SIs must seek new ways to add value to enterprises in agentic AI era, says Salesforce CTO

The vendor’s upgraded Headless 360 solution will enable enterprises to manage and build their own software, pushing partners to transform traditional business models.

Salesforce has expanded Headless 360 across the Salesforce platform to enable enterprises to securely deploy and maintain an agentic AI layer across the business. This will not just enable enterprises to easily build their own applications and software, but may dramatically change the way channel partners support Salesforce customers.

The expansion includes a new model context protocol (MCP) server, Data 360 capabilities, Slack integrations, developer tools, reusable skills, and headless experiences across every major cloud.

Rather than requiring developers to manually specify every object, API, workflow, or business rule an agent might need, the Headless 360 MCP server enables agents running in Agentforce, Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other AI platforms to dynamically discover, understand, and invoke Salesforce capabilities in real time.

“The idea is that everybody […] will have the ability to build their own software,” said Gavin Barfield, Chief Technology Officer and VP of Solutions Engineering, Salesforce ASEAN. “Every single individual, not just the IT department [can] build and maintain their applications.

“It’s around enabling our customers in general to be able to build stuff [with] Salesforce in the backend.”

In a media briefing, he shared that the Headless 360 expansion will have a flexible pricing model.

“Over the years, we’ve modified and added many more pricing [options],” he said. “Many customers [are] still interested in the per-seat price, so certain products that we have [like] Agentforce for sales and services, we’re able to offer unlimited internal usage for per user per-seat.

“That’s become quite attractive because many companies have been suffering from this sort of token shock […] It gives companies a lot of flexibility to be able to build multiple use cases without having to worry about the meter.

“The second way that we're pricing this is for certain customers, we’re also doing an unlimited usage that covers internal and external use cases. We've now recently launched our outcome-based pricing, so you only pay when the agent resolves a particular action.

“Then there’s flexi credits and they can be pre-purchased or bulk purchased. Basically we have a version of every single pricing option.”

A chance to transform the SI business model

While the technology is still in the ‘early days’ of rollout, Barfield shared that ASEAN enterprises seem interested in the ‘optionality’ aspect of Headless 360. It will also likely change the way traditional systems integrators (SIs) supported Salesforce customers, as the technology may take away the need to engage SIs simply to customize fields and maintain the platform.

“It is becoming easier and much quicker to be able to build and customize Salesforce together with every other application stack,” he said.

“I think most of these SIs and partners realize that actually there’s more value-add that they can add in other parts of the business. Just being able to develop software is a very small part of the [enterprise’] change and transformation.

“I think we’ll see their business models moving into more value-added stuff around how do they manage change management? How do they process optimization? How do they help transform organizations in a technology way? And that's not just [for] Salesforce — that’s just generally across the market.”

Build new experiences for customers

Barfield is also optimistic that SIs have an opportunity to build “completely new experiences” for customers using the upgraded Headless 360 technology.

Ultimately, Salesforce believes the update will ease operations for ASEAN enterprises running across multiple markets, navigating diverse languages, platforms and regulators.

During the briefing, the CTO shared the motivation behind the launch.

“This is not just about hitting a number [boosting financials],” he said. “This is also about the future direction of Salesforce and how we can make sure that our platform and application is relevant in the new AI era. It’s also about making this bold statement to say you can use Salesforce in completely different ways.”