Salesforce has introduced to South Korea for the first time a training program to develop engineers who can help local companies deploy artificial intelligence agents. Through its Partner Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) program, already running in global markets, the company aims to build a pool of specialists who can design, build and operate AI agents at customer sites.
Salesforce said on the 21st that it held its first Partner FDE workshop in Seoul from the 13th to the 15th of this month. An FDE is a specialist engineer who analyzes a client's business environment and work processes and supports the entire lifecycle of an AI agent, from design through building, deployment, operation and optimization. Salesforce plans to share its engineering capabilities and technical standards with local partners to strengthen their ability to apply AI agents in the field.
The workshop, held under the theme "FDE Ready: Making Agents Matter," drew 44 engineers and consultants from 11 South Korean systems integration (SI) and specialist consulting partners. On the first day, participants learned how to design AI agents using Agentforce and Slack and how to apply them to business operations. The second day covered the use of unstructured data, data analysis based on Tableau Next and the construction of key performance indicators (KPIs). The final day addressed six essential requirements for stable AI agent operations, including data security, governance and technical readiness, along with optimization methods.
Participants are held to a high bar of technical expertise. They must obtain professional certifications such as Agentforce Specialist and Data 360 Consultant in advance, completing roughly 80 hours of technical study and certification exams. Even after the workshop, they must pass a final assignment assessing practical skills to earn the Agentforce FDE Practitioner credential.
Salesforce's Partner FDE program is expanding in global markets as well. More than 1,000 specialists at 140 partner firms across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific have earned the certification to date. In South Korea, four partner firms are set to join the local Partner FDE network after completing the certification process following this workshop. The company aims to train more than 100 specialists next year.
The program is part of the "Agentic Enterprise" strategy that Salesforce laid out at Dreamforce 2026 in September. The idea is to strengthen the technical capabilities of the local partner ecosystem so that AI agent adoption goes beyond pilot projects to actual business use and measurable results.
"A company's competitiveness depends less on how quickly it adopts AI than on how much capability it has to embed AI in the organization's work systems and convert it into real business results," said Park Se-jin, country manager of Salesforce Korea. "We will share the expertise and technical standards we have accumulated in global markets with our local partners to help South Korean companies develop AI into a sustainable growth engine."