Google and Salesforce expand partnership

Google and Salesforce have expanded their strategic partnership to cover the integration of Google’s Gemini generative AI models with the Salesforce Agentforce platform.

Due to the expanded agreement, Agentforce will be able to utilise Gemini’s multi-model capabilities. This will enable customer service agents using the platform to work with images, audio and video as well as text, and leverage real-time insights searchable through Google Search.

Agentforce users will be able to reference continuously updated data, news, current events and credible citations generated through Grounding with Google Search to help them to deliver more accurate, evidence-backed responses. The new capability is expected to launch within the next few months.

Google’s Gemini AI models will also be available to Agentforce users for prompt building and reasoning. This will enable the platform to support automation of traditionally complex and time consuming manual tasks, the companies said. Examples include insurance customers evaluating the validity of a claim based on photos of the damage and an audio voicemail from a witness. Availability is expected sometime in 2025.

Other planned capabilities include real-time voice translation with sentiment analysis, agent-to-agent intelligent handoffs between virtual agents built on Google Conversational Agents and Agentforce users, and the ability to more easily share information between Gmail and Slack.

The collaboration builds on a partnership, announced in March, that enabled joint customers to combine their data across Google’s BigQuery and the Salesforce Data Cloud.

Srini Tallapragada of Salesforce said the deep integrations at the platform, application and infrastructure layer that will be delivered through the expanded partnership will give joint customers choice in the applications and models they want to use.

“Salesforce offers a complete enterprise-grade agentic AI platform that makes it easy to deploy new capabilities easily and realise business value fast,” he said. “Google Cloud is a pioneer in enterprise agentic AI, offering some of the most powerful, capable models, agents and AI development tools on the planet. Together we are creating the best place for businesses to scale with digital labour.”

Also as part of the partnership, Salesforce’s Agentforce, Data Cloud and Customer 360 apps will run on Google Cloud infrastructure, providing Salesforce with access to new regions and customers with simplified procurement models. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian welcomed the agreement.

“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-optimised infrastructure — with minimal friction,” he said. “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 and data analytics.”

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