Heroku AI: Managed Inference and Agents is now Generally Available

Many of the most exciting experiences we’re beginning to rely on every day are powered by AI; whether it’s conversational assistants, personalized recommendations or code generation, these experiences are powered by inference systems and intelligent agents. Behind the scenes, developers offload complex decisions, automate tasks, and compose intelligent applications using large language models and tool execution flows. Together, these AI-powered primitives are becoming a key complement to traditional application development, enabling a new wave of developer capabilities.

At Salesforce, we are helping our customers bring their agentic strategy to life with Heroku, Agentforce, and Data Cloud. These powerful products allow anyone in the company, from business analysts to developers to build robust, custom agents that can transform their business. Behind the scenes, developers offload complex decisions, automate tasks, and compose intelligent applications using large language models and tool execution flows. Together, these AI-powered primitives are becoming a key complement to traditional application development, enabling a new wave of developer capabilities.

Heroku Managed Inference and Agents bring together a set of powerful primitives that make it simple for developers to build, scale, and operate AI-powered features and applications, without the heavy lifting of managing their own AI infrastructure. With access to leading models from top providers and elegant primitives for building agents that can reason, act, and call tools, developers can focus on delivering differentiated experiences for their users, rather than wrangling inference infrastructure or orchestration logic.

Managed Inference for simplified AI integration

Managed Inference provides ready-to-use access to a curated set of powerful AI models, chosen for their generative power and performance, optimized for ease of use and efficacy in the domains our customers need most. Whether you’re looking to generate text, classify content, summarize documents, or build intelligent workflows, you can now bring AI to your Heroku apps in seconds.

Getting started is as easy as attaching the Heroku Managed Inference and Agents add-on to your app or running: heroku ai:models:create

Agents with Model Context Protocol

Extend Managed Inference with an elegant set of primitives and operations, allowing developers to create agents that can execute code in Heroku’s trusted Dynos, as well as call tools and application logic. These capabilities allow agents to act on behalf of the customer, and to extend both application logic and platform capabilities. Allowing developers to interleave application code, calls to AI, execute logic created by AI, and use of tools, all within the programmatic context. Heroku Managed Inference and Agents can now do more than just generate, it can reason, act, and build by adapting to context, and evolving with your users’ needs.

Heroku Managed Inference and Agents uses the Model Context protocol (MCP) to give your agents new capabilities. MCP helps you build agents and complex workflows by standardizing the way you can provide context and integrate tools. This means you can expose your app’s logic, APIs or custom tools to agents such as Agentforce, Claude or Cursor with custom code.

Heroku Managed Inference and Agents currently supports STDIO MCP servers. Attaching your MCP servers is as simple as attaching your add-on to your Heroku app which contains the MCP server. We are actively developing platform capabilities to support remote MCP servers hosted on heroku, which will feature OAuth integration and buildpack capabilities.

What’s next

Heroku Managed Inference and Agents marks a major milestone on our journey to provide AI-native capabilities on the platform and we’ve designed it with the graceful developer and operator experiences you’ve come to expect. Combined with MCP Server support, AppLink for Agentforce integration, and an evolving selection of curated models and tools, developers will be able to rapidly integrate the latest AI advancements and create next-generation, intelligent user experiences.

Again, to get started, provision Managed Inference and Agents from Heroku Elements or via the command line. We are excited to see what you build with Heroku Managed Inference and Agents! Attend our webinar on May 28 to see a demo and get your questions answered!

To learn more about Heroku AI, check out our Dev Center docs and try it out for yourself.

Interested in unlocking the full potential of your AI agents? Read Heroku AI: Build and Deploy Enterprise Grade MCP Servers.

Stay tuned for more — we’re just getting started.