Agentforce
Salesforce and Google have expanded their partnership to integrate Google’s Gemini AI into Salesforce’s Agentforce platform. The seven-year, $2.5 billion deal allows Salesforce’s core applications – including its CRM and Agentforce AI offerings – to run on Google Cloud with Gemini embedded. This gives enterprises a new choice in advanced AI for customer engagement and is widely seen as a move to challenge Microsoft’s dominance in enterprise AI.
Technical Integration and Gemini’s Capabilities
Gemini, Google’s multi-modal AI model, can process text, images, audio and video, enabling Agentforce to tackle complex tasks with a context window of up to two million tokens. It can also integrate real-time Google Search information via Vertex AI, allowing agents to pull in live insights during conversations. Additionally, Gemini offers advanced reasoning, yielding faster and more context-aware interactions for Salesforce’s autonomous agents.
The partnership brings deeper product integrations. Salesforce Service Cloud will tie into Google’s contact center suite, adding capabilities like real-time language translation, intelligent agent handoffs and AI-driven customer insights to improve support interactions. These new features help break language barriers and streamline service workflows for enterprises.
Salesforce is also extending its platform onto Google’s infrastructure. Agentforce and Salesforce’s Data Cloud and Customer 360 apps will now run natively on Google Cloud – gaining access to more global regions and one-stop deployment via the Google Cloud Marketplace. This multi-cloud alignment enables customers to deploy Salesforce’s AI solutions on Google’s secure, AI-optimized data centers with minimal friction.
Strategic Implications of the Partnership
This move underscores Salesforce’s shift toward a multi-cloud strategy. Salesforce has been a longtime Amazon Web Services customer, but it is now gradually weaning itself off AWS in favor of Google Cloud. By running Salesforce services on Google’s AI-centric infrastructure, customers gain Google’s advanced AI capabilities while avoiding lock-in to a single provider. Salesforce itself highlighted this “crucial flexibility,” noting that businesses can tailor AI solutions to their needs instead of being confined to one vendor’s model.
For Google, landing Salesforce as a cloud client is a major win. It brings a significant enterprise workload onto Google Cloud, helping monetize Google’s AI investments and showcasing its infrastructure in the enterprise market. In turn, Salesforce gains a state-of-the-art AI model to make its Agentforce platform multimodal and more attractive to customers. Early adopters like Wayfair and Accenture are already migrating their Salesforce applications to Google Cloud to capitalize on these combined capabilities.
Competitive Landscape: Countering Microsoft
A key driver for this partnership is the competition with Microsoft in enterprise AI. Microsoft has aggressively integrated its Copilot AI assistant across Office 365, boasting broad adoption among Fortune 500 firms. Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, has openly slammed Microsoft’s AI approach – even calling Copilot “inferior” and noting that many customers are disappointed with its accuracy.
Benioff has not minced words about Microsoft’s strategy. He accuses Microsoft of misleading customers about enterprise AI, arguing that they “were told things about enterprise AI… that are not true”. He contends Microsoft overhyped capabilities like Copilot, which then failed to fully deliver on expectations.
In contrast, Benioff touts Salesforce’s Agentforce agents as deployable in minutes with no training, implying they provide quicker, more reliable value to users. This sharp critique from Salesforce’s chief executive sets a combative tone, reinforcing why Salesforce sought a potent ally in Google to bolster its AI credentials.
By teaming up, Salesforce and Google present a strong alternative to Microsoft’s ecosystem. The alliance combines Salesforce’s strength in CRM and autonomous agents with Google’s AI prowess, aiming to attract businesses that want advanced AI capabilities with greater flexibility than Microsoft’s offering. In doing so, it directly challenges Microsoft’s position and forces rivals to respond with improved AI solutions for enterprises.
Broader Enterprise AI Impact
The Salesforce-Google alliance reflects a broader trend of alliances in enterprise AI, where tech giants combine strengths to deliver more powerful solutions. Rather than relying on one vendor, enterprises increasingly expect interoperability and choice in their AI tools. This partnership shows how a company’s CRM and data can be intertwined with a partner’s AI models and cloud services to achieve outcomes neither could alone. For example, integrating Salesforce customer data with Google’s generative AI in documents is a synergy that would be hard to replicate in a closed ecosystem.
This high-profile collaboration may spur similar deals across the industry as organizations seek the best mix of software and AI capabilities. Ultimately, the Salesforce-Google partnership pushes the enterprise AI market toward a more open, collaborative model, where vendors integrate their strengths to deliver real business value, instead of locking customers into a single AI stack.