Salesforce strikes multibillion-dollar deal to bring its AI agents to Google Cloud – SiliconANGLE

Salesforce Inc. is looking to lessen its reliance on Amazon Web Services Inc. amid its pivot to artificial intelligence agents, signing a massive new $2.5 billion deal with Google Cloud.

The new, seven-year deal, announced today, will enable Salesforce customers to run their Agentforce AI agents and its customer relationship management software on Google’s cloud infrastructure, where they can take advantage of an extensive range of data analytics products, Salesforce said.

The alliance suggests a concerted effort by the two companies to integrate their AI, customer relationship management and big data capabilities, as they push to win over enterprise customers from rivals such as Microsoft Corp.

Large enterprises including Accenture Plc and Wayfair Inc. both said they’re willing to move their Salesforce applications and Agentforce agents to Google’s cloud.

Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian said the partnership means customers will be able to deploy their most critical applications on his company’s AI-optimized cloud 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,” Kurian insisted.

As an example of the advantages the partnership provides, the companies said, a customer could use Google Docs to write a document for a sales lead, then fine-tune the details within that document using Google’s Gemini model, which would, in turn, leverage customer data from Salesforce.

Salesforce made AI agents, which are more advanced AI models that can perform tasks on behalf of users with minimal supervision, the main focus of its AI strategy last year. It’s a move that has been mirrored by a number of its rivals, including Microsoft, ServiceNow Inc., Adobe Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Google itself.

The Salesforce Agentforce platform is the key focus of that strategy, providing tools for customers to create and fine-tune AI agents that can perform tasks for customer support and sales development, among other applications. It provides a significant advantage over alternative agentic AI platforms in that it’s technically feasible, low-risk and easy-to-deploy, said Valoir CEO Rebecca Wettemann.

“Agentforce is really helping customers get over their fear of messing up,” she said. “Nontechnical users can quickly spin up AI agents and test them, and see very quickly the discrepancies in their data that they need to fix, effectively reverse engineering the whole data cleansing process.”

Salesforce is known to be a longtime partner of AWS in the cloud, and in November 2023 it announced it was doubling down on that relationship, with a number of its products being offered in the AWS marketplace.

However, today’s announcement suggests that Salesforce is looking to reduce its reliance on AWS, said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc.

“Salesforce has been slowly weaning itself off its first partner, and for Google this is critical as it needs more workloads from SaaS vendors,” Mueller said. “Google has invested earlier into AI than anyone else and now it needs to monetize that investment.”

Salesforce, on the other hand, needs to make the Agentforce platform multimodal to support its expansion and increase its attractiveness to enterprises, the analyst said.

“It’s great news for their existing and joint customers, as the AI in Agentforce gets better, with more options, and it gets easier for Salesforce customers already on Google Cloud to adopt Agentforce,” Mueller added.

Wettemann said the partnership is critical for Salesforce too, as the company has come to recognize how the costs and capabilities of AI continue to evolve. Simply put, customers want more flexibility, she explained. “Closer links to Google’s Gemini gives Salesforce Agentforce customers more options and less fear about being locked-in,” she said.

As Salesforce was ramping up its Agentforce offering last year, its Chief Executive Marc Benioff stepped up his criticism of Microsoft’s alternative Copilot AI assistants, deriding them as “inferior” products.

“So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft, and copilots, because they aren’t getting the accuracy and the responses they want,” Benioff said in an earnings call in August. “Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI.”

Microsoft’s chief communications officer Frank X. Shaw later hit back, claiming that Benioff’s strategy is “all about marketing” and “less about truth or substance.”

Despite the rocky relationship between the two companies, a report in The Information today claims that Salesforce is said to be holding talks with Microsoft over using some of its cloud capacity, which suggests they might be prepared to bury the hatchet for a while. Salesforce is also reportedly holding discussions with Oracle Corp. about accessing its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.

Meanwhile, Salesforce is expected to announce its latest quarterly financial results on Wednesday, when investors will be eagerly awaiting an update on Agentforce’s progress thus far.

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