The advent of Salesforce’s Agentforce is creating significant ripples across its partner network, raising questions about current strategies and the potential for a new order among its most influential allies.
Having spent twenty years working across the Salesforce ecosystem – in ISVs, boutique partners, GSIs, offshorers, and on the customer side – I’ve learned to read the signals that matter.
For the past year, I’ve been tracking the Agentforce adoption story closely, and what I’m observing is a genuine depth of commitment among a minority of customers. Much of the broader base is still in an early exploratory phase – testing proof-of-concepts and experimenting with ideas – with fully deployed, paying agents still on the horizon.
But customer data only tells part of the story. There’s another set of signals worth examining – and they come not from Salesforce’s customers, but from its partners. The behavior of Salesforce’s global System Integrators and consulting partners is, historically, one of the more reliable indicators of where enterprise technology is genuinely heading. Partners don’t build practices, certify consultants at scale, or tie their case study pipeline to products they believe are temporary.
When the big players go all-in, it means something. When they hedge, it means something too. So as Agentforce moves through its second year, I’ve been examining what Salesforce’s partner community is actually doing – partly to better advise our clients on where the real momentum lies, but also frankly because we see this shift as a genuine growth opportunity for our own Salesforce practice.
Following the Partner Money
Follow the money far enough up the partner chain, and the signals that Agentforce is driving change are hard to ignore – though they come with some important caveats.
Accenture, long one of Salesforce’s most prominent global partners, was among the first to plant a flag in the Agentforce space, featuring prominently in early launch activity at Dreamforce ‘24. More recently, Accenture acquired NeuraFlash in late 2025, a consulting firm specializing in Salesforce Agentforce implementations with over 50 Agentforce projects by May 2025.
This acquisition significantly enhances Accenture’s generative AI and “agentic” capabilities within the Salesforce ecosystem, signaling a serious investment in the platform’s potential.
Deloitte, PwC, Capgemini, and IBM have each followed with their own announcements of Agentforce capabilities and client work, though specific project numbers often remain under wraps. Salesforce itself announced a $15 billion investment in AI initiatives, including an AI Incubator Hub, further incentivizing partner alignment.
While certification numbers might suggest rapid mobilization – there’s good reason to treat those figures carefully. Unlike every other Salesforce certification, which typically carries a fee of several hundred dollars, Salesforce made its Agentforce certifications available free of charge for the first 18 months. That’s not a trivial distinction. Free certifications naturally drive higher volumes, which means headline numbers may flatter genuine readiness.
It doesn’t mean partner investment isn’t real, but it does mean certified headcount is a less reliable benchmark than it would otherwise be. The more telling signals come from what partners are actually delivering, though the nuances of reporting can sometimes mean that not all “Agentforce” projects translate to consuming agents.
Performa IT’s recognition – a boutique firm not typically highlighted in Salesforce’s major public accolades – for a key Agentforce case study in the UK and Ireland, hints at a potential shift in the ecosystem.
This trend is further underscored by the early achievements of companies like NeuraFlash, which outpaced many larger System Integrators before its acquisition. This unusual prominence for smaller players indicates that Agentforce might be altering the dynamics of who rises in the ecosystem, creating opportunities that defy the traditional dominance of the consulting giants.
Timo Kovala, Salesforce Architect and Strategist at Capgemini, has offered one of the more candid assessments of where Agentforce’s real value lies – and where go-to-market framing has fallen short.
Kovala has argued that Agentforce has been “positioned and sold wrong,” with activity focused on “flashy demos instead of real customer pain points.” His observation that the most powerful Agentforce deployments are non-conversational and headless – not the chatbot-style interfaces most commonly demonstrated – speaks to a gap between how partners are selling Agentforce and how the most sophisticated customers are actually running it. That difference matters because it shapes what kind of partner wins.
If the most valuable Agentforce implementations are technically complex and deeply integrated with data architecture, the advantage shifts toward partners with genuine engineering depth — not just those with the largest practices or the loudest marketing. For partners, that skills gap is both a challenge and an opportunity.
A New Partner Pecking Order?
The traditional Salesforce partner hierarchy has been remarkably stable. It’s a hierarchy that has broadly reflected Salesforce’s history as a CRM and business process platform.
Agentforce may not overturn that order, but it is creating new competitive lanes within it. More agile partners with expertise outside the usual lanes of the GSI’s can win significant Agentforce work by focusing on niche expertise and rapid deployment.
The entry of non-traditional partners like Capita into the Salesforce Agentforce space is equally noteworthy. While Capita, a leading UK BPO, initially began leveraging Agentforce as a customer to transform its own recruitment processes, we can now expect to see it embedding Agentforce into its regular work as a BPO – effectively becoming a Salesforce partner in a whole new category, one that uses Agentforce to augment core business process outsourcing offerings. It may well be one of many new partner categories we see emerge.
This is precisely the dynamic I find most exciting from where I stand at VML. If Agentforce’s reach is extending beyond core CRM into marketing, creative, and customer experience, then the set of leading partners extends too.
VML has been a Salesforce partner for decades, with broad and deep experience across the platform. But Agentforce uniquely positions our blend of creative thinking and precise implementation at a more central point in the ecosystem than we’ve ever occupied before – and that feels significant.
It’s why, on Tuesday, May 19, at Sea Containers in London, we’re bringing clients together specifically around Agentforce for our Unlocking Agentforce event, and launching our dedicated Agentforce Centre in the UK.
This isn’t a broad Salesforce gathering – it’s a focused, evidence-based conversation about what Agentforce can genuinely do, grounded in real research and real implementation experience.
On the day, we’ll also be publishing new research – Agentforce Unlocked: Accelerating Digital Transformation with Salesforce Agentforce & VML – which I hope will bring a more rigorous, data-driven perspective to a conversation that has too often been dominated by vendor announcements and partner marketing.
I want our clients to be ahead of the curve on this. Not caught up in the hype, but genuinely equipped to understand where the real value lies and how to go after it. That’s the spirit of the event, and of the research we’re publishing alongside it.
VML’s engagement is notable precisely because it signals that Agentforce is no longer purely a technical or CRM story. When a global creative and marketing network starts convening clients, building practices, and publishing independent research around a platform, it suggests the technology’s relevance is expanding into territory the traditional SIs have never owned.
Whether that creates durable new positions in the ecosystem, or whether the global giants eventually absorb the opportunity through scale, remains an open question – but it’s one I intend to keep asking.
Final Thoughts
If partner behaviour is a leading indicator, the current picture is broadly encouraging for Salesforce – but it carries the same asterisk that has followed Agentforce throughout its first year. Investment is real, but readiness is uneven.
The loudest voices don’t always reflect the deepest capabilities, and the certification numbers – inflated by Salesforce’s decision to make Agentforce qualifications free for the first 18 months – are a less reliable guide than they might first appear. What’s perhaps most significant about the current moment is the sheer breadth of partners moving toward Agentforce.
When creative agencies, marketing networks, BPOs, and industry specialists start building practices and publishing research alongside the traditional SIs, it’s a signal that the platform is evolving in quite a different way than we’ve seen before. This shift indicates that success increasingly relies on new and diverse skillsets. This broader engagement suggests a new era where diverse expertise, beyond traditional CRM implementation, is becoming critical.
Whether that breadth eventually reshuffles the partner hierarchy – creating truly new leaders – or simply means more players competing for the same expanding work within a still-dominant structure, remains to be seen. The real test, as with Agentforce itself, will come not in the launches and announcements of 2026, but in what’s still standing and delivering demonstrable value in 2027.
If you want to be part of that conversation – and get ahead of it – I’d love to see you in London on May 19. Find out more and register for Unlocking Agentforce here.
