Salesforce and Google announced a major expansion of their partnership, one that sees Google’s Gemini integrated into Salesforce’s Agentforce.
Salesforce unveiled Agentforce in September 2024, billing it as “the Third Wave of AI” and “what AI was meant to be.” CEO Marc Benioff has continued to tout Agentforce, saying it blows away competing products, such as Microsoft’s Copilot.
In a surprise move, the two companies are significantly expanding their partnership, with Salesforce now available on Google Cloud and Agentforce tapping into the power of Gemini, giving customers the ability to create Gemini-based Agentforce agents.
“Through our expanded partnership with Google Cloud and deep integrations at the platform, application, and infrastructure layer, we’re giving customers choice in the applications and models they want to use,” said Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce President & Chief Engineering and Customer Success Officer. “Salesforce offers a complete enterprise-grade agentic AI platform that makes it easy to deploy new capabilities easily and realize business value fast. Google Cloud is a pioneer in enterprise agentic AI, offering some of the most powerful, capable models, agents, and AI development tools on the planet. Together we are creating the best place for businesses to scale with digital labor.”
“Salesforce’s selection of Google Cloud as a major infrastructure provider means enterprise customers can now deploy some of their most critical applications on our highly secure, AI-optimized infrastructure — with minimal friction,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Our mutual customers have asked us to be able to work more seamlessly across Salesforce and Google Cloud, and this expanded partnership will help them accelerate their AI transformations with agentic AI, state-of-the-art AI models, data analytics, and more.”
The two companies went on the describe the benefits of the partnership to customers.
Agentforce will be able to use Grounding with Google Search through Vertex AI, building on the secure data foundation established through the zero copy partnership between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google BigQuery. This integration empowers Agentforce agents with the ability to reference up-to-the-minute data, news, current events, and credible citations, substantially enhancing their contextual awareness and ability to deliver accurate, evidence-backed responses.
For example, in supply chain management and logistics, an agent built with Agentforce could track shipments and monitor inventory levels in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and proactively identify potential disruptions using real-time data from Google Search, including weather conditions, port congestion, and geopolitical events. Availability is expected in the coming months.
With Gemini and Agentforce, businesses will benefit from:
- Agents with multi-modal capabilities: Gemini’s native multimodality lets agents “see” and interpret the world, enabling AI to recognize images (like error codes) and detect emotions in voice. Integrating this into Agentforce creates smarter agents that respond to audio, video, and text.
- Expanded contextual understanding and reasoning: Gemini’s 2 million-token context window lets agents retain and reference massive amounts of information, like entire codebases, years of customer interactions, or product documentation.
- Increased speed and efficiency: Google’s Tensor processing Units (TPUs), combined with advanced techniques like those used in Google’s NotebookLM, enable Gemini to process and understand information with exceptional speed and efficiency, delivering real-time responses even for complex queries. This translates to faster response times and reduced operational costs.
Salesforce on Google Cloud will also provide customers with the benefits of the third-largest cloud provider, one that has made AI development front and center.
Customers will be able to use Salesforce’s unified platform (Agentforce, Data Cloud, Customer 360) on Google Cloud’s highly secure, AI-optimized infrastructure, benefiting from features like dynamic grounding, zero data retention, and toxicity detection provided by the Einstein Trust Layer.
Once Salesforce products are available on Google Cloud, customers will also have the ability to procure Salesforce offerings through the Google Cloud Marketplace, opening up new possibilities for global businesses to optimize their investments across Salesforce and Google Cloud and benefitting thousands of existing joint customers.
The companies emphasize that the partnership goes beyond the individual capabilities of either platform, providing customers with a value proposition that is greater than the sum of its parts.
This partnership goes beyond core product integrations to deliver a more connected and intelligent data foundation for businesses. This is just the beginning; Salesforce and Google Cloud are committed to ongoing innovation and deeper collaboration to empower businesses with even more powerful solutions. Expected availability throughout 2025.
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 and data definitions.
Google’s Growing Influence In AI
Despite being taken by surprise when OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene, Google has made significant progress in its efforts to close the gap. Not only has the company delivered a competitive AI model in Gemini, but it is striking important deals that will see Gemini gain important mindshare among users.
Recent reports indicate Gemini will soon join ChatGPT as one of the available AI models in Apple Intelligence, potentially giving it important market share among home users and consumers. With the Salesforce integration, Gemini is will gain important market share in the enterprise.
While there’s no doubt Google was caught flatfooted in the AI race, the company has quickly demonstrated its ability to compete with the best the AI industry has to offer. Inking critical partnerships, such as with Apple and Salesforce, will go a long way toward solidifying its position.
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