In this #Dreamforce interview, Nick Johnston, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Salesforce, joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and George Gilbert to unpack how Salesforce is operationalizing the agentic enterprise. Johnston explains how the ecosystem strategy spans four layers – data, apps, AI and the “human layer” with Slack – and why openness and extensibility are core design principles. He details the evolution from AppExchange to AgentExchange for third-party agent actions inside Agentforce 360, along with bidirectional, zero-copy data access through the Zero Copy Partner Network. The discussion also clarifies Salesforce’s Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) focus on activation across sales, service, marketing and commerce – partnering with Snowflake, Databricks and Google BigQuery rather than replacing data platforms.
The conversation explores model choice for Agentforce’s reasoning engine (supporting OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini), the emerging role of Agentforce Voice and how teams meet customers where they work with Slack – while also accommodating Microsoft Teams. Johnston addresses interoperability patterns (packaged agent actions, MCP and A2A), marketplace transactability via Salesforce contracts and how consulting partners help customers assemble “Lego blocks” of integrated capabilities. He also highlights pathways for startups and SMBs to build on the Salesforce platform and tap Agentforce toolkits without moving data.
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Nick Johnston, Salesforce
In this #Dreamforce interview, Nick Johnston, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Salesforce, joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and George Gilbert to unpack how Salesforce is operationalizing the agentic enterprise. Johnston explains how the ecosystem strategy spans four layers – data, apps, AI and the “human layer” with Slack – and why openness and extensibility are core design principles. He details the evolution from AppExchange to AgentExchange for third-party agent actions inside Agentforce 360, along with bidirectional, zero-copy data access through the Zero Copy Partner Network. The discussion also clarifies Salesforce’s Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) focus on activation across sales, service, marketing and commerce – partnering with Snowflake, Databricks and Google BigQuery rather than replacing data platforms.
The conversation explores model choice for Agentforce’s reasoning engine (supporting OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini), the emerging role of Agentforce Voice and how teams meet customers where they work with Slack – while also accommodating Microsoft Teams. Johnston addresses interoperability patterns (packaged agent actions, MCP and A2A), marketplace transactability via Salesforce contracts and how consulting partners help customers assemble “Lego blocks” of integrated capabilities. He also highlights pathways for startups and SMBs to build on the Salesforce platform and tap Agentforce toolkits without moving data.
play_circle_outlineUnlocking Customer Experience: Salesforce's Dynamic Partnerships and Ecosystem Evolution at Dreamforce 2025 Through Open Integrations
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play_circle_outlineTransforming Integration: From App Exchange to Agent Exchange and Zero Copy Partner Networks for Seamless Data Utilization
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play_circle_outlineFocus on partnerships with Snowflake and Databricks for data access and functionality.
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play_circle_outlineConsulting partners playing critical roles in deploying integrated solutions using ecosystem components.
SVP of Strategic Partnerships & Business DevelopmentSalesforce
In this #Dreamforce interview, Nick Johnston, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Salesforce, joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and George Gilbert to unpack how Salesforce is operationalizing the agentic enterprise. Johnston explains how the ecosystem strategy spans four layers – data, apps, AI and the “human layer” with Slack – and why openness and extensibility are core design principles. He details the evolution from AppExchange to AgentExchange for third-party agent actions inside Agentforce 360, along with bidirectiona...Read more
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What is the focus of the current partnerships and ecosystems strategy in enterprise software?add
What initiatives are being taken to create a more open and extensible ecosystem in the context of AI and agents?add
What is the value proposition of the Data 360 platform regarding data activation and its relationship with partners like Snowflake and Databricks?add
What is the role of consulting partners in helping customers navigate AI and data integration within the ecosystem?add
>> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante with George Gilbert, and we're wrapping up day three coverage of Dreamforce 2025. George and I are taking over for John Furrier and Gemma Allen. We're back in the New York Stock Exchange studio rocking all day. I'm seeing all kinds of stuff coming out of there. Nick Johnson is here, senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Biz Dev at Salesforce. Great to have you on.
Nick Johnston
>> Thanks for having me.
Dave Vellante
>> Thanks for coming.
Nick Johnston
>> It's great. It's great to be here.
Dave Vellante
>> So ecosystem, it's like the flywheel of our era and it feels like it's going to just spin faster. So, talk about your role and let's get into the ecosystem.
Nick Johnston
>> Well, I've been saying all week, it's never been a more interesting time to be working in partnerships and ecosystems, but really where we're focused are the core relationships that we have with the largest enterprise software companies and technology providers that we have to extend our product into and with to create really valuable shared enterprise experiences for customers. So, when we think about the hyperscalers, we think about the big data platforms, the large language model partners, some of the core applications in the enterprise. If we can't create really integrated, open experiences with them, our customers can't get the full value out of Salesforce. So, we're really focused on leading in with these partnerships. Everybody's building AI, so we're trying to make things as open and extensible as possible and having a lot of fun.
Dave Vellante
>> Building an ecosystem, it's not a trivial task. I mean it's a heavy lift of sorts. You've got to be really focused and deliberate and committed, top down, bottoms up, middle out. So I wonder if you could describe, looking back on the Salesforce history, how that ecosystem developed. What was the anatomy of that evolution?
Nick Johnston
>> Yeah. Well, the ecosystem for us has always been a differentiator. We've had the intentionality to be open and extensible from the beginning. The app exchange has been around for well over a decade, and at the time when we were pioneering cloud computing and making it possible for third party applications to build their apps onto Salesforce, that was revolutionary and we created a really great ecosystem around that. But in the world of AI and agents, that ecosystem needs to be more open and extensible for data, and it also needs to be open and extensible for agents. So, you've probably heard us talking about our agent exchange, which is the evolution of the app exchange, where we allow third parties to build their agents and agent actions into our user experience of Agentforce 360. We're also doing a lot with the ecosystem at the data layer and what we call our Zero Copy Partner Network, where companies like Snowflake or Databricks can have data that shared clients can access through Data Cloud, Data 360 as we're now calling it, without actually having to move the data. So, that data can serve the agents at the top layer of Agentforce, but also those same partners can access Salesforce data without moving it over, Zero Copy, into those systems as well. So, continuing the open and intentional embracing of the ecosystem as part of this new strategy.
Dave Vellante
>> So, Snowflake and Databricks are interesting partners because when we had Mark on, he's like, "No, we're not trying to be a data platform." But people could get confused around that. I've had people tell me, "What Salesforce needs to do is they need to buy a database company." And I'm like, "I don't think so. I think they really, they want to be above that."
Nick Johnston
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> "They want to partner with the Snowflakes and the Databricks." And Mark made that point pretty forcefully. And even at this event, I've seen some misunderstanding and confusion. I wonder if you could help clear that up.
Nick Johnston
>> Yeah, they're both great partners, and the way we think about it is our Data 360 platform is really about data activation. So, if we can use Data 360 as a way to understand the full context of the customer, by using data that lives in either a Snowflake or a Databricks or a Google BigQuery and create a metadata understanding of that data, we can actually use it inside of the Salesforce platform without moving it and serve it up through our apps. So, the Data 360 value prop is really about activation in sales, service, marketing, commerce use cases. So we're creating this orchestrated layer at the Data 360 level, not about trying to be a general purpose data lake. So, you're absolutely right, and both Snowflake and Databricks have been having great meetings with customers here. We've really enjoyed growing those partnerships and we're just going to keep building on what we have.
Dave Vellante
>> A lot of customers here.
Nick Johnston
>> Yeah, for sure.
Dave Vellante
>> happy. I'm hearing that Agentforce has a lot of momentum, great customer interactions. Of course, Data Cloud's now being rebranded and enhanced, and so it seems like a lot of momentum there. I've heard conversational analytics is actually getting a lot of buzz. What else are you hearing that's getting traction?
Nick Johnston
>> I mean, we're really excited about the work we're doing with the large language model providers, really being thoughtful about enabling customer choice for our reasoning engine and the capabilities of Agentforce, supporting OpenAI models, Anthropic models, and Gemini, which was announced today. So, we're really excited about that. We're really excited about Agentforce voice and what that paradigm is going to look like in the context of the partnerships we have with contact center providers and really being able to engage with a natural language agent in the customer experience setting, or even salespeople as they're thinking about engaging with their CRM, using voice as a modality as opposed to typing. So, the ecosystem's really unlocking all kinds of new potential for us, and we're pretty excited.
George Gilbert
>> We were talking before about the four layers of your ecosystem. Elaborate maybe on that to help and put some examples in to put meat on the bones of that.
Nick Johnston
>> Yeah, absolutely. So the four layers we talked about were the data layer, the app layer, the AI layer, and then Slack or the human layer as we talk about it. And so I talked a little bit about the Zero Copy partnerships that we have at the data layer, but really about bidirectional data access for making that data available for AI agents. At the app layer, the extension of our app exchange to the agent exchange, and really where we're intentionally creating integrated app experiences. And at the AI layer, that's where the agent exchange and the third party actions we can be bringing into our platform, as well as that model choice that I just talked about, where we're making it easier for customers to select the models they want to use inside of Agentforce. And then Slack is where the agents and the humans can come together. And we think it's just such an important part of that integrated experience with the right data, the right app experiences, the right agents, but a place where humans and agents and teams can really unlock the potential of this AI, so.
George Gilbert
>> What if I don't use Slack? That is a Setup question. What if I don't use Slack?
Nick Johnston
>> We are going to be open and extensible. You probably saw Teams listed as something that we're being thoughtful about too because we want to be in the surface areas where our customers are. And so we think Slack is going to be an amazing extension of the user experience of Salesforce, but to your point, you don't have to be because make it possible in Slack. We'll work with Microsoft and make sure we're bringing those integrated experiences forward.
George Gilbert
>> I'm wondering if maybe the app tier was the original part of the ecosystem when Data Cloud came along, and as it's matured, especially with Zero Copy, it makes it really clear that it's not meant to replace the data platforms. It's the harmonization, unification, activation, value add on top, but the harmonization and unification not to be minimized, because modeling the customer and the journey. So, that's relatively new and you emphasized bidirectional, so value added data can come out.
Nick Johnston
>> That's right.
George Gilbert
>> Okay. Now, put a little more meat on the bones of the agent layer. Now, someone could build agents natively within your tools. So that one I guess is easy to picture now, but what happens if you have agents that are built in external tools that somehow need to interoperate either with your own agents or your data or the application surfaces themselves? How does that work?
Nick Johnston
>> Great question. There's a couple of different ways that we can make that pattern work. The first is through our agents exchange. As I referenced before, we're enabling third parties to bring their agent actions into the surface of Agentforce so that the action itself calls the third party agent using our native capabilities of the platform to bring back the answer. And that's all through the natural packaging that a partner can do inside of Agentforce. But we're also embracing the standards like the MCP protocol standards and A2A standards, which will be another way that we can enable seamless handoffs between agents.
George Gilbert
>> But this is, so if they export or register and curate an action, it's just more seamless.
Nick Johnston
>> That's right.
George Gilbert
>> Then if you use MCP and A2A because then it's a looser coupling.
Nick Johnston
>> Maybe. I think there's going to be different reasons, just like we've seen over time different reasons to have data streaming experiences versus batch data movement. There's going to be different reasons that you're going to follow a different architecture pattern, but we want to embrace them all. So, there's going to be really natural easy ways where if a third party's packaged an agent action, you can just drag and drop that as an admin into an Agentforce agent and then access that third party's AI. Maybe doesn't need as much technical support or technical thinking in how you're going to architect an MCP interoperability or an A2A framework. So, there's just going to be different ways of making these agents work together.
George Gilbert
>> Let me ask also now on the LLM front that the Atlas reasoning engine has always been supposedly the brain of the agents. And I mean that's the core of an agent that makes a plan. It accesses context, calls, tools, but you are riding on this unbelievable price performance curve of the frontier LLMs. Maybe tell us how much more capable that reasoning engine becomes by leveraging the frontier models, and put some meat on the bones of what the reasoning engine is doing beyond the vanilla LLM itself.
Nick Johnston
>> Sure. I mean, the reasoning engine that our team's built is really purpose-built for Salesforce and understanding the context and the deep data and the workflow that we have around sales, service, marketing and commerce. So, our research team and our Agentforce team has built that reasoning engine with some proprietary ways of thinking and handling context in the CRM setting. But to your point on the just vast performance improvements, we're seeing from the large language models great opportunity for us to have that reasoning engine working on top of that core capability. So as they continue to improve performance, we get the benefit of that too. So, we've optimized our reasoning engine to run on open AI models, on anthropic models, and now Google Gemini models so that depending on the customer's preference and the different things that we want to be able to enable through Agentforce, there's options, model choice.
Dave Vellante
>> And those preferences, they'll change-
Nick Johnston
>> Model choice....
Dave Vellante
>> weekly.
Nick Johnston
>> Model choice, customers want it.
Dave Vellante
>> It really will. A lot of announcements this week. It's hard to keep track. Are there any patterns that you're seeing in terms of taking shape with some of the focus is, it depends on the partner, but what are you seeing that stand out?
Nick Johnston
>> I think what's great in the work we're doing with the ecosystem is that so many of our partners are embracing this open and intentionally integrated concept of how we're going to make AI and data work together. I'm having lots of great customer conversations where they're seeing the things we're building with our partners as Lego blocks that are intentionally met to fit together. But they're also asking the question of, "Gosh, you showed me what I can do or I could do, what should I do?" And I think I'm seeing a really interesting evolution in the role that consulting partners are now playing. When you think about all those Lego blocks and helping a customer navigate the things that should intentionally fit together, how should they, which patterns should you use? You talked about MCP and A2A. how do you architect it all? And I'm just seeing such a broader lens that the consulting partners are now playing and thinking about Salesforce and all of our tech partner ecosystem and piecing all of those Lego blocks together. So, it's just fascinating broader conversations than maybe we were having a year ago.
Dave Vellante
>> So, we've got the ecosystem pieced down. It's very clear. What is your marketplace play? Educate us on that.
Nick Johnston
>> Yeah, so the app exchanges we talked about has been decades long plus value proposition for our customers and our partners building onto Salesforce. But that's really been a way to discover third party apps and deploy them through our metadata model. We're moving towards a model where we're also going to enable transactability, which is a way that our partners built on our platform or built to our platform, will actually be able to sell their products through our marketplace in via Salesforce Contracts, which is something we're moving towards as the next wave of our agent exchange and the future of how we're going to go to market with partners.
Dave Vellante
>> You'll transact directly through Salesforce, if I want to, part of that paper. And then I got credits that whole facile-
Nick Johnston
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> That's like the PhD version of app exchange.
Nick Johnston
>> And I'll say we've had a lot of inspiration from our hyperscaler partners and the work we've done with AWS and Google Cloud. We've seen how enabling procurement choice and simplification through third party marketplace really, really can help. So, we want to give options and we want to enable a similar experience on our front as well.
George Gilbert
>> This could be, it sounds like the transition when Apple went from a device maker to having the App Store and it was really a portal. It was funny, but it was Microsoft's dream 30 years ago that they wanted to be the toll booth.
Dave Vellante
>> So, so true. Remember that?
George Gilbert
>> Yeah, for all e-commerce, and it turned out to be Apple. But now in a world where its services as software and a customer brings in Salesforce as their environment, then all the third party services might come through. Maybe not all, but I wonder if that's the goal that the marketplace is.
Nick Johnston
>> I wouldn't say that's the goal. We definitely don't want to be the toll booth or force that.
George Gilbert
>> I know that's a bad word.
Nick Johnston
>> I think what's important is-
Dave Vellante
>> But there's value to be created in simplifying and integrating.
Nick Johnston
>> Spot on. Simplifying it and giving customers options, there may be very real scenarios where one of our partners wants to build to our platform and they may not have a vendor relationship with an end customer that we do. And it's a lot simpler for that team to purchase that third party agent or their product through our marketplace. So, we just want to give options. We believe that that's always the best path for the customer. So, I don't think we pick one or the other, but the options are going to help.
George Gilbert
>> So, pricing models are in flux for that sort of thing, but the idea is you're not going to be buying software at some point, you're going to be buying outcomes.
Nick Johnston
>> That's right.
George Gilbert
>> Okay. That's significant.
Nick Johnston
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> You're right. Maybe tolls is not the right way to think about it. I think the right way to... I mean, look at Amazon, they make money by selling compute storage and networking. You're going to make money by selling agent capabilities and outcomes, as George said, and there's value there.
Nick Johnston
>> That's right. And if you think about where employees are going to get access to these agents and how they're going to actually interact with our agents as well as third party agents, we have an amazing surface area with the sales cloud and service cloud and those places where enterprise workers are logging into every day as well as Slack. And so we can use those surface areas to help our partners get better access their AI and their agents and the systems that we are delivering to our customers every day.
Dave Vellante
>> It's awesome you get these great companies like CrowdStrike and Snowflake and Databricks and Google and Amazon in your ecosystem. What if I'm a little guy, and I'm like, "I really believe... I saw Benioff's keynote. I'm inspired. I got my startup, I want to participate. How do I do that?"
Nick Johnston
>> Build it on the Salesforce platform. So, the same value prop that we had when we were telling companies that they could build their industry-specific CRMs on our platform, you can get access to our Agentforce capabilities. You can be an agentic enterprise by using our platform. And you've got AI toolkits at the ready via Salesforce. So, it's just an evolution of our packaging and our story that's just as relevant for an SMB as it ever has been.
Dave Vellante
>> And what about startups? First of all, are they a strategic target? Are you able to attract startups to actually do that?
Nick Johnston
>> Yeah, I mean, we have an amazing SMB team here at the company. Our venture group is also super involved in startups. I don't personally work with the startups a ton, but we've seen such energy. And if you think about where AI is going to help different segments of the business achieve outcomes faster, I mean, these startups are getting a ton of efficiency and scale through the value of AI. So, we're starting to see these startups punching above their weight using the Salesforce platform and using our AI capabilities, and they're becoming way more relevant than maybe they were in years past.
Dave Vellante
>> Small, medium, and large, hey, we're a customer.
Nick Johnston
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> We're small.
Nick Johnston
>> Exactly.
Dave Vellante
>> We know that you got some big customers as well. Well, listen, thanks so much for coming on the team.
Nick Johnston
>> Thanks for having me, and thanks for being at Dreamforce.
Dave Vellante
>> Congratulations. A great event, biggest ever.
Nick Johnston
>> It is. It is.
Dave Vellante
>> Is my understanding.
Nick Johnston
>> We keep stepping it up every year.
Dave Vellante
>> Fantastic. And you have it right in San Francisco, so that's great. All right.
Nick Johnston
>> Thanks for being here.
Dave Vellante
>> Thank you, Nick. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, and that wraps up Salesforce Dreamforce 2025, Dave Vellante for George Gilbert, Gemma Allen, and of course John Furrier and the whole CUBE team. Thanks, guys. Thanks to Salesforce for this great location and hosting us here. We'll see you next time. We're busy time of year, so check us out. Check out siliconangle.com, thecube.net, thecuberesearch.com, and check out thecubeai.com, ask it what were the highlights of Salesforce Dreamforce, and you'll get some good answers. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.
Dave Vellante
George Gilbert