Your AI agent may be ready. Your sales motion probably isn’t.
Our take
The rise of AI agents promises a revolution in how businesses operate, but as Salesforce’s recent article highlights, the path to realizing that promise isn't solely about sophisticated AI capabilities. It's about the often-overlooked friction in the sales and deployment process. Interested buyers don't generate revenue; live customers do, and the gap between expressing intent and actively using a product is widening, creating a significant bottleneck for ISV partners. Companies are pouring resources into agent development, yet many are neglecting the equally critical task of streamlining the journey from initial interest to full deployment. This mirrors a broader trend where technological advancement outpaces operational adaptation, leaving businesses struggling to capitalize on their innovations – a situation Nvidia's work on Switchyard router reshuffles AI models mid-task, cutting task costs to a third in its own tests illustrates in a different context, highlighting the importance of optimizing the underlying infrastructure to support advanced AI applications. Furthermore, the speed at which LTX-2.5 can generate AI video from an image showcases the rapid progress in AI model development, emphasizing the urgency for streamlined deployment processes to keep pace.
The article’s analogy of building a bullet train and selling tickets by fax is particularly apt. The product – the AI agent – may be built for speed and efficiency, but a cumbersome, outdated buying process negates those advantages. Gartner’s prediction that 90% of B2B purchases will be AI-guided by 2028 underscores the scale of this shift. It's no longer enough to have a technically superior agent; discoverability and ease of purchase are becoming paramount. This means rethinking traditional procurement processes – the manual contracts, custom invoicing, tax reviews, and provisioning delays – that currently bog down deals and allow competitors to capitalize on lost momentum. The shift towards agent-guided buying means the initial evaluation may happen *before* a demo or even a conversation with a sales representative, further highlighting the importance of marketplace visibility and a frictionless purchasing experience.
Salesforce’s AgentExchange initiative directly addresses this problem, providing a centralized platform for discovery, commerce, and activation. The success stories, like Gutenburg’s 60x improvement in contract processing time, are compelling evidence of the transformative power of removing these operational bottlenecks. The ability to close a deal in 48 hours, compared to a previous 30-45 day cycle, isn’t just about speed; it’s about scalability, improved pipeline coverage, and increased net recurring revenue – all without a proportional increase in headcount. This is a fundamental shift in the economics of growth, where distribution becomes a product in itself, requiring dedicated resources and continuous iteration. The fact that Mistral AI wants to build 1 gigawatt of European compute by 2030 further emphasizes the scale of investment required to support this rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Ultimately, the article serves as a wake-up call for ISVs. While perfecting agent reasoning capabilities remains important, prioritizing a seamless buying experience is now a strategic imperative. The companies that proactively address this challenge, treating distribution as a product problem and investing in solutions like AgentExchange, will be best positioned to thrive in the agent economy. The question now is: will other platforms emerge to compete with AgentExchange, and how will the broader ecosystem adapt to ensure that the promise of AI agents isn't stifled by outdated operational processes?
Presented by Salesforce
Interested buyers don't generate revenue. Live customers do. That's the lesson I keep drawing from watching hundreds of ISV partnerships navigate the agent economy over the last 18 months.
The companies pulling ahead aren't winning on features. They're winning because customers can move from discovery to live deployment in hours, while competitors are still negotiating contracts, clearing tax reviews, and waiting on provisioning.
That gap between a buyer who says “yes” and a customer who is actually using the product is where too many deals lose momentum. Urgency fades. Champions move on. Competitors get another opening.
Gutenburg saw that gap firsthand. Healthcare organizations valued its product, but sales cycles stretched 30 to 45 days. With custom pricing via AgentExchange, the company closed an urgent healthcare deal in just 48 hours.
Not 48 days. 48 hours.
The final contract phase alone dropped from 4 hours to 4 minutes. A 60x improvement.
I see this pattern across the ISV ecosystem. Building agents is getting faster. Getting buyers live before urgency fades is becoming the constraint. In a market moving this quickly, that can matter as much as the agent itself.
It’s like building a bullet train and selling tickets by fax. The product is built for speed. The transaction is not.
Distribution beats product in crowded markets
Nearly every software company is pouring resources into agent development. Far fewer are rethinking the path from discovery to deployment. Manual contracts, custom invoicing, tax reviews, provisioning delays, these are the handoffs that turn a 48-hour deal into a 45-day cycle.
That friction is now a competitive disadvantage, because the buying process is changing faster than most back offices are. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 90% of B2B purchases will be guided by AI agents.
That does not mean humans disappear from enterprise buying. It means the discovery and evaluation process changes. Buyers will increasingly use AI to identify, compare, and narrow solutions.
If your agent is not discoverable where that evaluation is happening, you may never make the shortlist.
A better agent can still lose to one that's easier to buy.
Domain expertise matters. Workflow depth matters. Proprietary data matters. Customer context matters.
But enterprise categories are getting crowded fast. In crowded markets, the best product does not always win. The product that is easiest to discover, buy, deploy, and scale often has the advantage.
As agent-guided buying takes hold, the first evaluation may happen before a demo is scheduled or a sales rep is in the room.
AI agents will increasingly scan marketplaces, compare solutions, and help narrow purchase decisions in the time it used to take to schedule a discovery meeting.
Companies that figure out marketplace distribution now will own their categories.
That is the problem AgentExchange was built to address. It’s a single destination for apps, agents, and integrations that extend and connect to Salesforce and Slack, helping customers get more from their platform investments.
But discovery is only the first step. The bigger question is what happens after the buyer says “yes”.
“Yes” doesn't mean live
Enterprise software teams spend enormous energy getting to "yes." But in many deals, that is where the operational work begins.
Between “yes” and “live,” the back office can generate a chain of handoffs: contracting, invoicing, tax calculation, licensing, provisioning, fulfillment, payment, and finance reconciliation. Every handoff delays activation for the customer and delays recognized revenue for you.
For AI agents, that back-office drag is becoming a front-office problem.
AgentExchange brings discovery, commerce, and activation together, helping partners manage custom pricing, billing, licensing, provisioning, and fulfillment through one connected experience.
"AgentExchange removes the traditional procurement friction that slows deals. Customers can now discover, purchase, and deploy PandaDoc directly through their existing Salesforce contract, turning what used to be a multi-week process into a same-day activation." Keith Rabkin, CEO at PandaDoc
What closing in 48 hours actually looks like
Gutenburg’s 30-45 day cycles were eaten up by contract logistics. Sales moved faster than their back office.
Using custom pricing and automated transaction capabilities through AgentExchange, they streamlined contracting, tax calculation, provisioning, and other steps between buyer interest and activation.
When a healthcare organization needed a tool to help them create documents aligned to the Americans with Disabilities Act and accessibility requirements, Gutenburg closed in 48 hours from first contact.
The 48-hour close is the differentiator. It is what efficient growth actually looks like in practice. Revenue scales without scaling headcount. Pipeline coverage improves because you are discoverable everywhere. Net recurring revenue increases because customers expand through the same frictionless channel.
"AgentExchange condenses contracting and tax calculations into a 10-minute process with improved accuracy," said Zamial Jones, VP of Customer Success at Gutenburg. "For partners spending hours on these tasks for every deal, that's transformational."
The window is closing faster than you think
The app economy took a decade to mature.
The agent economy won't.
The ISV partners I've watched pull ahead aren't the ones with the most sophisticated agents. They're the ones who treated distribution as a product problem — resourced, measured, and iterated — before the category consolidated around them. The ones still treating go-to-market as a post-launch consideration are consistently 6 to 12 months behind.
You can spend the next two quarters perfecting your agent's reasoning capabilities. Or you can spend them making sure customers can actually buy it.
Salesforce is investing in the next generation of companies creating agents with $50 million through the AgentExchange Builders Initiative—capital, engineering support, co-marketing, and co-sell programs. Companies that move now will define what enterprise AI distribution looks like for the next decade. Learn more here.
Lisa Eisenberg is SVP of ISV Partnerships at Salesforce.
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