Simplicity, scale and boosting partner profitability paramount in Southeast Asia for Salesforce

“It's not just about understanding technology conceptually, it's about creating, delivery ready practitioners that can go out and deliver the agentic value to the customers,” says Pravar Gautam, Vice President, Alliances & Channel ASEAN, Salesforce.

Salesforce’s global partner ecosystem in 2026 is undergoing one of its most significant transformations in years, driven by the company’s aggressive pivot toward AI. Agentforce, Salesforce’s agentic AI platform, is a cornerstone of partner-led engagements, with over 29,000 Agentforce deals sealed and more than half of Agentforce implementations delivered by partners.

With strong customer retention following initial deployment, Salesforce recently refreshed its consulting partner program to simplify the tiering model it previously had. Salesforce is also doubling down on the investment in its partner ecosystem by rewarding the experts who ensure agents are secure, compliant, and built for verifiable outcomes.

In Southeast Asia, Agentforce continues to be the growth momentum for Salesforce. Available in five local languages, customers are able to adopt and use it easily in the region through the local partner ecosystem.

According to Pravar Gautam, Vice President, Alliances & Channel ASEAN, Salesforce, partners are the architects of the agentic enterprise, and the tech company wants partners to be a seamless extension of Salesforce.

“70% of Salesforce implementations globally are done by our consulting partners. So, in the region, we have consulting partners like Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, FPT Software, and many others who are really shaping the agentic future for our customers. And the customer conversation has also now shifted. Customers are no longer buying technology or buying software licenses. They're really buying business outcomes. So, we're shifting our partner ecosystem from license sales to delivering those predictable outcomes for the end customers,” Gautam shared with CRN Asia in a recent interview.

In terms of capacity capability, across the region, Gautham said that there are 20,000 Salesforce certifications with partners, with over 250 partners Agentforce certified and over 1,000 Agentforce certifications across the region.

“That number is growing very rapidly. We've also built, and we've started developing a center of excellence with our partners on data and AI. We have overhauled and redesigned our partner program to focus on AI outcomes. We made it radically simple for our partners and are focused really on speed, simplicity, and profitability. We want partners to spend less time on admin and more time delivering tangible, real value to their customers,” he explained.

Gautam also stated that Salesforce is focused on delivering predictable, scalable business outcomes through Agentforce through four integrated layers. These include the system of context, system of agency, system of work and system of engagement, which Gautam believes plays out in a nice way with customers in a way that the partners can provide the managed services, and also be much more efficient about it.

“They can be much more outcome driven. And our new partner program essentially helps the partners move into that outcome focused delivery,” he added.

Partner enablement

For Gautam, the biggest challenge the partners face as they travel across the region is the pace of technological change. What he means by this is that AI is evolving faster than any technological shift seen in the past. This creates a pressure on the partner because they now need to create capability and create skill set to be able to be relevant to their customers.

“It's not just about understanding technology conceptually, it's about creating, delivery ready practitioners that can go out and deliver the agentic value to the customers. And the opportunity is massive in ASEAN, and partners who move fast will actually be able to grab that opportunity. Salesforce is fully committed to making sure that we are working with our partners to enable them to make them successful with us through our COE initiatives, through the certification drives that we run, through the new partner program that we've launched, through value realization workshops, and so on. So, we're not asking partners to do it all alone. We are in it with them,” he explained.

With a focus on simplicity, scale and boosting partner profitability, the new partner program makes it simpler for the partner. Specifically, the new program removes the complexity by reducing four tiers down to just two of its consulting track. Salesforce has also consolidated 170 competencies to just 28.

“We made the discovery easier for customers. Because when our customers find the right Salesforce expertise faster, partners get more inbound business. It's that simple. We also launched a new project bulk upload tool, and unified app exchange search. We want partners to spend less time on admin and more time proving and delivering that agentic value to their customers,” Gautam said.

On partner profitability, he said that Salesforce is doubling down on expanding their benefits on lead submission, pre-sales activities, both sales implementation subsidies, and also giving partners access to demo orgs, product access vouchers, and such.

“We're doing all of this to make sure that the agentic value gets delivered to the end customers in the most efficient, frictionless and profitable way. And we've been receiving great feedback from our partners on the program so far,” he added.

For Gautam, the Salesforce journey has been incredible for both partners and customers. However, with agentic AI being the most defining transformation and seeing great traction with customers, the agentic divide is also very real.

“It is simply the gap between those who successfully leverage AI, and those that are held back by poor data, wrong governance, too much DIY, non-aligned priorities and such. So, there's a huge responsibility for sitting with us and our partners to bridge that, that agentic divide. And we've seen over and over again that technology truly elevates us when humans and agents work together to drive customer success,” he concluded.