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Google Cloud has landed a seven-year, $2.5 billion contract with CRM big Salesforce, marking a big growth of their long-standing partnership. The deal allows Salesforce clients to run its merchandise, together with Agentforce AI brokers, on Google Cloud infrastructure whereas introducing a variety of recent integrations.
One key enhancement is the combination of Google’s Gemini AI into Agentforce, permitting clients to enter pictures, audio, and video prompts for extra advanced duties. For occasion, an insurance coverage buyer may add harm images when submitting a declare, and the AI agent may assist assess their validity.
AI-powered insights and expanded cloud choices
Salesforce AI brokers will acquire real-time insights to Google Search through Vertex AI, offering up-to-date insights and citations. This builds on a pre-established connection corresponding to Google BigQuery, which allows AI brokers to take motion based mostly on large-scale enterprise knowledge.
These capabilities may show priceless for provide chain administration, the place AI brokers can proactively establish potential disruptions — corresponding to climate circumstances or port congestion — whereas monitoring shipments and stock.
Additionally, Salesforce’s Service Cloud will now combine with Google’s Customer Engagement Suite, permitting for AI-powered customer support instruments corresponding to real-time voice translation and clever agent suggestions. All Salesforce merchandise may even be made out there on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Google Cloud goals to make use of these integrations to draw Salesforce clients presently utilizing Microsoft merchandise, based on a Bloomberg report. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian mentioned in a press launch that “mutual customers” have been asking for a better collaboration between the 2 corporations.
Salesforce’s cloud technique and AI computing wants
Last week, stories instructed that Salesforce was in dialogue with Microsoft and Oracle, and Google, a couple of billion-dollar cloud deal to help its AI computing wants; nevertheless, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff shortly denied this on X, clarifying that his firm had already chosen Google Cloud in 2024.
Salesforce and Google have collaborated for greater than 15 years. In 2023, the businesses collectively built-in their AI assistants, Google’s Duet AI and Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot, into Slack and Tableau. A Microsoft partnership additionally appears unlikely, given Benioff’s previous criticisms of Microsoft’s Copilot AI.
“Salesforce could host their stuff anywhere,” Kurian informed Bloomberg. “But I think they see the quality of our technology.”
AI brokers calls for for extra compute energy
Salesforce’s shift towards AI-driven brokers is rising its demand for computing assets. AI brokers, that are semi-autonomous generative AI fashions, can work together with purposes and perform advanced duties in unstructured environments. For instance, Salesforce makes use of AI brokers to name gross sales leads with Agentforce.
Salesforce has been pushing to steer within the AI agent house with new AI agent releases, together with Einstein Copilot’s “Actions” and Agentforce 2.0. According to Bloomberg, these developments are straining Salesforce’s compute capability, prompting it to hunt extra cloud partnerships.
In addition to Google Cloud, Salesforce has relied on Amazon Web Services as a main cloud supplier since 2016, increasing its compute utilization with AWS in late 2023. Currently, Salesforce clients can run workloads on Salesforce’s personal knowledge centres, AWS, or…
