Salesforce customers will be able to run the company’s full software suite – including Agentforce, Data Cloud, Customer 360 – on Google Cloud infrastructure after the two companies signed a $2.5 billion deal.
A press release is clear on the main focus of the partnership: The word “agent” appears no fewer than 47 times (17 of them being references to Salesforce’s “Agentforce”, 18 of them to “agents”, 5 of them to “agentic”)
For all Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s persistent sniping at Microsoft over Copilot, it is clear that connecting Salesforce data with hyperscaler-hosted AI models is a priority for the company. (The deal follows a 2023 agreement with AWS that enabled Salesforce users to connect their applications and data with the Amazon Bedrock managed AI service.)
See also: Google Cloud's Matt Renner: “Half of all AI PoCs are just a bad idea"
It also gives more flexibility on hosting: Salesforce customers currently have the choice of running workloads on its “proprietary” data centers, AWS, or Alibaba. They will now be able to choose GCP too.
Salesforce’s “Agentforce” platform for building AI agents will also be able to tap Gemini models, “allowing agents to work with images, audio, and video, handle more complex tasks using Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities and two-million-token context windows, and act using real-time insights and answers grounded in Google Search with Vertex AI,” they said.
The partnership means that customers will be able to use Google Workspace to write sales proposals, pull details from Salesforce’s customer data and “fine-tune the proposal using information from Google’s Gemini AI model,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Bloomberg: “Salesforce “could host their stuff anywhere,” Kurian added in an interview. “But I think they see the quality of our technology.”
Salesforce and Google Cloud are “also exploring deeper integrations between Slack and Google Workspace” they said on February 24.
The two did not share further details on these proposed integrations.
See also: Google Cloud says AI demand greater than its capacity - vows $75b CapEx boost
Among other elements of the partnership:
- “Deeper integrations across Data Cloud, BigQuery, and Cortex Framework will make it easier than ever for customers to securely ground their AI agents in all of their enterprise data.
- “New native Tableau, Looker, and BigQuery integration will allow customers to manage and visualize business data across all platforms in one single UI with standardized business logic
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud added. “This expanded partnership will help [customers] accelerate their AI transformations with agentic AI, state-of-the-art AI models, data analytics, and more.”
Froth going out of the AI market? Not here it's not.
