The Next Step For AI Agents? Salesforce SVP Says They May Start Making Purchases

“A procurement team could say, ‘Hey, agent, as long as you’re within this budget, here’s my credit card. Go ahead,’” says Tyler Carlson, Salesforce’s senior vice president and head of product for AgentExchange and partner experience.

Procurement teams may soon feel comfortable enough to leverage specialized artificial intelligence agents not only to write and assess requests for proposal, but also to make purchases on humans’ behalf.

That’s a near possibility, Tyler Carlson, Salesforce’s senior vice president and head of product for AgentExchange and partner experience, told CRN in an interview.

“A procurement team might buy a specialized agent or they might set Claude or ChatGPT on a long-running goal task to write an RFP, go send that RFP out to a bunch of different vendors, collate all the responses, use the requirements to determine what the right scoring and best fit solution for a business need is,” Carlson said. “A procurement team could say, ‘Hey, agent, as long as you’re within this budget, here’s my credit card. Go ahead.’”

Growing AI tool usage, Salesforce’s decision to decouple its customer relationship management (CRM) software from its user interface to open up further flexibility for users and ongoing advancements in the San Francisco-based vendor’s AgentExchange marketplace are some of the biggest opportunities ahead for the vendor’s partner ecosystem, Carlson said.

[RELATED: Salesforce Dreamforce 2026: CEO Benioff Touts New AIforce Interface Layer]

Salesforce Invests In AgentExchange AI Discoverability

Sean Catlin, executive vice president and global head of strategy at Québec-based Salesforce solution provider OSF Digital, told CRN in an interview that the solution provider has built out a methodology to differentiate the company from the rest of the channel.

This methodology is aimed at delivering value in weeks and transforming clients into agentic enterprises in months.

Other solution providers can “get to use cases and pilots really, really quickly, but the scale doesn’t really happen afterwards” with other solution providers’ methodology. “We’ve developed a whole practice with defined roles. We’ve got specialized training and enablement that we’ve been scaling up our team globally. We’ve been using that with customers. It’s really exciting.”

Salesforce’s Carlson told CRN that some architectural changes made to AgentExchange under his watch to take fuller advantage of the AI opportunity include better answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO), including better allowing indexing by AI agents and agent access through browsers.

That “is also going to help all of our partners get more discoverable in those surfaces,” Carlson said. “So you can start asking questions like, ‘What are the best consultants for Salesforce in this industry?’ And it will be able to read our data and make recommendations and actually converse with the AgentExchange through Claude or ChatGPT or Google AI. So that’s cool.”

Here’s more of what Carlson had to say on how Salesforce’s innovation and strategic choices in the AI era are benefiting its partner ecosystem.

What’s your message to Salesforce solution providers coming out of Dreamforce 2026?

For the partners—particularly for the SI partners—what we’re doing with AIforce is like a whole new surface area for them to think about how they bring Salesforce solutions to their customers. … We’re getting a lot of interest from the community on how they can use the Headless Toolkit, the asset that we created, to build experiences like what we’ve done with Salesforce and Claude. … It’s effectively an SDK (software development kit) for building all kinds of new experiences with Salesforc

We’re seeing this reinvigoration of the ecosystem in a way that I think mirrors like the early days of Force.com (the cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for building and running custom applications on the same infrastructure as Salesforce CRM) and the platform, which is really exciting.

We’ve got a bunch of ISVs building all kinds of new experiences like Lovable, as an example, which you wouldn’t have thought traditionally of as an ISV of Salesforce.

But they’ve built an amazing experience where you can connect Lovable to the Salesforce HeadlessToolkit, our APIs (application programming interfaces) and MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers.

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].

Then all of the SI partners can go and do that kind of custom work and implementation for all their customers.

Are you seeing a convergence in partner business models—services partners developing software, vendors adding services?

We are seeing a lot of SIs that are building more package solutions, durable IP (intellectual property) that they can bring to our marketplace.

We did a big uplift for consulting partners on the AgentExchange recently. Reinvigorated the listings, brought the new partner program and competencies and all of that. And we created effectively what is a partner container. [They can list] their consulting services, but also if they want to list ISV applications, they can all do that under one partner container.

We are starting to see some of our SIs go in that direction—build out accelerators, packaged IP, AgentExchange apps. Deloitte is one that did that with us (for example).

What are the benefits of Salesforce solution providers investing in their AgentExchange presence?

The opportunity now with what we’re doing with headless and the opportunity for what the partners are building on the AgentExchange, whether ISV or SI, to drive more usage of the platform.

[That] is creating a flywheel for the partner and the reps (Salesforce sales representatives) to care about bringing in the right partner for their customer, bringing in the right ISV solutions for their customers, so that it’ll drive additional consumption and usage and value for the customer. … Our aspiration with the AgentExchange is … to build a similar marketplace for a SaaS (software-as-a-service) product like the hyperscalers have.

And as customers pre-buy usage, commit to usage, there becomes this mechanism where our partners get access to this pre-committed budget. Purchases through the marketplace can help them retire that usage and precommitted budget. … We launched AgentExchange commerce with custom private offers for partners to sell through.

In October … we will also allow partners to sell services and their core products that aren’t necessarily running on Salesforce through that marketplace surface as well.

How should Salesforce solution providers think about this theme coming out of Dreamforce that the platform’s value is beyond the user interface?

We have this opportunity now to think of these AI tools as a completely new interface experience for Salesforce and lots of other applications.

What we’ve built with the Headless Toolkit is basically that set of primitives in the platform that enable you to bring all of those experiences to life across any number of new interfaces, starting with Claude, Slack and Coworker. … We are going to be adding many, many more.

The interesting part about that for our partner ecosystem, whether you’re an SI or an ISV, you now have this platform foundation to build incredible new experiences.

And if you look back maybe two years when all of this large language model stuff started, we were thinking about prompt engineering and prompts almost starting to become a little bit of that new interface layer.

The problem with that is that everybody can prompt the LLM in their own way. And you get this sort of proliferation of different people asking different questions. And in the enterprise, that can be a challenge because when you’re running a process and I’m running a process, we want that process to have relatively deterministic outcome and results.

That’s where a lot of what we’re building into the Headless Toolkit and AIforce layer is this set of opinionated pre-built skills and plugins, which are effectively a wrapper around our MCP server with a set of pre-built skills that give everyone what effectively would be the right prompting for the LLM to understand how to do a task.

So whether that’s generating a brief for an account or helping you diagnose your sales pipeline with those pre-packaged skills, we’re giving you—this is the right way to ask the LLM to do this task on your behalf on top of our platform.

For our partner ecosystem, you can think about, we’ve just built [37 Claude skills into Salesforce] so far. 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.

For the consultant partners, you can think about taking all of the implementation methodology that they have and packaging that up into skills to say, ‘How do you configure and use Salesforce better as a platform?’

There are a ton of really cool stuff that I think we’re hoping to see the ecosystem build on top of what we just announced.

Are we seeing Salesforce enter a new category with this technology stack?

If you look at that stack that we announced—AIforce at the top, then you have the agent layer, the context, the semantics, the apps and then the data layer—when you have all of your business processes defined and your permissions, models and all of the different business logic and workflow that you’ve generated as a business in one platform like Salesforce, it becomes business process infrastructure for the A