Executive Summary: ISG Provider Lens™ Salesforce Ecosystem Partners - Brazil 2025
30 Apr 2025
by Marcio Tabach
The individual quadrant reports are available at:
Suppliers that continuously invest in human capital boost the Brazilian Salesforce market
This edition of the ISG Provider Lens report™ — Salesforce Ecosystem Partners - Brazil 2025 — brings some new features compared to previous editions. The first of these concerns the incorporation of the evaluation of the use of AI, which is emerging as a dominant trend in the Salesforce market, with leading companies integrating Einstein, Agentforce and generative AI (GenAI) for personalization, automation and insights. The focus is clearly on improving CX and operational efficiency.
Agentforce’s expectations
In May 2024, Salesforce faced a significant drop in the value of its shares. A few months earlier, service providers reported developing in-house solutions and integrating Salesforce platforms with market LLMs such as GPT, Claude
and Gemini to improve insight generation and sales pitches. In the wake of this move, financial analysts expressed concerns about Salesforce’s ability to remain competitive amid the dominance of GenAI in IT systems, culminating in a fall in its shares. Salesforce responded in September of the same year with a significant recovery in the value of its shares following the launch of Agentforce. This new product allows the creation of autonomous agents that perform complex tasks without human intervention, such as customer service, replacing the traditional call center.
Salesforce’s CEO announced the intention to have 1 billion agents in production worldwide by the end of 2026. Another innovation introduced by Agentforce was the way it charges, which is now per conversation and not per user
license. The company’s bold strategy has generated ambivalent feelings among partners operating in Brazil. The first concern is the reliability of these agents’ responses, especially in Portuguese. At the time of this research, Agentforce in Portuguese was still in its beta version and had only been mentioned in a few PoCs in the country.
The other concern relates to the marketing model, which charges $2 per conversation.
These costs are uncompetitive when compared to the costs of operating call centers in Brazil, calculated in local currency. Despite Salesforce’s massive incentives and the possibility of testing Agentforce for free, many Brazilian service providers show a certain caution when proposing Agentforce as a solution to their clients. With the exception of multinational partners, few Brazilian partners have signed up for the Agentforce pilot program.
Although the general perception persists that the natural evolution of AI application in companies is AI agents, Agentforce does not yet seem to be ready for the Brazilian market. This perception could change if success stories emerge in the country during 2025.
The inexorable disruption of AI
Despite the caution with Agentforce, AI continues to be a decisive element in the Salesforce ecosystem, whether as a platform feature, in implementation processes or in managed services. Suppliers in Brazil have highlighted success stories in implementing Einstein functionalities, effectively automating managed services processes or conducting preproduction quality tests.
Some companies such as BRQ and OSF Digital have developed in-house AI-based platforms to monitor the process of creating and implementing Salesforce solutions and promoting speed and precision in the implementation of the platform. In other cases, Salesforce instances are monitored using AI tools, which automatically rectify bugs in different Salesforce instances, countries or clouds, as in the case of Infosys.
In the new scenario of incorporating AI into business systems and processes, customers need even more consultative work from service providers to select the best platforms and products in the complex AI environment.
Mergers and acquisitions strategy proved successful
The second novelty in this year’s study concerns the division between companies targeting large and midmarket segments. Each supplier has been classified into one category based on its clientele’s predominance. This stratification made it possible to identify other equally important characteristics and the type of customers they predominantly serve.
Large enterprise suppliers distinguish themselves from midmarket companies in terms of the size of their certified team, the type of project they conduct and the Salesforce products they implement. Suppliers in the large enterprise segment have certified teams with several professionals involved in implementing Salesforce industry clouds, promoting multicloud implementations and integrating these products with corporate systems. This demonstrates the clear existence of two distinct segments in the domestic market.
Another aspect that draws attention in the supplier environment of large companies is the fact that many of them, generally Leaders in the quadrants of this study, went through partner acquisition processes known as acquihiring during the years 2021, 2022 and 2023. The leadership of these companies shows that the strategy of expanding their teams through acquihiring has proved successful. Examples include Deloitte, Compass UOL, Valtech, OSF Digital and Globant. These companies could better deal with the growth of the Brazilian Salesforce market and capture a large
market share.
New focus for mergers and acquisitions
The focus of acquisitions in recent years seems to have changed. Some companies listed in the Implementation Services for Marketing and Commerce with AI Enablement quadrant have engaged in acquisitions specifically focused
on creative activities in martech. In 2023 and 2024, Accenture acquired SOKO, Globant acquired GUT and OSF Digital acquired Digital Business. These acquisitions helped strengthen the creative side of B2C digital marketing campaigns. This indicates that traditional systems integrators should enter the segment of B2C campaigns in Salesforce environments.
Some companies in this quadrant, especially digital marketing agencies, are preparing to broaden the scope of their offerings. Previously focused exclusively on the Marketing Cloud, they are adjusting to the announcement at Dreamforce 2024 that this cloud will be incorporated into the core clouds. Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud will not be
completely discontinued but will be integrated into the platform’s core.
Salesforce plans to integrate Marketing Cloud into its core structure, enabling more centralized and integrated data management through Data Cloud and other technologies such as MuleSoft and Zero Copy. This means that the Marketing Cloud functionalities will continue to be available, but now as part of a broader, more integrated solution within the Salesforce platform.
For this reason, companies focused on the Marketing Cloud will need to implement core clouds to offer the platform’s marketing automation services. Many of these companies are investing in training their teams to handle this expanded scope.
CDP Cloud gains importance
In this context, the product that stands out and promises to be Salesforce’s sales driver in Brazil is the Customer Data Platform (CDP) Cloud. Successful AI projects necessarily depend on good quality, easily accessible data. CDP Cloud plays a key role in collecting and storing customer data that is fed into AI engines, whether it is Einstein, Agentforce or a third-party AI platform. CDP represents a key element in using data and analytics within the Salesforce environment, promoting insights and personalization in customer relationships.
Managed services are key to maximizing the value of the platform
As for managed services, in addition to the aforementioned use of AI, license management services stand out. Most Salesforce use cases are multicloud, i.e., they use more than one Salesforce product. This makes license management highly complex, generating unnecessary or unoptimized expenses for customer use. Consequently, customers require
their service providers to actively monitor and propose changes that minimize their expenses. This is particularly relevant in an emerging market such as Brazil.
Attracting, retaining and upskilling human capital drives the key to success
In the dynamic Brazilian CRM market, suppliers have shown double-digit growth, driven by the excellence of specialized human capital.
The presence of highly qualified and certified teams has proved to be a critical element in the development of partners and implementers, with several suppliers implementing in-house certification and qualification programs for Salesforce professionals.
This strategy is supported by important recognitions, such as the Great Place to Work® seal, which attests to the robustness of programs for attracting, retaining and developing talent in the CRM sector. Understanding the contingent of professionals specialized in Salesforce is an essential variable for success and expansion in the Brazilian market. Organizations are consolidating the foundations for sustainable and consistent growth in the digital transformation segment through the Salesforce platform. Judging by the performance of the leading companies in the Brazilian market, it can be assumed that the market will continue to grow rapidly.
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