Salesforce is disclosing more of its agentic AI “ecosystem” at its TDX developer conference in San Francisco this week, as its executives reject common IT industry talk of software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise applications being imperilled by artificial intelligence (AI).
The supplier said, in a general news statement for the conference, that its decision – taken “two-and-a-half years ago”, in late 2023 – to rebuild its code base for agentic AI has taken it beyond traditional user interface navigation of business software.
“Instead of burying capabilities behind a UI [user interface], we now expose them so the entire platform is programmable and accessible from anywhere,” it said in the statement.
“Sales workflows, service processes and every other capability Salesforce has built over 25 years” can now be built on by agents, as well as humans, according to the company.
Headless 360 platform is next generation of enterprise development
In a pre-conference press briefing, some Salesforce executives indicated how the supplier’s thinking is developing in the face of the growth of AI in enterprise applications.
Joe Inzerillo, president of enterprise and AI technology at Salesforce, said: “The biggest thing that we’re working on right now is the next generation of the platform, which is the Headless 360 platform. This really leans into the fact that coding agents have just gotten really good.”
He said Salesforce envisages “humans and agents working together to build other agents”.
In its news statement, the company said: “For developers, headless means you can build on Salesforce any way you want. More than 60 new MCP [Model Context Protocol] tools and 30+ preconfigured coding skills give your coding agent complete, live access to your entire platform, directly in the tools you already use.”
Madhav Thattai, executive vice-president and general manager for Agentforce, said, about coding agents: “We hear from our community that they’re starting to use these tools a lot more. Whether it is our admins [or] our Salesforce developers, they are starting to shift a lot of development to using these coding agents to perform a lot of their work.
“And so it’s really important that we set up an infrastructure that works well with these coding agents and that requires that composability. It requires that headless architecture at every single level.
“There are also people who traditionally have not developed in the Salesforce ecosystem, who are now very involved in the use cases. There are now new people who are engaging with [us], and they tend to use these tools quite significantly across that development ecosystem.
“So, that’s really exciting for us because it means that the tent is expanding.
“And the people that are deep in Salesforce are now starting to use some of these new tools, and so it’s really important that we set up our infrastructure in a way that everyone can now participate effectively using these coding agents, because we really believe that is what the future of development is going to look like.”
Challenging the ‘SaaS is dead’ narrative
In response to a question about how Salesforce’s so-called Headless 360 initiative challenges the narrative that SaaS is dead, Thattai said: “As a business, the experiences we build with SaaS applications are really evolving, but we believe very strongly that our customers rely on Salesforce for the context, for the workflow, for the engagement layer, to build these agentic systems using incredible tools like [Agentforce] Vibes and with this headless platform to drive outcomes.”
SaaS is evolving, but there’s still real value to be delivered at scale because not everybody’s going to build everything themselves; it just doesn’t make any sense for them to do so Joe Inzerillo, Salesforce
Inzerillo added: “I think it comes down to the core principle of what companies do and how they differentiate themselves. Maybe you could vibe code yourself a SaaS application, but who’s going to maintain it? Who’s going to add features?
“I think the notion that every company is just going to build everything that they need to use themselves seems pretty crazy when you think about it, because it’s just a huge amount of expense, and a huge amount of time and energy and brain power, that companies would be focusing on [outside] their core business.
“We feel our job is to lift companies up. By making our platform headless, by participating in that ecosystem, it makes it easier for companies to drive their value proposition and their business value using our tools.
“SaaS is evolving, but there’s still real value to be delivered at scale to people, because not everybody’s going to build everything themselves; it just doesn’t make any sense for them to do so.”
Unified marketplace for agentic tools
At TDX, the supplier is ramping up AgentExchange, which it describes as a unified marketplace that brings together Salesforce AppExchange, Slack Marketplace and the Agentforce ecosystem. It was originally launched in 2025.
Its stated rationale for AgentExchange is: “In the agentic enterprise, work often extends beyond one team, channel, system, or solution. A sales agent might need a data connector to access Salesforce data, a workflow to coordinate approvals in Slack, and a sub-agent to surface account insights and next best actions through Slackbot. Until now, finding and activating each of those solutions meant navigating different surfaces and flows, breaking momentum across teams.”
The supplier said that AI agents on Slack have grown by 300% since January 2026. “Slackbot is the front door to the agentic enterprise. It knows your users, knows your agents and orchestrates them to get work done. Your people do not need to know which agent handles which task. They ask, and Slackbot calls the right one.”
AgentExchange is said to bring together 10,000-plus Salesforce apps and experts from companies like DocuSign for AI agreements and Zoom for collaboration and meetings.
Salesforce says it includes more than 2,600 Slack apps and agents from technology companies like Notion for surfacing knowledge, Linear for tracking development work and Cursor for executing code changes.
One of the customers endorsing the AgentExchange initiative is Siemens. Kurt Kuelz, senior vice-president of global customer success at Siemens Digital Industries, said: “Our workforce spans 4,500 professionals globally supporting six major commercial software platforms, managing thousands of Certinia projects. The imperative is clear: identify deliverable discrepancies early to minimise risk. Certinia’s Project Agent, built on Salesforce, is making that a reality.”
Salesforce has also launched an AgentExchange Builders Initiative, which it described as a $50m pledge to help its partners turn ideas into revenue. This initiative is coupled with an AgentExchange Go-To-Market App, which enables private offers, unified billing and automated provisioning.
