent advancements. Salesforce can act as an important layer of the stack for maintaining governance, security and consistent processes and experiences throughout an organization.
“For our partner ecosystem, you can think about, we’ve just built [37 Claude skills, or reusable AI agent instructions, into Salesforce] so far,” Carlson said. “We’re going to be building a whole bunch more. But the ISVs and SIs can take this layer that we’ve built and completely explode the possibilities. Verticalized use cases, industry use cases across all different kinds of things, building out things for their own apps and surfaces.”
Consulting partners also have an immense opportunity working with customers on implementation methodology, configuration and more, he added.
What’s Next For AgentExchange
As for Salesforce’s AgentExchange marketplace, Carlson said that the vendor has improved the experience for consulting partners, including the ability for consultancies to list services for purchase and applications and other intellectual property (IP) the partner has built in one container.
The move reflects an ongoing convergence among partners in the AI era as they combine services and intellectual property to differentiate themselves in the channel, Carlson said. “We are starting to see some of our SIs go in that direction—build out accelerators, packaged IP, AgentExchange apps,” he said. The marketplace has also added more partner program competencies.
In October, Salesforce plans to allow solution providers to sell services and core products that don’t run on Salesforce through the marketplace, Carlson said. The move adds more flexibility on top of the recently added option for partners to list custom private offers.
Other features and capabilities on the AgentExchange roadmap for 2027 include a skills marketplace for ISVs, agentic search and comparisons, a flex credits purchasing option, public offers and multi-party transactions.
Salesforce solution providers should invest in their marketplace presence in part because the vendor’s internal sellers can use the marketplace to bring in appropriate solution providers for their customers, Carlson said. The marketplace also allows solution providers to leverage customers’ pre-buy usage and usage commitments to speed up deals.
Salesforce’s marketplace can help solution providers “with procurement friction, getting in the door—especially if you’re a smaller consultant,” Carlson said. “Leveraging the Salesforce relationship with the customer and their awareness of us and our marketplace helps them land a customer they maybe wouldn’t have landed.”
