➡️ Summary ➡️

Tyler Carlson, SVP and Head of Product for AgentExchange and Partner Experience at Salesforce, joins to unpack what the reinvigoration of the Salesforce marketplace really means for ISVs. A former employee at a Salesforce ISV himself, Tyler breaks down the $50 million Builders Fund, the shift to Headless 360 and what a UI-optional, agentic future means for how partners architect their products, and the ground-up overhaul of AgentExchange search, listings, and discovery. The conversation digs into GEO and the decline of organic search, the new GoToMarket app for private offers and native billing, agent-driven procurement, and how partner solutions are becoming discoverable inside Agentforce Builder, Agentforce setup, and even Tableau Next.

➡️ Guest ➡️

Tyler Carlson https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylermcarlson/

➡️ Takeaways ➡️

The $50 million Builders Fund is aimed squarely at product-led companies — roughly a quarter is earmarked for pre-Series A founders, funded through a Salesforce Ventures investment vehicle

New ISV-first programs sit under the fund, including MDF for established partners and a first-of-its-kind lead referral fee when partners bring co-sale opportunities to Salesforce

Headless 360 reverses the polarity — build for the power of the platform first, then express it through many "heads" like Slack, ChatGPT, Claude, and MCP rather than beautiful UI screens

Platform-hosted MCP servers and richer out-of-the-box APIs mean ISVs no longer have to stand up their own gateway layer to go agentic

The internal push to headless is funding a cross-cloud effort to close long-standing metadata and API coverage gaps

AgentExchange search is only about a third through a major roadmap; an AI overview-style "AI mode" search with summarized listings arrives around Dreamforce

A new org context picker will personalize search and recommendations based on what is actually installed and used in a selected org, leveling the field for smaller ISVs

Search will increasingly reward listings with useful, current content — LLM-powered publishing tools will help generate listing copy from your existing website

Salesforce is shifting from listing volume as a vanity metric to actively curating quality, flagging stale listings, giving deadlines, and potentially delisting with an option to relist

Every ISV is seeing organic search traffic dip as AI overviews answer buyer questions, making GEO (generative engine optimization) table stakes

The GoToMarket app is live today as a native Salesforce capability — a permission flip lights up standard objects for partner offers, Stripe setup, price books, invoices, and payouts

Private offers, public checkout, and Salesforce-managed billing are becoming API-accessible, opening the door to agent-driven procurement within a set budget

Partner agent assets — actions, subagents, MCP servers — are exploded out of the package manifest and made individually discoverable inside Agentforce Builder

Agentforce setup will replace the legacy setup menu and proactively recommend AgentExchange solutions based on your org context and current project

The same discovery APIs now power embedded marketplaces in other products, like the new Tableau Next marketplace — the AgentExchange site is just one of many heads

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➡️ Keywords ➡️

Salesforce, AgentExchange, AppExchange, ISV, Builders Fund, Headless 360, MCP, GoToMarket app, generative engine optimization, Agentforce Builder, Agentforce setup, private offers, Salesforce Ventures, Tyler Carlson

➡️ Hashtags ➡️

#AppsemblyLine #Salesforce #ISV #AgentExchange #AppExchange #Headless360 #Agentforce #AI

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I'm excited today to be joined by Tyler Carlson of Salesforce, S VP and head of product for agent exchange and partner experience. Welcome to Appsembly Line, Tyler.

Hey Scott, ⁓ thank you so much for having me.

I I I'm really looking forward to to chatting with you. We talk on this podcast to a lot of builders in the Salesforce ecosystem, so it's great to have someone like you on that's kind of a builder for the builders. ⁓ so to lead into that, maybe you could I I know you've been working with Salesforce and in the ecosystem for a long time. So maybe you could share with listeners and viewers your background and how you got started.

Yeah, I so I've been at Salesforce for 10 years. I've worked in our partnerships organization for for much of that time. So technology partnerships. ⁓ prior to joining that team, I was a solution engineer, so have a a pretty technical background building on the Salesforce platform.

And ⁓ prior to joining Salesforce, I was actually at a ⁓ Salesforce ISV. And at the time we were selling a CPQ solution built natively on the platform. So I've been ⁓ I've been on both sides of the equation and as an ISB and also on the Salesforce side. I spent the last, you know, eight or so years at Salesforce in the technology business building out our technology partnerships.

⁓ function. I was part of many of our large strategic partnership negotiations with companies like AWS and Snowflake and Google and others. ⁓ and then about a year ago, ⁓ took over the product responsibility for the marketplaces that we have, as well as the full tech stack in support of all of the different partner ⁓ experiences we have ISVs, SIs, ⁓

outsource service providers, managed service providers, resellers, all of that. But my primary focus is in the reinvigoration of our marketplace surfaces, the app exchange, now Agent Exchange, Slack marketplace, which has been, you know, unified into that same picture and sort of reinvigorating, reinvesting and building out a new roadmap of innovation for those products and platforms.

that's awesome. I I knew of course that you were heavily involved ⁓ in the partnership side, which includes ISVs at Salesforce. I did not realize ⁓ you also were at one point at a Salesforce ISV. It w was it Steel Brick by chance that eventually went on to become? Okay.

It wasn't. ⁓

the company was called Model In. ⁓ they did revenue management. It was very focused on the high-tech semiconductor and and pharma and med device space. But they built a you know completely native CPQ solution and CLM solution on the platform. It was really geared towards those industry use cases. and ⁓ I actually joined Salesforce right after the Steel Brick acquisition. It was a little bit of like a

well, I you know, should I go work on the CPQ thing that's happening like at the company that owns the platform that I'm building on? So that was kind of like how I I thought about it. I was I I had been working on the Salesforce platform for about two years at that point. I was just kind of like that was like at the height of the, you know, Trailblazer and Trailhead and all of this stuff. And I kind of drank the Kool-Aid a little bit and was like, it would be really cool to go work at this company and

Mm-hmm.

you know, see what's going on from the inside. So that's kinda how I I ended up ⁓ deciding to make the move.

Very cool. That's awesome. ⁓ okay, well, so you mentioned ⁓ the reinvigoration of the the

partner ⁓ ecosystem as well as the the reinvestment. So I I do want to touch on that because one of the major announcements ⁓ that Salesforce had made was this $50 million incentive program. So they Salesforce has put this massive investment on the table for agent building and technical assistance. ⁓ And I just want to clarify who in the community this is really for. So ⁓ given you you know you oversee partnerships ⁓ on all angles, not just ISVs like you were talking about

Yeah.

Could

you could you clarify, does this incentive fund apply to product other ISV product led ISVs or is it mostly ⁓ targeted for SIs? I know Salesforce has their their Ford deployed engineer program now with Agent Force and all their AI initiatives.

So this ⁓ 50 million builders fund is actually directly oriented towards a product-led company. So that's that was kind of the the intent in naming it the Builders Fund. ⁓ we have other incentive programs for our SI community. Those are geared towards you know trying to ⁓ drive projects together that drive adoption of products that we want to see you know those SIs bring into their projects like Agent Force and otherwise. but this is really about you know.

Reinvesting in the builders who are building on and to the Salesforce platform, whether you're building an extension to our platform or building a whole ⁓ you know complete SaaS solution as an OEM style partner, we want to invest in this ecosystem again in a meaningful way. So that that was part of it. Part of the fund, I think it's about a fourth of the fund, is really geared towards the the early stage companies. So companies that are, you know.

precede round Series A and are interested in building a solution that sort of takes a ⁓ infrastructural dependency on Salesforce. We want to invest in those founders and businesses. ⁓ And then we've put money into new programs, so like MDF funding for established partners, a lead referral program, which is the first of its kind for ISVs. We've done this in the SI space for a long time, which is if you you bring

Customers to us that end up driving, you know, a Salesforce deal on our side in a co-sale capacity, you know, we should pay you a lead referral fee for that. So the the 50 million bu builders fund is kind of a a bucket of all of those things together. and I will say that ⁓ that is probably just the start. That $50 million figure is like this is the initial investment. But if these programs work and people take advantage of them and we see value out of it.

I think there is more ⁓ funding available to keep reinvesting in this ecosystem, you know, as it as it grows and and takes advantage of what we've initially made available.

Well, I know everyone's gonna be happy to to hear that. So i if if someone is just hearing about the program for the first time, ⁓ what what resource would you point them to to learn more or perhaps apply for this funding or you know, is

Yeah, I would

I would go to ⁓ either your ⁓ partner account manager ⁓ or in the the partner blazer or partner community. I think there are some resources available as to how to get ⁓ to get access to some of this funding. Some of it is available, you know, if you're already a partner, some of it's available to you already through the lead referral program, MDF funding, et cetera. And there are some, you know, program rules, et cetera, that govern how those funds get

Get doled out. And then for anyone who is, you know, an early ⁓ stage company that's looking to get access to sort of that like investment funding, ⁓ I think we had a process that was in either the partner community or partner blazer, I don't remember which, where you can request to be a part of that initial program. And I think we're like picking some initial investment.

opportunities to put some of that funding to work for for those founders and and early stage companies.

That's so cool. Is there an and is this an initiative that that you're personally leading or is there another individual at Salesforce that folks should be following on LinkedIn?

I I was part of like

Yeah, I was part of spearheading the creation of the overall program. We have a couple of different people that are involved in it. We have the the actual agent exchange program team, ⁓ which does not report to me. We sort of centralize the program management for everything under Andrew Kislow, who is a peer of mine who owns all of the partner program and operations for the partnership business. ⁓ and then ⁓ the

Mm-hmm.

Specifically the investment piece of it is also a partnership with Salesforce ⁓ ventures. So there's a an investment vehicle that we're using through the the Salesforce Ventures ⁓ fund to help fund these initial investments in the early stage companies. Cause it's a true, it's a true, you know, investment from Salesforce ventures when they get awarded that.

Cool. Okay. All right. Thank you. So kind of leapfrogging off that, another huge announcement that everyone's been talking about ⁓ again and again is is this you know headless 360. ⁓ and I'm curious for for someone who's ⁓ either new to the Salesforce space or just maybe new to a Salesforce ISV partnership.

Yeah.

you know, coming from Salesforce ISV background yourself, with Headless 360, do partners need to start thinking differently about their products in terms of the traditional UI? And I'm I'm thinking specifically like in this in an agentic area era, should ISVs focus less on you know, making beautiful screens and more on structuring these tangible outcomes? Because you you even mentioned Slack marketplace, right? It's taking off and I I think

I think people in the community have been wondering if there's gonna be more and more of this off-platform consumption, even of even of their own plug-in for Salesforce, their own their own ⁓ ISV or their own IP.

I I would say yes.

I think it does I think everyone is sort of having to rethink the way they structure their architecture and and headless is sort of like our response to that for Salesforce at large, right? Which is Salesforce is ⁓ in many ways evolving from

Mm-hmm.

You know, an app with a front end that was sort of like that was your experience of Salesforce into for those who have built on the Salesforce platform for a long time, they kind of know this was this was sort of always already true. Like you could use the APIs, you had all of this capability that was super rich behind that UI layer. And if you were really only just using the UI layer, you're probably not getting the fullest potential of what the platform offered. And I think what we're doing with Headless 360 is really kind of reversing the polarity on that to say, like,

If you're building on our platform as a customer, as an ISV, you should really think of the power of that platform first and then think about how you want to express the power of those workflows, business processes, capabilities into different heads, so to speak, ⁓ that might look very different depending on the use case and the job to be done that you're you're trying to accomplish. And I think you'll see this from some of the ways that we're

Interacting with our technology partners. Like we are leaning extremely heavily into partnering with OpenAI and ChatGPT, Anthropic and Claude, ⁓ you know, exposing Salesforce through the Slack front end. If you paid any attention to what happened at TDX, we announced the sort of agentic experience ⁓ layer. Now we're talking about the headless experience layer. These are all ⁓ new platform features that make it much easier to have this.

Sort of

experience layer agnostic way of thinking about using the Salesforce platform. So I would say if you're an ISV who's building your app, yeah, I think to some extent, the hope that we have is that what we're building with Headless 360 will give you a leg up on trying to make this transition for your own app. Things like platform-hosted MCP servers, the fact that you know the Salesforce platform has already ⁓ come out of the box with a really rich set of APIs to begin with, right? So you're not it, you know, if you were doing this yourself.

Kind of part of the benefit of building on our platform is now you don't have to go figure out how to like set up an you know a gateway layer for MCP and manage all that complexity. you can kind of just take advantage of the platform ⁓ as it is. But but so we hope that that will help accelerate many of your transitions to sort of thinking about software development in this way. But I do think it will require, you know, over the course of the next year, year and a half, we're all gonna be, I think, on this journey of sort of each.

Even going down to the use case level in our products and sort of rethinking how we build to support those things for our customers. We're doing this across the board with sales cloud, service cloud, marketing cloud, commerce cloud, like all of the GMs of all those products are completely rethinking their product roadmap and strategy to say, okay, the thing that we're really building is we're building that opinionated workflow. Like we're building this thing that is that isn't so coupled.

Mm-hmm.

the UI layer anymore, but has an opinion about the right way to do a process or is configurable way to do a process, and then think about how that is exposed through the ⁓ APIs and headless layer.

And I think this is a really exciting time for ISVs because it ⁓ it we have had some gaps in the platform relative to metadata coverage, API coverage, and all of this stuff. And this transformation to headless internal to Salesforce is actually creating a massive cross cloud program to close a lot of those gaps because we need to in order to make these capabilities available headlessly. ⁓ so it's a really exciting moment.

Think

for a reinvigoration of the platform as a place to build and and really rethinking our strategy to be much more oriented to like that developer layer and what we provide as a set of tools for building on top of the Salesforce platform. And I think it's gonna end up I think what it'll what'll end up happening is it'll end up creating a bunch of new hooks and ways in which ISVs will creatively extend the Salesforce platform. And I'm kind of looking to you all to play with.

this stuff to try it out to tell us where it works, where it doesn't, like help guide the roadmap and shift what we're doing towards this sort of model. ⁓

But I think it'll actually be a really powerful tool for ISVs. And I I expect the next generation of products that are built on top of or connected to the Salesforce platform to look a fair bit different from what was built maybe 10 plus years ago in sort of the traditional force.com platform era.

Mm. Mm. It's cool. I mean, now like you said, now you can

You can reach the platform from so many different angles. ⁓ the APIs have always been there. Now, of course, there's there's agent force actions. There's you mentioned Salesforce MCP, so pr perhaps folks are using ⁓ AI from kind of outside the Salesforce ecosystem like Claude and hooking it up through the MCP server. So ⁓ it's very cool. And it's exciting to hear that it seems like everyone's learning from the other side. So Salesforce is building ⁓ these new ⁓ hooks that

Yeah.

Yeah.

ISVs can tap into to augment their ⁓ their reach and simultaneously Salesforce is learning from what the ISVs are building to say, ⁓ we have this gap in our metadata API. We can fill that and make everybody more po more ⁓ powerful at the same time. So it's cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think like

You know what I would what I would recommend for all the ISVs thinking about how to build like this, the way that our teams internally are thinking about it is very much at the ⁓ you know, what is the set of tools behind an MCP server that we need in order to like create the experience we want? And there's, you know, tools, plugins, skills. So all of these sort of patterns that you're seeing emerge in developing for ⁓ sort of agent harnesses and LLM powered software experiences are sort of what

Our teams are starting to build as the first-party software asset. And then the goal would be to make that platform extensible. So as an ISV, you can build your own tools and skills and plugins that live in that same MCP layer that expose our first-party functionality to tools like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. And that you would sort of be able to do the same thing as an ISV. And you know, I think the boundary of what

⁓ of what you build where is also shifting a little bit. I think this is going to end up creating potentially more hybrid architectures where it's like, okay, you know, what piece of this do I put in the Salesforce platform versus what part do I keep outside of it? You know, we have a lot of partners that really just extend our platform. And so they're calling our APIs and then using that capability to build other experiences that live in different surfaces. ⁓ and I think this transition is really helping us move away from the orthodoxy.

Everything should sort of be built on the Salesforce platform. And if you're building like a connector that extends the Salesforce platform, I think in the past that was sort of looked at as like, you you can do that, but maybe that's not the thing Salesforce wants you to do the most. ⁓ I think now I I'm very interested in seeing what ISVs can do when they sort of treat our APIs and platform as sort of like an infrastructure layer and build whatever they want, either on it or above it.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that'll be really interesting to see what happens. But it's it's a pattern that I think we want to incentivize people to use.

Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I mean i th you know, the h the kind of the headless ⁓

the the headless approach is not just ⁓ inside of Salesforce. It's happening everywhere, right? So the people are running these agents that might be interacting with Salesforce as well as Stripe, you know, all these other different ⁓ platforms. And so it's not just maybe a point to point connection anymore that these ISVs need to be thinking about. So it it's cool that ⁓ you know, Salesforce understands that and it's not perhaps it sounds like maybe it was little ⁓ frowned upon or maybe just the the

Mm-hmm.

the the the red carpet wasn't rolled out to to partners that were just plugging into the ap APIs, but now it's seen as like a first class way to approach partnership.

Yeah.

I think what I think what

Headless is gonna end up doing is it's gonna end up making us a bit more developer friendly. I think we we started that way, and then I think there was sort of this messy middle phase that we went through over maybe the past like six, seven years where

We weren't probably as developer friendly as we should have been. And I think this is a a a hard pivot back in that direction, which is like APIs, metadata completeness, new features for developers, ⁓ a focus on sort of like making sure that like all of that is documented in the right way and it's just easy and simple for an ISV to get started building what they want to build. And and ⁓ you know, hopefully the platform is an enabler and it kind of gets out of your way versus sort of like imposes its own opinion on you.

⁓ in a more sort of oppressive way.

Mm-hmm.

Yes. Okay. All right. So I wanna kinda change lanes a little bit. ⁓ we've talked ⁓ more on the the building side and I wanna focus a little bit to kind of the the business side ⁓ for ISVs, specifically kind of go to market lead gen, which is a topic you brought up earlier about the the kind of the newer ⁓ lead referral for ISVs. ⁓ you know

Yeah.

The formerly known as the App Exchange, the Agent Exchange continues to be ⁓ a major go-to-market channel for a lot of ISVs out there. One of the more recent announcements was a complete revamp of how search works. ⁓ so now Agent Exchange has semantic search with

⁓ I I believe ⁓ the last announcement I I had read was a a conversational search was coming later in fall of twenty twenty-six. So if an ISV wants to ensure that their app pops up for the right buyer, right? yeah. Assuming assuming that ⁓ folks are still ⁓ making these purchasing decisions with the human rather than AI, ⁓ it how do they make sure that their app is is being shown to the right eyeballs at the right time? You know, what does this search evolution mean for?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I mean

let me start by just saying of

where we are in this transition in the search, because we're we're about, I would say, maybe a third of the way through our planned roadmap of of updates to search. this has been sort of my a big project of mine trying to figure out how to make this work. And some of this was already in in motion when I took over the product and we've had a to kind of you know steer it a little bit directionally since then. And so you know there have been I I would say our rollout of this has not been maybe as smooth as

It could have been. ⁓ but we are really investing in search in a he in a heavy way. You you reference conversational search. So what's gonna come

⁓ around the Dreamforce time is a new AI mode search, which looks a lot like what you would see for like AI overview on Google, where we're actually gonna do some like summaries of listings, give you like top three recommended for this category type responses to questions that a browser is asking. And then the second thing we're gonna do is actually build ⁓ an org context picker. So, much like you have on the Slack marketplace, you can choose what workspace, what Slack workspace you're using.

When you're browsing the marketplace, we're going to do the same thing with orgs. So you'll be able to say, like, you know, especially if you're a consultant or someone that has multiple orgs that you're working with, ⁓ we're going to use that org context for personalization. So we'll have sort of like a broad broad idea of who you are as a logged in user. But when you select, you know, what org context you're looking for, we'll also be able to use some of that additional information and how we

⁓ Personalized search results and recommendations. ⁓ What do ISVs need to do to make sure that they're showing up well in this experience? ⁓ There's going to be some changes that we're going to ask you all to make to your listings over time. And we're going to build some features that sort of help ⁓ ISVs optimize their listings for this search experience. I would say very much like what's happening in the general search space, like if you think about ⁓ generative engine optimization.

And these other things that are going on, our search algorithm is going to probably more and more reward the partners that are actually giving useful information about their app in the app listing. I think right now, you know, if I go look at all the listings that are out there, I think there are some partners that do this really well. And there are some partners that, you know, may not have updated their listing and, you know.

Two, three, four years. They've got outdated screenshots, they've got, you know, marketing copy that doesn't really tell you anything about what the app does. and so you know, if you think about sticking an LLM on top of that, that

LLM is going to reward those apps for which it has more context, right? If someone's asking a question like, does your app do a thing? If your app listing doesn't in any way express that your app does that thing, it's probably not going to be a part of the conversation that that customer is having about apps that do that thing. ⁓ So I think we're gonna you'll you'll sort of see that be the direction where things go. And what we're going to do is try to help all of the ISVs through this transition with guidance.

Guidance in the publishing console to help you know you understand what changes should you should be making to your listing copy and others. And then we're putting out some like LLM-powered publishing tools that will actually help you generate some of this copy. So we could be like, you know, just like upload your website or like point to your URL, and we'll actually help try to create a V1 of your listing that's like based off of maybe the existing marketing copy you have on your website and sort of try to optimize it so that it'll be.

Mm.

Set up well for our platform. ⁓ And we'll probably be giving more guidance as we sort of release new features like how to make sure that your listing isn't getting left behind. But I think like at the core of this transition is a philosophical change for me as the owner of the marketplace in how we think about listing quality. ⁓ Going back

you know, 10, 15 years, I think there was a lot of focus for the leadership of the the App the then App Exchange on volume of listings as a vanity metric.

Mm.

And

yeah, I care about having a lot of listings. I think that's useful. But if those listings aren't useful listings, if they're old things that haven't been updated in a long time, you know, that aren't being maintained or upgraded, I kind of don't want to show them to customers. And I think ⁓ you're gonna see us move more aggressively to curate the marketplace ecosystem and try to shed, you know, some of these listings that maybe aren't

being actively maintained, aren't you know n maybe aligned to ⁓ the current state of the platform, things like that. And you know, we'll we'll certainly make sure that you know we're not catching anyone off guard by that. If you're ⁓ an ISV with one of those listings, we'll make sure you have ample time to be like, hey, by the way, your listing hasn't been updated in a long time.

We'd like you to update it. If you're not gonna update it, you know, here's the deadline, and then we'll probably ⁓ take it down with you know an option to relist if you if you update it. But I really wanna focus on making the experience a really compelling experience for the browser to come actually look and try to find stuff, and then also try to take that and extend it into how we like bring your solutions to things like Google search and other places. ⁓

So that we're actually driving like useful qualified traffic, which I think ⁓ you know, I'm I hope and my hypothesis is that as we do that, it the the marketplace will actually start to become a little bit more vibrant over time. ⁓ and that will drive, you know, higher quality leads to partners. You'll get more engagement on your listings as we bring more of the listings into the product itself, into like the Slack experience, into the agent builder experience, into

Mm-hmm.

The agent for setup experience. Like you can imagine how we can start to use this recommendation engine and the better listings to kind of do a more proactive, ⁓ opinionated curation of like what the right things for customers are. But in order to do that well, we kind of have to do a little bit of like cleanup and maintenance on the whole thing.

we'll give more guidance. ISVs will have a chance to make sure that they're like surfaced the right way in all of these new experiences, but change is definitely coming.

Cool. I di I was not aware of the the ⁓ org picker that y'all are building for added context. So I think definitely consultants are gonna love that. But it's also useful just yeah, you know, thinking of your old your the your old ISV, you know, folks that maybe their org is specifically or their their vertical is specifically in life sciences, ⁓ you know, the the the Model N listing maybe would be ⁓ brought more to the surface since y'all were focusing specifically on that vertical, right?

Yeah,

that's the idea. I mean, it's like we should be we we know what's in that org. Like we should be able to tell, like, they're using Life Sciences Cloud or they have this other ISV installed. Like we should be able to like understand enough about that to help guide customers to the right solution. ⁓

for them and I think that will actually help I think make the platform a little bit fairer for the different ISVs that are that are all on here. Whereas, you know, I think in the past it's been heavily weighted to at the top, right? It's like the the biggest ISVs with the most customers and the most revenue and all of that kind of like got overly weighted in the in the way that this works, which is like I you know.

Those ISVs are all great and they're doing amazing things. And I love having large businesses that are built on our platform and I want to reward them for that. But it shouldn't come at the expense of making it really, really hard as an entrant to the marketplace to like get placement and search results. It should really be about what is the right, what is the best thing for the customer, and that's what should drive the recommendations that we're making.

Mm. Yeah, and you me you mentioned also about GEO and I was wondering if that's where

things were headed. ⁓ I mean it makes sense. I think a lot of partners hopefully are already thinking about that just in terms of surfacing, you know, their own ⁓ landing pages and things like that. But it's funny because so so in addition ⁓ to to episode line, I also ⁓ am an ⁓ at an ISV and ⁓ the first the first episode of the podcast actually ⁓ I met with Peter Gonza, aka the App Exchange Whisperer, ⁓ and he just roasted our listing. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

going over like, you know, these are the things you should be changing to actually be be found. And that was that was now before a lot of these announcements. So perhaps I'll have to have another conversation with Peter about how to get ready for for the kind of the GEO aspect.

Yeah, I think it's

Yeah, the GEO thing is really interesting. I mean, I think across the board every ISV I talk to, every software company I talk to are all seeing just like a dip in organic search traffic that I think is primarily driven by the the shift to to things like AI overview answers and stuff. Cause customers just get, you know, if the if I'm asking like what's the best CPU solution for Salesforce, I ask that in in Google, it's gonna give me an answer and maybe I don't you know, I I just like go off of that. ⁓ so I'm not necessarily ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Coming to your listing anymore or going and doing all those things. So we want to make it ⁓

not only a better experience so that we're sort of like controlling how you sort of your listing shows up because we can do a lot better with the listing pages to help you place better in the sort of like underlying ⁓ data set that the LLMs are using for for things like A AI overview. And there's a lot of you know GEO ⁓ methodologies and stuff for that that we're we're working on. ⁓

But the other thing that we're doing is also thinking about with the new transaction capabilities that we're building. You mentioned earlier, like, is it really a human who's sort of evaluating or buying this thing anymore, or is it an agent? And you know, at some point we have to think about the possibility that.

You know, some of these procurement decisions might be s at least in part outsourced to, you know, a deep research agent to go figure out the right solution and like even figure out how to buy it. and so, you know, as we're thinking about the next year of roadmap for the agent exchange, you know, we launched at TDX private offer through the GoToMarket app that enables you to sort of use set up a Stripe account and use Salesforce billing.

Definitely. Mm-hmm.

relationship and and we handle the bill on your behalf and invoicing and payment with the customer extending that to to rebuild the checkout experience so the same

The same SKUs you define, the same price books, the same ⁓ billing account that you set up can be used for public offers and public checkout versus a private offer configuration. And then making all of that accessible via API. So theoretically, an agent, you know, if you're a small company and your solution is, I don't know, like let's say $10 a user or a couple dollars for some consumptive unit, ⁓ it's not out of the question that.

Yeah.

That you might have some companies that are like, hey, I'm setting up my marketing stack and I want the ability to s to do like templated email sends.

And so there's a solution out there that does that. And I'm just gonna tell my agent, like within a certain budget, you can just go buy whatever you want to set this up and like actually have it like go configure the solution with them. And I think the combination of what we're building with Headless 360 and making sure that like the agent exchange is its in it is in and of itself a headless service in the Headless 360 platform. ⁓ you could kind of imagine that world where all of a sudden checking out, you know, at least on the public price list pricing for a solution.

On the agent exchange is possible. ⁓ But yeah, that's that's I can see this going a lot of different ways. And at this point, it's hard to truly say exactly what the state of sort of commerce at the you know, both this the low end and high end of SaaS procurement within these marketplace surfaces is gonna look like. ⁓ But we're definitely investing in the foundation to make all of that possible.

Yeah. I I'm I'm so glad you brought up the the the go to market app, ⁓ because I that was something I wanted to touch on because it

Seems like it's gonna provide like this frictionless way ⁓ to handle like you said private offers, enterprise billing, automated provisioning. and it it I was curious, so it sounds basically like a dream for enterprise procurement. ⁓ and I'm just wondering for like operations and products folks that are listening or watching, what does the setup look like? Is it is it all available today or is that something that's being released slowly?

Yeah.

It's available

today. ⁓ Any partner ⁓ who wants to try out the GoToMarket app experience can do so. There's an addendum to the PATA agreement that sort of is required to sign in order to get access to the functionality. But once you do that, we flip a switch, and in your PBO and your partner business org, we turn on all of the go to market app features. And differently than those that have sort of operated the back end of an ISV partnership with us in the past, we have like the channel order app and the license manager.

Management app, which are managed packages that get installed in the PBO. ⁓ We built the GoToMarket app as a native capability of Salesforce. So really what happens behind the scenes is we flip a permission on the PBO and it lights up a new set of standard objects. So it's a partner offer, the setup node for configuring your Stripe account, ⁓ invoices, payouts, price books, ⁓ you know, SKU lists, et cetera, are all just native objects on the platform and the

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

You know, it does require some setup. You have to go in there and put your SKUs in and your price lists and make sure that you sort of set it up the right way to transact. ⁓ and we are working with a lot of ⁓ partners actually that help ISVs set this up. So there are companies like Tackle IO and others that are in the market of helping ISVs manage marketplaces like the AWS marketplace and others, and they'll they'll sort of help help configure. But we want to make it as easy as possible to set this up and get going. ⁓ And then over time.

Time

you the go-to-market app boundaries should expand. And things like the channel order app and license management app will effectively become native features of the go-to-market app. So that you have sort of one application for managing your entire go-to-market relationship as an ISV with Salesforce. ⁓

And then you know, my vision, and this is safe safe harbor because I haven't quite exactly gotten the plan together for exactly how we would build this. So there's a couple of architectural options, but is to also help try to merge that experience that you have in the GoToMarket app, which is like in the PBO, with the experience you have on the partner community, which lives in a community cloud instance over here, and the experience you have in the partner console and security portal of. ⁓

The agent exchange. So you kind of have this like really disparate set of surfaces as an ISV that you have to operate across. And you know, the second part of my title is the partner experience product. And so my goal over the next year is to make that experience much more seamless so that you really have one single place to go to sort of launch and manage all of these different processes as a relationship with us. And that surface would extend to all of our partner types. So while that it might look different for an ISV.

You might have things like build and listing management and other things in that experience. If you're an SI, you'd have things like partner relationship management, deal registration, leads and opportunities. ⁓ So really thinking through as we build out the Go to Market app, it's kind of become this catalyst for thinking about how we rethink the entire back-end operations of being a partner of Salesforce, but specifically an ISV selling through our marketplace.

Very cool. ⁓ y y a lot of balls in the air it seems like right now on your side of the fence.

Yeah. ⁓

there's a lot there. And then the other part of that with the GoToMarket app is also just making sure it actually aligns to some incentives that make it useful as a partner, like why as a partner would I want to to sort of change the way I transact. ⁓ and so there are things that we're working on that I can't talk

you know, in in super great detail about, but suffice to say it we're trying to create the right incentive loop with our customers where customers will have a real reason and incentive to want to buy your solution through the marketplace versus direct, ⁓ which I think will also create ⁓ a bit of an incentive for customers to start thinking about buying ISV solutions in a in a really compelling way again. So more to come on that hopefully later this year. But the Go to Market app is sort of

kernel that allows us to start building out all of these different programs and reinvesting in the go-to-market value that we provide to partners when they you know sell through the agent exchange.

Cool. Awesome to hear that ⁓ y'all are thinking about, you know, how to get that flywheel going ⁓ for for all the partners so that everybody kinda wins together. I like that. all right, the the last thing that I want to focus on is ⁓ the

Leveraging the Agent Force Builder and Slack specifically as lead gens for ISVs. ⁓ so there was an announcement that partner agents will become discoverable right inside of the Agent Force Builder and the new

Mm-hmm.

The new agent exchange in Slack just feels like this massive new pipeline channel where you have your listing, and like folks could be either folks are searching the agent exchange, perhaps their AI agent is is scouring the agent exchange for them. but then there's also this new area, this new surface area where partners can be brought right right into view for an admin or a consultant ⁓ that is building and maybe didn't know about.

the solution before. So could you talk a little bit about like what this discovery experience actually looks like for an end user and how partners can best prepare to be ⁓ builder ready?

Yeah, I mean this is the start of a

it's been about a year's worth of development effort. It started with the first version of the agent exchange when we sort of launched that. I think it was at TDX, not last year, but the year before, where we did actually create an entry point in the builder where it's like you can browse for agent actions or topics that are available from our partners. But there was a lot of problems with sort of thinking about how to take the listing experience and make that sort of useful in the context of in-product. So the last year or so, we've sort of really been working on revamping.

That completely from the ground up. And what we did is we actually created a way to sort of almost explode the manifest of a listing. And we're doing this at first with the agentic listings, but the same pattern would work for really any metadata type, where we actually inspect the package manifest. So we can see what ⁓ metadata assets are in the managed package, and then we can actually extract the individual assets and make those sort of partial.

Of a discoverable list underneath the listing. So what happens when you browse for an agentic solution in the builder experience, we're not showing like the listing, we're showing all of the assets in the listing that are sort of individually useful in the context of building an agent, which means the agent actions, the subagents that you have as part of that ⁓ MCP servers now that are part of your listing. So we actually make those individual units.

it's

discoverable and then we had to create this sort of wrapper around it so that when you you know look at the individual asset it's like well this asset is a part of this listing and so you have to be able to like traverse from the atomic ⁓ sort of like discoverable thing to the listing that that is housing it and then you can sort of like install or procure the listing for the solution that you then gives you this sort of pack of all the agentic solutions that you can use. So that's like one pattern that we've been working on. ⁓

The other pattern that we're working on, which we haven't fully announced yet, but is coming ⁓ later this year, is about Agent Force setup. So hopefully anyone who's sort of been around the Salesforce platform for a long time is is seeing the value of sort of taking the LLMs and sort of wrapping the setup experience in that. I think you know our goal over time is to effectively get rid of the historical s setup menu, which is just this like it

It's a long list of a bunch of stuff where every product team creates their own entry node in that list, and it's it's not been managed well for a very long time and needed a complete overhaul. And I think Agent Force setup sort of represents that future overhaul state. And you can imagine also what the experience of in-product discovery of agent exchange assets starts to look like when you can actually just talk to Agent Force setup. It's completely aware of all of the metadata.

That are that's in your org. It's aware of the project you're currently working on as an admin. It's aware of like all of the stuff you're doing and can start to actually make recommendations around the right solution that might actually help you solve the problem that you're trying to solve as an admin. So we want to make that a much better experience where you can actually like ⁓

experience a personalized recommendation of agent exchange solutions, but also you know be able to to sort of experience what they look like inside the product. And so there's a lot of work going into that. And I think the same thing is true in the context of headless. I mean underneath the hood, in order to make this experience, we've had to build the APIs that support listing discovery, the APIs that sort of s support you know pulling out individual bits of the package manifest and sort of making them individually

Discoverable. So a lot of the foundation work allows us to now do a lot of really cool things in embedded discovery. So as an example of that, ⁓ the Tableau team is working on a new marketplace surface for Tableau Next, which is the sort of ⁓ core app native version of Tableau. And because we built all of these APIs, they're basically able to use it as a platform to build their own marketplace.

Mm.

So they have now the Tableau Marketplace built into their product, which is serving agent exchange listings from our APIs directly into the native product service. So you can imagine going there and be like, you know, I want a visualization or I want a data set or I want this like asset that is useful only in the context of Tableau Next, but I can sort of browse a ⁓ sort of filtered set of assets from the agent exchange.

Mm-hmm.

That sort of are relevant to that product context. And so you can imagine repeating that pattern now. Really, every product that we sell can have sort of this like embedded experience of the marketplace that just showcases like here are the assets that are useful in the context of this product that you might want while you're like building the next visualization or working on a data pipeline or all of that stuff. So it's a really interesting ⁓ sort of new frontier for what we're doing where.

the site experience of the agent exchange is really only one of the heads that we care about now, where before it was sort of the whole thing.

Gotcha. Well, that that feels like a a a good place to to leave ⁓ leave it. Although I I appreciate you coming on today, providing some clarity on a lot of these topics. And also I feel like I'm gonna have to ha ask you back sometime because you've teased ⁓ some some safe harbor ⁓ stuff coming down the pipeline that now I'm really excited about too. but for any anyone listening or watching that ⁓ wants to learn more ⁓ about ⁓ one of the things you

you you've mentioned who or how should they be reaching out ⁓ to get additional information.

Yeah.

You can you can reach out to your partner account manager. You can reach out ⁓ to my team in the partner blazer community. ⁓ feel free to at mention me in there. I'm in there, so you can like app mention at Tyler Carlson and you know, maybe this is a bad idea for people for me to tell people to do that, but they can. ⁓ I'll happily take, you know, all of your feedback. I love hearing from our ISV partners and the admin community, and you know, we're really here to serve you and our companies.

Ha ha.

customers and and I think you know more and more we want to be in conversation with you about what we're building. So that's a good place to get started. ⁓ And then I'll I'll make sure that my team is also available in those services ⁓ so that you know if if you have questions on anything in in particular or specific, we can get you to the right expert.

Awesome. Well, Tyler Carlson is a senior vice president and head of product and agent exchange and partner experience at Salesforce, like I mentioned before. But I'm I'm just gonna call you a builder for the builders. ⁓ I I really appreciate you coming on ⁓ and sharing all this. Thank you so much for joining Assembly Line. I appreciate it, Tyler. Talk soon. Bye.

Awesome. Thank you, Scott.