What it is
Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) lets organizations connect their own AI model — hosted on a cloud AI service such as Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, or Google Vertex AI — so Salesforce AI features and agents can use it. In Salesforce it is configured through Einstein Studio's Model Builder for governance and cost control.
Why it matters
Many mid-market companies already have model preferences tied to compliance, industry regulations, or existing cloud contracts. BYOM lets IT teams meet those requirements while still using Agentforce's automation and workflow tools. It also protects against vendor lock-in, so switching models later doesn't mean rebuilding your agent strategy from scratch.
Key components
- Model registry
- Custom endpoint connector
- Governance policies
How it connects
BYOM is about which model runs; it works alongside BYOK, which is about who holds the key and the provider contract. Test any swapped model in Agentforce before go-live.
Good to know
Test latency and grounding quality carefully—swapping models can change agent behavior and hallucination rates.
Related terms
Foundation Model
A large AI model trained on broad data at massive scale that serves as a general-purpose substrate other applications fine-tune or prompt against. The category that includes GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Llama, and the rest of the frontier model lineup.
LLM Gateway
A unified proxy in front of multiple LLM providers that captures every call, enforces policy, and lets a single application talk to Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Gemini, and local models through one interface.
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key)
A model where users provide their own API keys for AI services (like OpenAI, Anthropic, or other LLM providers) instead of relying on the platform's bundled AI.
Atlas Reasoning Engine
The AI brain inside Agentforce that plans multi-step actions, evaluates options, and decides what to do next — all grounded in your Salesforce data.
Bring Your Own Model in practice
Articles from the Funnelists Team that put this term to work.
