Salesforce UK boss underlines role of channel

Salesforce’s UK CEO has restated the company’s commitment to and the importance of channel partners. The vendor has been entertaining partners and customers in Excel London at its World Tour event, encouraging them to adopt more agentic artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

When asked last year about what the channel meant to the firm, Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UK&I, stated that it was not only viral but the opportunities for them continued to emerge. Asked if those statements remained valid, she said that partners were fundamental to the business.

“Our channel ecosystem is such a vital part of how we operationalise everything we’ve been talking about within our customers,” she said.

Bahrololoumi thanked the channel for its role in driving growth and enabling customers, going on to highlight the role played by its channel community.

She added that Salesforce had committed global channel Leadership in place and was “continually investing in our partner ecosystem”.

In terms of the opportunities, she stated that the channel was at the coalface working with customers keen to adopt the latest AI tools: “We’re starting to see more innovative models of engagement as our customers demand more outcome-based commercials. We are learning and evolving with it.”

The focus of the London event, which used a range of customers including Formula 1 and Pandora to illustrate the power of agentic AI, was to encourage greater levels of adoption of its tools, including its Agentforce offering.

“We wouldn’t be able to make this [the World Tour] possible without our partners. They are shoulder to shoulder with us, making this very event happen, fully integrated into how we operate,” she concluded.

One of the key areas where partners could have an impact is in tackling user concerns, particularly those worries that were holding back the introduction of more AI across businesses.

Joe Inzerillo, president of enterprise and AI technology at Salesforce, said that fear of making platform decisions and the prospects of rolling out AI was the number one factor holding back wider adoption, and there was a need to provide reassurance to calm those concerns.

The ongoing need for humans was repeatedly voiced by executives and customers that wanted to stress that AI was not seen as a staff-cutting tool but rather as a timesaving and customer experience-enhancing technology.

That message also addressed concerns that continue to swirl around AI and the motivation for some deployments, which are issues the channel has had to acknowledge as a barrier to wider adoption.

In addition, Bahrololoumi said the vendor had committed to investing $6bn in the UK and was keen to widen the adoption of AI and use its available training to improve skills around the technology.

She stated that Salesforce is committed to working with the UK government to ensure the country remained among the AI leaders and could harness the power of artificial intelligence.

The other overarching theme of the event was the need to help overcome user fears around AI and to encourage more businesses to adopt the technology.