Salesforce and Google have announced an expansion of their strategic partnership, delivering choice in the models and capabilities businesses use to build and deploy AI-powered agents.
The expanded partnership provides crucial flexibility, empowering customers to develop tailored AI solutions that meet their specific needs, rather than being locked into a single model provider.
Google Cloud is at the forefront of enterprise AI, with millions of developers using its cutting edge Gemini models and AI optimised infrastructure.
This expanded partnership lets Salesforce customers build Agentforce agents with Gemini and deploy Salesforce on Google Cloud. It builds on their existing collaboration, which enables seamless data sharing between Google BigQuery and Salesforce via zero copy technology. This gives businesses the AI, data, and trust they need to integrate autonomous agents into their operations.
“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,” says Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce president and 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 realise 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 labour.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, comments: “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-optimised infrastructure — with minimal friction.
“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.”
Agentic AI isn’t just emerging, it’s already here and represents a $2 trillion market opportunity, according to a study from Salesforce. In fact, 84% of CIOs believe AI will be as significant to businesses as the internet. To fully realise this potential, businesses need an agentic strategy with openness, trust, and choice at the centre.
This includes:
- Data: Highly secure and unified access to all your data, no matter where it resides, with a zero-copy architecture and enriched metadata for deeper insights. This breaks down data silos across platforms so customers don’t have to sacrifice choice for an integrated experience, unlike solutions that hoard data access or require users to cobble together disparate solutions.
- AI: Unparalleled choice and flexibility with leading AI models, including predictive, generative, and multi-modal options. This allows businesses to tailor solutions to their specific needs and avoid being locked on a single provider’s AI capabilities.
- Trust: A multi-layered approach to protect your data and infrastructure with encryption, data residency options, and a choice of infrastructure providers. Additionally, robust guardrails, bias detection, explainability, and toxicity controls are built-in to ensure responsible AI development and deployment.
- Actions: Seamless integration of automation, analytics, and applications across platforms to streamline workflows and drive efficiency across the organization. This allows businesses to maximize the impact of AI agents by connecting them to their existing tools and systems, unlike solutions with limited integrations or closed ecosystems.
Agentforce will be able to leverage 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.
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.
Customers will be able to leverage 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.