Salesforce Inc. on Monday signed a $2.5 billion, seven-year agreement with Google Cloud that would allow Salesforce customers to run its Agentforce autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, customer-management software and data cloud products on Google Cloud.
The sweeping alliance is part of a larger effort by the two companies to integrate their AI and CRM capabilities and peel corporate customers away from rival Microsoft Corp.’s AI and productivity products.
Wayfair and Accenture are among the large customers moving their Salesforce applications to Google Cloud.
“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-optimized infrastructure – with minimal friction,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement announcing the partnership.
“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 said.
The combined Salesforce-Google Cloud technology, for example, will let a corporate customer use Google Workspace to write a document for a sales prospect, and then fine-tune details in the document from Salesforce’s customer data via Google’s Gemini AI model, Kurian told Bloomberg in an interview.
Salesforce, which leans on Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud services, abruptly pivoted its AI strategy to focus on AI agents last year – as did Microsoft, Google, ServiceNow Inc., Adobe Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., and others.
Salesforce’s Agentforce line is a set of tools to handle tasks such as customer support and sales development independent of human supervision. The tools, which are more sophisticated than typical applications, require more cloud-computing capacity.
As Salesforce rolls out Agentforce, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a frequent critic of Microsoft, has ratcheted up the rhetoric and chided Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistants as inferior products. “When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing,” Benioff wrote on social media platform X in October.
Benioff’s jab prompted a rebuke from Microsoft spokesman Frank X. Shaw, who called Benioff’s strategy “all about marketing, less about truth or substance.”
Salesforce, which is scheduled to report quarterly results on Wednesday, is poised to sign “thousands” of Agentforce deals in the current fiscal quarter, Benioff said.
