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Google Cloud has landed a seven-year, $2.5 billion contract with CRM giant Salesforce, marking a significant expansion of their long-standing partnership. The deal enables Salesforce customers to run its products, including Agentforce AI agents, on Google Cloud infrastructure while introducing a range of new integrations.
One key enhancement is the integration of Google’s Gemini AI into Agentforce, allowing customers to input images, audio, and video prompts for more complex tasks. For instance, an insurance customer could upload damage photos when filing a claim, and the AI agent could help assess their validity.
AI-powered insights and expanded cloud offerings
Salesforce AI agents will gain real-time insights to Google Search via Vertex AI, providing up-to-date insights and citations. This builds on a pre-established connection such as Google BigQuery, which enables AI agents to take action based on large-scale enterprise data.
These capabilities could prove valuable for supply chain management, where AI agents can proactively identify potential disruptions — such as weather conditions or port congestion — while tracking shipments and inventory.
Additionally, Salesforce’s Service Cloud will now integrate with Google’s Customer Engagement Suite, allowing for AI-powered customer service tools such as real-time voice translation and intelligent agent recommendations. All Salesforce products will also be made available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Google Cloud aims to use these integrations to attract Salesforce customers currently using Microsoft products, according to a Bloomberg report. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a press release that “mutual customers” have been asking for a closer collaboration between the two companies.
Salesforce’s cloud strategy and AI computing needs
Last week, reports suggested that Salesforce was in discussion with Microsoft and Oracle, and Google, about a billion-dollar cloud deal to support its AI computing needs; however, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff quickly denied this on X, clarifying that his company had already chosen Google Cloud in 2024.
Salesforce and Google have collaborated for more than 15 years. In 2023, the companies jointly integrated their AI assistants, Google’s Duet AI and Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot, into Slack and Tableau. A Microsoft partnership also seems unlikely, given Benioff’s past criticisms of Microsoft’s Copilot AI.
“Salesforce could host their stuff anywhere,” Kurian told Bloomberg. “But I think they see the quality of our technology.”
AI agents demands for more compute power
Salesforce’s shift toward AI-driven agents is increasing its demand for computing resources. AI agents, which are semi-autonomous generative AI models, can interact with applications and carry out complex tasks in unstructured environments. For example, Salesforce uses AI agents to call sales leads with Agentforce.
Salesforce has been pushing to lead in the AI agent space with new AI agent releases, including Einstein Copilot’s “Actions” and Agentforce 2.0. According to Bloomberg, these advancements are straining Salesforce’s compute capacity, prompting it to seek additional cloud partnerships.
In addition to Google Cloud, Salesforce has relied on Amazon Web Services as a primary cloud provider since 2016, expanding its compute usage with AWS in late 2023. Currently, Salesforce customers can run workloads on Salesforce’s own data centres, AWS, or Alibaba — with Google Cloud soon joining as a fourth option.