Salesforce UK boss stresses the importance of partners

Salesforce has encouraged more partners to join its ecosystem as the firm ramps up its offerings around agentic artificial intelligence (AI).

Using its World Tour event in London as a backdrop, Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UK&I, outlined the moves the firm was making to provide enterprise AI platforms with more programming tools to encourage customised app development. She acknowledged the contribution made by Salesforce’s channel and alliance partners, along with the impact these have made with customers.

“Behind all of this is the most incredible ecosystem – our partners,” she said. “We don’t do this alone. We’re incredibly appreciative of our brilliant ecosystem, and we invite you to join this ecosystem and continue to scale this brilliant trust and innovation across enterprise that [shows] all our lives can be made easier.”

Bahrololoumi added that the opportunity for partners was expanding as the vendor itself was able to work with customers on deeper levels. “What we are seeing in our customer base is the extension much deeper into the enterprise – such as mid-office and the back-office, and IT support,” she said.

“We think about the use cases we’re seeing – it’s not just connecting the customers, it’s connecting the employees, the operations and the agents, the threads that go all the way through, and that is a territory that our partners bring the expertise [to].

“They have that depth of industry expertise and they can help to navigate us and our customers through what that change looks like – through data, process, augmenting people, along with how things can be really optimised.”

Those comments came after she used a keynote to outline increased investments in the UK, with $6bn being spent in the country over the next few years to support ambitions to make it a centre of AI development

“We are at a very pivotal moment. For every company and every industry, AI is transforming our lives. There are absolutely no questions [about that], but how do we bring that power into our businesses?” said Bahrololoumi.

“We are putting our resources behind this in a big way. We have pledged and committed $6m into the UK through 2030, and this investment is geared to support the UK’s mission to become a leading AI and data hub – one that grows jobs and skills, and one that supports innovation up and down the country.

“For Salesforce in the UK in particular, that places us as an AI hub for the entire region and ensures that the UK remains one of the best places to start and to grow a business,” she added.

Bahrololoumi said that AI had accelerated quickly, with most users comfortable using tools such as ChatGPT, but there had not been similar rapid adoption among businesses. “Enterprises are lagging. We are seeing a widening agentic divide between customer expectations and enterprise capability,” she said.

Bahrololoumi warned that too many customers were trying to add AI without the right strategy, and these DIY efforts were leading to high project failure rates. She stated that she held regular discussions with customers that prove the appetite is there for AI, but the path to adopting artificial intelligence had not always been a smooth one.

“Many of these projects will not get into production. That is because the data quality in these companies is typically very poor, and the technology is bolted on, it’s not built in. This is the price of too much DIY AI, and we know a better way, and we don’t want our customers to be facing this journey – we want to help them,” she said.

The event was used to showcase Agentforce 360 along with some app programming tools designed to help users enhance customer service and unlock more business opportunities.

“We want to help you create an entirely new kind of enterprise,” said Bahrololoumi. “We call this the agentic enterprise. This is where humans and agents drive customer success together, where loyalty grows, and where trust deepens. This is where your employees achieve so much more.”