ISV Strategy for Salesforce Spring ‘26 Release

For years, our Salesforce ISV partners have been putting in the invisible work. You were building intelligence into your apps long before it was a headline, proving use cases while they were still experiments.

Now, the market has reached a tipping point. Customers are moving past the AI hype and demanding autonomous agents that deliver a clear, measurable impact on their bottom line.

Spring ’26 is designed to turn that hard work into market leadership. This release addresses enterprise growing pains head-on through three strategic pillars: developer velocity, deterministic trust, and new ways to grow revenue. We’ve distilled 500 pages of release notes to highlight exactly what you need to build faster, outpace the competition, and scale your impact.

Developer Velocity: Slash R&D Time, Not Quality

In Spring ‘26, AI is treated as a first class citizen in the dev workflow, shortening the path from initial code to compliant deployment. 

• DX Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server: By opening Salesforce metadata to AI-native editors like Agentforce Vibes, Cursor and Windsurf, your developers can use natural language to perform development tasks like generating metadata, scanning it for quality signals, running tests, and deploying it to a Salesforce org. This means your team gets to skip the boilerplate coding, speed up onboarding, and ship high-value features faster.

• Agent Scanner: This tool provides a clear path to managing “Shadow AI” by automatically detecting and cataloging agents across the organization. This ensures that any third-party agent—whether running on Salesforce, Amazon Bedrock, or Google Vertex AI—meets strict enterprise security standards before deployment.

• Agentforce Script: This is for anyone who needs an agent to follow a specific path every single time. It’s a pro-code language built for consistency, ensuring your agent follows your defined logic every time. This hallucination-proofing is your golden ticket to closing FinServ and Healthcare customers who are currently uncomfortable with LLM unpredictability. 

• Agentforce Builder: Think of this as your agent’s IDE. The ability to toggle between a visual Agent Canvas (for rapid prototyping) and Script View (for logic control) means your product managers and engineers can speak the same language. This is your low-code, conversational environment for defining, configuring, and testing autonomous AI agents.

• Scale Center: High velocity requires high visibility. Now GA for ISVs, you can access real-time performance metrics and Apex insights to root-cause bottlenecks and ensure your app is built to scale at enterprise volume. 

Contextual Intelligence & Slack: The New Front Door for your App

Slack’s latest update breaks down data silos by offering two distinct ways to access critical information, whether you are building for AI agents or traditional applications. 

• Slack MCP Server: This streamlines how LLMs and AI agents access Slack data, providing conversational context to ground agent responses and actions. It serves as a unified, bidirectional communication layer that respects user permissions, reducing the need for complex, service-specific integrations. For ISV partners, this enables agents to write back into Slack to trigger automated notifications and alerts, mirroring the high-value DevOps workflows that originally drove Slack’s enterprise adoption.

• Slack Real-Time Search (RTS) API: This capability gives apps secure, query-based access to Slack data, so they can retrieve only the information they need, without storing customer data on external servers. When used as context for agents, this approach helps produce responses that are more relevant, accurate, and grounded in real work. This provides partners with a traditional API-centric method to pull critical data out of silos and run business operations more effectively without requiring a full agent client.
  

New Commercial Frontiers: Marketing & Mulesoft

Spring ’26 offers new features for your revenue-generating engine by monetizing the space between your apps.

• Marketing Cloud Next: Building on our December announcement that Next Gen Marketing Cloud is now Generally Available for ISVs, this release adds additional features to build and sell. At its core is Two-Way Email for Agentforce Marketing, which uses autonomous AI to turn one-way messages into dynamic conversations. We are also expanding the platform to include Partner Account Linking and Multi-Touch Attribution. With these out-of-the-box capabilities, you skip months of custom R&D and immediately visualize how every touchpoint drives lower acquisition costs.
  

• MuleSoft for Flow: We’ve opened a new listing type on AppExchange where anyone in the ecosystem can build and publish their own connectors. This makes it easier than ever to extend your automation across any tech stack, using IDP to automate unstructured data like invoices and service requests.

Your Spring ’26 Priority Checklist:

1. Conquer Shadow AI. Start with the Agent Scanner. Identify every agent in your ecosystem and bring them onto a uniform foundation. This is your first step toward meeting enterprise security standards and scaling.
2. Update Your IDE. Once you have a handle on your landscape, move your team to the DX MCP Server. Start shipping high-value features and navigating complex metadata at AI speed.
3. Harden Your Logic. Audit your current agents. Identify the critical paths where you need the deterministic precision of Agentforce Script to pass strict enterprise scrutiny.
4. Mind the Gaps. Look for ways to add new capabilities to your revenue engine (like the new Marketing Cloud Next features).
5. Get the Full Briefing. Download the Spring ‘26 ISV Technical Blueprint for a deep dive into the APIs and schemas driving this release. 

Ready to lead the Agentic Enterprise? Let’s build.