Salesforce brings its Partner FDE program to South Korea, training 44 partner engineers in its first Seoul workshop

Salesforce has introduced its Partner FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) program in South Korea for the first time. Its first Seoul workshop, held October 13 to 15, brought together 44 engineers and consultants from 11 local system integration and consulting partners, according to DigitalToday.

Over three days, participants worked on automating work with the Agentforce agent platform and Slack, using unstructured data, data analysis and building KPIs, and reviewed data security, governance and readiness requirements for running agents in production. Entry requires certifications such as Agentforce Specialist and Data 360 Consultant plus about 80 hours of technical study; people who pass the final assessment earn the Agentforce FDE Practitioner qualification.

Salesforce says more than 1,000 specialists at 140 partner companies have earned the certification worldwide. In Korea, four partner firms are set to join the FDE network after the workshop, and the company wants more than 100 trained experts there by next year. Salesforce Korea head Park Se-jin framed the goal as helping companies move AI agents beyond pilots into real workflows.

For FDEs, this is another sign that the forward deployed model is spreading from vendors' own teams into the partner and consulting ecosystem. Engineers at Korean SIs and consultancies now have a formal path to an FDE credential, and partner FDE roles are likely to grow alongside Salesforce's own FDE hiring in the region.