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Salesforce Is Putting a Meter on the Pipe
Agent identity is overdue. Charging per call is the wrong lever at the wrong layer.
Salesforce is changing how AI agents connect to its platform. Agents that touch Salesforce will need to be registered, and every successful call they make, whether over MCP or straight through the API, will be counted as a Headless Platform Interaction (HPI) and drawn against Flex Credits.
The identity half of this is good news. The billing half worries me, and Salesforce isn’t the only vendor heading this way.
What’s changing
Salesforce is introducing what it calls Agentic Identity. Admins register each agent, and the agent gets its own credentials and permissions instead of acting as a person. Once an agent is registered, Digital Wallet tracks every successful call it makes to a production org and bills it as an HPI. Sandboxes, scratch orgs and Developer Edition orgs aren’t metered.
Salesforce is targeting November for the rollout. New customers have three months from Salesforce’s notice to register agents that use its APIs, and existing API customers register when they renew. Anyone using a Salesforce MCP server has three months from notice, whatever their contract.
