Solution providers can ‘start really thinking about how to build the management capacities of AI agents as we start seeing more of this kind of hybrid workforce,’ Salesforce AI Executive Vice President and General Manager Adam Evans said.
Salesforce’s third version of its Agentforce artificial intelligence agent development platform offers more capabilities that should interest its solution providers, Adam Evans, Salesforce AI executive vice president and general manager, told CRN during a virtual press conference Monday.
Native support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), coming in July, and the new Agentforce Command Center, available in August, are important developments for solution providers who work with the San Francisco-based enterprise applications vendor, Evans said.
Partners can expect support for Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol in the future. For now, MCP support is “a commitment to making agents and Agentforce work through all systems,” he said.
Whether solution providers “are bringing in products or connecting products, you can expect to see more of that interoperability investment going forward today,” Evans said.
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Salesforce Agentforce 3
Salesforce has about 16,000 partners worldwide.
Altaf Shaikh, CEO and founder of Framingham, Mass.-based Salesforce solution provider ListEngage, told CRN in an interview that as the vendor’s ecosystem keeps going, partners such as himself with 20 years of experience in Salesforce architecture will continue to stand out from the pack.
The AI era has enterprises turning to their trusted solution providers to translate the cutting-edge technology to specific use cases and to make sure data is prepared for insights and secured to preserve authorized access, Shaikh said.
“AI might disrupt services organizations,” he said. “AI might make things easier. We’re talking in terms of tying in large enterprises and small enterprises and bringing in all that data within the Salesforce ecosystem. Agentforce lives on top of good data. Good data lives on top of good workflows. Things get messy in an organization.”
Agentforce Command Center
The Agentforce Command Center observability service for optimizing AI agents will help Salesforce solution providers better manage AI agents, set up key performance indicators (KPIs) and present more advisory and consulting work, Evans said.
Salesforce solution providers should expect to see more business-function management and reporting tools from the vendor for the AI era.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for value-add—specifically for (partners) like SIs—to come in and start really thinking about how to build the management capacities of AI agents as we start seeing more of this kind of hybrid workforce,” he said.
Command Center will allow for agent health monitoring, performance measuring and interaction analysis, according to the vendor. The service is built into Agentforce Studio.
Users can track agent latency, escalation frequency, error rates, success rates, cost and adoption, plus signals from third-party vendors including Datadog and Cisco Splunk. Command Center can push real-time alerts for unexpected behavior.
Other Agentforce 3 Updates
An Agentforce Studio application is also slated for an August release, according to the vendor. Capabilities in pilot or beta with general availability expected in July include Anthropic Claude models hosted within the Salesforce trust boundary, MuleSoft MCP and A2A support, and Heroku AppLink.
As part of Salesforce’s partnership with Anthropic, the AI upstart will work with Salesforce to scale Agentforce adoption with Claude for customers in regulated industries. Claude Sonnet model access in Agentforce comes through Amazon Bedrock hosting within the Salesforce trust boundary.
Salesforce also plans to allow Google Gemini use in Agentforce “later this year.”
MuleSoft’s new MCP connectors will allow conversion of any application programming interface (API) and integration into an agent-ready asset, according to Salesforce. The asset will have security policies, activity tracing, and traffic controls for orchestrating and governing multi-agent workflows.
Heroku Applink promises to simplify deployment, registration, maintenance and connection to custom MCP servers.
Already available Agentforce 3 capabilities include 100-plus new pre-built industry actions to hasten time-to-value, managed MCP server hosting through Herok, increased speed and response streaming, web search for Agentforce data libraries, and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High authorization for Agentforce’s public sector customers.
Agentforce 3 also adds support for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese. Another 30-plus languages are gaining support “in the coming months,” according to Salesforce. Agentforce 3 has also deployed within Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Japan and Brazil.
