Salesforce Partners Seek Clarity on Pricing as Agentforce Adoption Grows

Salesforce has been expanding its capabilities in AI and agentic technology through its Agentforce platform, which allows businesses to automate customer service tasks. According to Stephanie Sadowski, Global Salesforce Business group leader at Accenture, a Salesforce Global Partner of the Year for FY27, this new capability is creating a lot of interest among customers.

However, the use of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), who are experts in implementing and maintaining these AI systems, has caused some challenges for partners. Sadowski admitted that determining a charge-out rate and pay scale for FDEs was difficult due to their scarcity. She emphasized the need for pricing clarity from Salesforce.

Nick Johnston, EVP of Global Partnerships at Salesforce, outlined the company's evolving pricing strategy. While most customers still have seat-based pricing, Salesforce now offers bundles with high consumption customers. The company is also introducing pure consumption options and outcomes-pricing, which starts with customer service use cases. In this approach, clients pay per resolution, making it a straightforward pricing method.

Systems Integrators (SIs) are concerned about the difficulty of offering clients certainty over Agentforce costs across three-to-five year contract periods. Johnston acknowledged that partners need more pricing clarity and is working on creating tools such as calculators and price sheets to assist them.