Salesforce’s AgentExchange targets AI agent adoption, monetization

Salesforce is launching a new marketplace named AgentExchange for its agents and agent-related actions, topics, and templates to increase adoption of AI agents and allow its partners to monetize them.

“AgentExchange will drive agent consumption where an enterprise or a developer can get a head start on adopting and using agents,” said Jason Andersen, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

But Andersen pointed out that AgentExchange’s success will depend on how much customization will be required when the purchased assets are being implemented. “Will it be easy to tie in one’s own data to give a more personalized user experience? My assumption is that it will vary from agent to agent.”

The analyst also expects AgentExchange to be a new route to market for Salesforce partners, both individual developers and software firms, as the assets listed on the marketplace can be monetized or used to propagate any innovation.

What is AgentExchange?

The new marketplace will initially feature action, topics, and templates from 200 partners for sales, service, finance, HR, productivity, and operations across various industries, including manufacturing, retail, education, hospitality, and healthcare.  

The actions available on the marketplace are expected to help enterprises expand the jobs agents can do by adding new integrations ranging from Apex, flows, APIs, and prompts in order to suit the use case, the company said.

Topics, which are grouped actions and instructions around a single task, are also available on the marketplace and can be used to refine an agent behavior to suit use cases, it added.

Further, the marketplace will also feature two kinds of templates — prompt and agent templates — which can be used by enterprises to refine agent behavior or build agents faster.

While prompt templates are pre-written and reusable prompts that ensure consistent agent interactions to gather more information from users to achieve specific goals, agent templates are grouped topics complete with metadata and instructions to accelerate the agent building process.

Some of the partners for AgentExchange include Box, DocuSign, and Workday, Appiphony, Highspot, Neuron 7, SalesWings, Seismic, Asymbl, Bullhorn, Certinia, FinDoc, and OpenText.

Availability, competition and adoption

The new marketplace has been made generally available, but the packaging and listing of agent templates will be opened up in April 2025. Currently, partners can list prompt templates and topics, Salesforce said.

Although Salesforce competes with a variety of software vendors, such as Google, AWS, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Oracle, and IBM, in the agentic space, analysts believe that the launch of AgentExchange could give the CRM software provider an advantage over its rivals.

“Salesforce pioneered the agentic AI market with Agentforce, subsequently witnessing the entry of numerous competitors. With its marketplace initiative, Salesforce has demonstrated its proactive approach,” said Vershita Srivastava, practice director at the Everest Group.

Moor Strategy & Insights’ Andersen too believes that AgentExchange might give Salesforce a first mover advantage as of now, but he also expects that other vendors will soon start offering something similar in 2025.

Further, Everest Group’s Srivastava believes that the new marketplace will provide some fillip to Agentforce’s adoption.

“Despite the rapid advancement of agentic AI, small and medium-sized enterprises are predominantly leveraging pre-built agents for their initial deployments, rather than utilizing custom agent builders,” Srivastava said.

“Salesforce’s AgentExchange provides a strategic middle ground, effectively balancing the expediency and cost-effectiveness of pre-built agents with the tailored value proposition of custom-built solutions,” she explained.