The promise of AI lies in its ability to transform businesses with digital labor, where AI Agents work alongside humans. However, unleashing its potential has presented a paradox for companies: How do they embrace an open, collaborative ecosystem for innovation without sacrificing security and governance, typically associated with closed platforms that interact only with a select few systems?
Salesforce recently announced the next major leap in open, trusted AI with native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for its digital labor platform Agentforce, which will be in pilot in July, and support for MCP servers on AgentExchange, the trusted Agentforce marketplace. Until now, tech partners have faced a tangle of one-off agent API integrations and closed AI stacks. Salesforce is opening a new path: native agent interoperability, built on open standards, and with enterprise trust controls.
Why this matters
Most AI adopters believe an open ecosystem will be the norm by next year, with tech leaders citing its effect on increased innovation and faster adoption of AI. However, closed ecosystems, manual point-to-point agent integrations, and security tradeoffs have held back AI innovation and partners developing enterprise AI agents — affecting their ability to capture their share of an emerging $6 Trillion digital labor market opportunity.
Partners don’t have to choose innovation over security, or vice versa. Salesforce will offer enterprise-grade AI agent interoperability with partners through MCP server listings on AgentExchange, as well as Agent2Agent (A2A) support in the future. As a result, businesses can build, deploy, and monetize agent-ready partner solutions, all governed by enterprise-grade security. This enables organizations to deliver autonomous AI agents an average of 16 tmes faster than traditional DIY approaches.
The Salesforce perspective
“Agent interoperability creates a massive opportunity for our partners to leverage their existing intellectual property and extend it to a whole new category of agent-first businesses. Partners on the AgentExchange provide the agentic building blocks and now the agent connections, so customers don’t have to DIY their AI and can confidently transform their company into an agentic enterprise.”- Brian Landsman, CEO of AppExchange and Global Partnerships
AgentExchange partners build once, connect everywhere
With MCP and A2A support coming to AgentExchange, tech partners will now be able to connect interoperable AI Agents and agent components that plug into enterprise systems out-of-the-box, without custom integrations or vendor lock-in. This improves extensibility without compromising governance, particularly in regulated environments.
Over 30 industry-leading partners, including AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM, Notion, PayPal, Stripe, Teradata, WRITER, and more, have already committed to listing MCP servers. They join hundreds of partners who are building agent-first tools with Salesforce’s open ecosystem approach.
For example:
- AWS: Agentforce will enable agents to unlock critical insights from vast repositories of unstructured data stored on AWS, leveraging a suite of MCP servers such as the Amazon Bedrock Data Automation MCP Server and Amazon Nova Canvas MCP Server. This will allow Agentforce agents to intelligently process and summarize documents, extract key information from images, transcribe and analyze audio recordings, identify crucial moments in video files, query enterprise knowledge bases, perform semantic code repository searches, and interact with databases through natural language interfaces via Aurora PostgreSQL/MySQL MCP Servers—all enhancing customer service, compliance checks, and operational reporting.
- Box: Agentforce will help retrieve the latest signed NDA from a Box MCP service, including a summary of key terms. Agentforce will then post a Slack update to the relevant teams that includes the AI summarization, the contract in pdf form, and recommended next steps.
- Google Cloud: Customers can unlock new Agentforce use cases by connecting to key Google and Google Cloud services via MCP. For example, developers will be able to seamlessly connect Agentforce to the Google Maps Platform and generative AI models like Veo, Chirp, Imagen, and Lyria, while also enabling agentic interactions with Google Cloud Databases. This can enable Agenforce actions that span location-based services, creative AI, and transactional data.
- PayPal: Customers can now power a full range of agentic commerce capabilities by connecting Agentforce to PayPal’s MCP server. They can list products, place orders, process payments, dispute claims, track shipping, manage subscriptions, issue refunds, and more with PayPal, making integrations simple and easy.
- Stripe: Agentforce will enable AI agents to directly handle a wide range of Stripe functionalities via its MCP server, including real-time product lookups, quick payment link generation, subscription setup, and faster dispute management.
- WRITER: Through a secure connection to WRITER’s MCP server, Agentforce will call WRITER’s enterprise-grade AI agents to automate content generation, knowledge retrieval, and compliance checks all within Salesforce workflows.
Salesforce accelerates the agent economy with partner ecosystem investments
As customers look to quickly integrate and scale Digital Labor, Salesforce partners are helping them drive agentic transformation and adopt the next generation of Agentforce solutions with trust and confidence.
To simplify its partner experience, Salesforce has brought together the AppExchange and Global Partnerships teams under a CEO, Brian Landsman, to bring product and go-to-market innovations more closely together and double down on its ecosystem strategy. This strategic commitment will bring more innovation and agility to how partners work with Salesforce at a dynamic moment in the software, AI, and technology industry. Partners are key to Salesforce’s company-wide AI strategy, and the continued evolution of the AppExchange and AgentExchange is vital to their success.
Consulting partners are also critical in guiding customers through their agent journey from initial proof of concept to full enterprise-wide adoption. Salesforce is focused on enabling its system integrator (SI) and consulting partners to help customers realize the full value of their agent implementations, providing innovations like Agentforce for Partner Community and new training, which has resulted in 272,000 AI-certified specialists.
Additionally, Salesforce Global Partnerships and Salesforce Ventures are developing a strategic program that will accelerate the success of next generation startups building AI solutions on Agentforce. The program will offer dedicated resources, expert guidance, and streamlined access to the AgentExchange ecosystem, empowering startups to rapidly develop, integrate, and scale with Salesforce and its global customers.
