Twenty years ago, Salesforce introduced AppExchange, a cloud-based marketplace for business applications. It was designed to strengthen the platform and provide CRM administrators and developers with a space to showcase their apps. Since then, it has become a key part of Salesforce’s ecosystem. Today, there have been more than 13 million installs, and it now hosts over 7,000 programs. Now, Salesforce aims to replicate that success—this time with AI agents. That vision has led to the launch of AgentExchange.
Initially, with 200 partners onboarded and hundreds of actions, AgentExchange is a repository of ready-to-use agentic AI components. The goal is to help organizations streamline their AI projects while assisting third-party developers in marketing and monetizing their work. AgentExchange is another step by Salesforce towards realizing Chief Executive Marc Benioff’s vision of AI agents becoming a digital workforce.
“AgentExchange opens up new opportunities for partners and Agentblazers to participate in this multi-trillion dollar AI economy,” Alice Steinglass, Salesforce’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Platform, Integration and Automation, stated during a press conference on Monday. “It means that our customers can get started with a pre-built library of agents and partner actions—actions from partners like Docusign, who is building actions that will seamlessly generate documents, route them for signatures, track their status, and automate key workflows; or Box, who is enabling Agentforce customers to seamlessly interact with the content that they store today in Box; and that’s just the beginning. With hundreds of agent actions from over 200 partners, AgentExchange is going to create new revenue streams and fuel the next generation of businesses.”
Agents, actions, and templates were previously supported within AppExchange. Developers could find pre-built solutions from Amazon Web Services, Google Workspace, Workday, IBM, Docusign, Sprout Social, OpenText, Box, and Zoom. Separating the agentic offerings from the app-centric ones will expedite searches and development, especially for developers keen on building for either platform. Salesforce will likely have migrated the work from existing partners to AgentExchange.
“We are actually launching with 200 partners on AgentExchange, and those partners—a lot of them—already have apps on AppExchange, and they’ve been excited to already start working as we’ve already begun this process,” Steinglass confirmed. She explained that over 1,000 partners have undergone training to build AI agents and that there are plans to do more educational outreach.
Salesforce AgentExchange Features
The company boasts that its new agentic marketplace comes with a few features:
New Component Support
Partners can offer four types of building blocks, from actions (the jobs agents can do with new integrations) to topics (focusing and refining agent behavior through group actions and instructions around a single task or job), prompt templates (pre-written, reusable prompts that ensure consistent interactions and help agents research, assist, and achieve specific goals), and agent templates (AI solution that combines multiple topics, uses pre-built actions, and comes complete with metadata and global instructions spanning topics).
Try Before You Buy Install
As mentioned earlier, AgentExchange improves the user discovery process. Instead of wading between apps and agents, there’s now a marketplace dedicated to AI development from partners. Salesforce claims customers can search for solutions and then elect to try them before deciding whether to make a firm commitment.
A Trusted and Safe Marketplace
Companies need assurance that the pre-built solutions they install are secure. Salesforce emphasized that all AgentExchange agents, actions, and templates undergo rigorous security reviews and have received sufficient customer feedback to earn a spot in the marketplace. Developers searching for agentic tools on AgentExchange should be able to find quality providers, eliminating the risk of inadvertently installing a malicious AI bot.
Connect With Agentblazers
AgentExchange is not solely about software. It’s also a place where users can network with Salesforce’s so-called Agentblazers, individuals who have embraced and innovated around AI and Agentforce. Within the marketplace, Agentblazers can offer knowledge, best practices, and tips on how organizations can adopt agentic AI.
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Salesforce Looks to Build up the AI Economy
AgentExchange will be formally announced at Salesforce’s TDX conference this week. It’s the proverbial carrot being dangled in front of developers that the company hopes will jump-start interest in third-party extensions to Agentforce.
However, the company realizes that it cannot service all its customers’ AI needs. Although it supports many of the popular large language models (LLMs) and has a powerful CRM component, Salesforce isn’t a market leader in a few specialty areas. Agentforce may be a good place for developers to start building their agents, but there are some traits and capabilities these bots need that are available from third-party providers.
It’s a well-known strategy in tech, seen not just with Salesforce’s AppExchange but also across major platforms like Google and Microsoft. Nevertheless, it aligns with Salesforce’s pitch that Agentforce is an open platform.
As Steinglass pointed out, having an LLM alone isn’t enough for AI projects to be successful. It needs a more extensive system, similar to a CPU requiring an operating system, memory, and peripherals. To be effective, AI must have access to structured and unstructured data while also ensuring trust, compliance, and security. And beyond simply retrieving information, a truly valuable AI agent must take autonomous actions across applications. Building it entirely in a unified platform like Agentforce ensures consistency and simplicity.
Disclosure: Salesforce has invited me to attend TDX as its guest, paying for my expenses. The company, in no way, dictated the content of this post. These are my words.Featured Image: People gather around the Agentforce booth at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference on Sept. 17, 2024. Photo credit: Ken Yeung
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