Salesforce and Google Bring Gemini to Agentforce, Enable More Customer Choice in Major Partnership Expansion

Business Wire 24-Feb-2025 9:00 AM

•  Agentforce will be able to use Google's Gemini models, allowing agents to work with images, audio, and video, handle more complex tasks using Gemini's multi-modal capabilities and two-million-token context windows, and act using real-time insights and answers grounded in Google Search with Vertex AI.
• Salesforce Service Cloud will become more tightly integrated with Google Customer Engagement Suite, bringing enhanced AI-enabled contact center capabilities including real-time voice translation, intelligent agent-to-agent handoffs, personalized agent recommendations, and AI-driven conversational insights across all channels.
• Salesforce's Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360 Apps will run on Google Cloud infrastructure, with access to new regions and simplified procurement through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Salesforce and Google today announced a major expansion of their strategic partnership, delivering choice in the models and capabilities businesses use to build and deploy AI-powered agents. In today's constantly evolving AI landscape, innovations like autonomous agents are emerging so quickly that businesses struggle to keep pace. This expanded partnership provides crucial flexibility, empowering customers to develop tailored AI solutions that meet their specific needs, rather than being locked into a single model provider.

Google Cloud is at the forefront of enterprise AI innovation with millions of developers building with Google's cutting-edge Gemini models and on Google Cloud's AI-optimized infrastructure. This expanded partnership will empower Salesforce customers to build Agentforce agents using Gemini and to deploy Salesforce on Google Cloud. This is an expansion of the existing partnership that allows customers to use data from Data Cloud and Google BigQuery bi-directionally via zero copy technology — further equipping customers with the data, AI, trust, and actions they need to bring autonomous agents into their businesses.

"Through our expanded partnership with Google Cloud and deep integrations at the platform, application, and infrastructure layer, we're giving customers choice in the applications and models they want to use," said Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce President & Chief Engineering and Customer Success Officer. "Salesforce offers a complete enterprise-grade agentic AI platform that makes it easy to deploy new capabilities easily and realize business value fast. 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 labor."

"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," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. "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."

"At Wayfair, we're deeply committed to using data and AI to create exceptional customer experiences," said Fiona Tan, CTO of Wayfair. "The Salesforce and Google Cloud partnership, particularly the availability of Salesforce on Google Cloud infrastructure and the integration of Agentforce and Gemini, offers powerful new capabilities to personalize interactions and empower our teams to better serve our customers."

Why it matters:

Agentic AI isn't just emerging; it's already here and represents a $2 trillion market opportunity, according to a study from Salesforce. In fact, 84% of CIOs believe AI will be as significant to businesses as the internet. To fully realize this potential, businesses need an agentic strategy with openness, trust, and choice at the center.

This includes:

• Data: Highly secure and unified access to all your data, no matter where it resides, with a zero-copy architecture and enriched metadata for deeper insights. This breaks down data silos across platforms so customers don't have to sacrifice choice for an integrated experience, unlike solutions that hoard data access or require users to cobble together disparate solutions.
• AI: Unparalleled choice and flexibility with leading AI models, including predictive, generative, and multi-modal options. This allows businesses to tailor solutions to their specific needs and avoid being locked into a single provider's AI capabilities.
• Trust: A multi-layered approach to protect your data and infrastructure with encryption, data residency options, and a choice of infrastructure providers. Additionally, robust guardrails, bias detection, explainability, and toxicity controls are built-in to ensure responsible AI development and deployment.
• Actions: Seamless integration of automation, analytics, and applications across platforms to streamline workflows and drive efficiency across the organization. This allows businesses to maximize the impact of AI agents by connecting them to their existing tools and systems, unlike solutions with limited integrations or closed ecosystems.

Data: Real-Time Responses in Agentforce with Google Search

Agentforce will be able to use Grounding with Google Search through Vertex AI, building on the secure data foundation established through the zero copy partnership between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google BigQuery. This integration empowers Agentforce agents with the ability to reference up-to-the-minute data, news, current events, and credible citations, substantially enhancing their contextual awareness and ability to deliver accurate, evidence-backed responses.

For example, in supply chain management and logistics, an agent built with Agentforce could track shipments and monitor inventory levels in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and proactively identify potential disruptions using real-time data from Google Search, including weather conditions, port congestion, and geopolitical events. Availability is expected in the coming months.

AI: Unlocking the Power of Choice and Flexibility with Gemini and Agentforce

Businesses need the freedom to choose the best models for their needs rather than be locked into one vendor. In 2025, Google's Gemini models will also be available for prompt building and reasoning directly within Agentforce.

With Gemini and Agentforce, businesses will benefit from:

• Agents with multi-modal capabilities: Gemini's native multimodality lets agents "see" and interpret the world, enabling AI to recognize images (like error codes) and detect emotions in voice. Integrating this into Agentforce creates smarter agents that respond to audio, video, and text.
• Expanded contextual understanding and reasoning: Gemini's 2 million-token context window lets agents retain and reference massive amounts of information, like entire codebases, years of customer interactions, or product documentation.
• Increased speed and efficiency: Google's Tensor processing Units (TPUs), combined with advanced techniques like those used in Google's NotebookLM, enable Gemini to process and understand information with exceptional speed and efficiency, delivering real-time responses even for complex queries. This translates to faster response times and reduced operational costs.

For example, an insurance customer can submit a claim with photos of the damage and an audio voicemail from a witness. Agentforce, using Gemini, can then help the insurance provider deliver better customer experiences by processing all these inputs, assessing the claim's validity, and even using text-to-speech to contact the customer with a resolution, streamlining the traditionally lengthy claims process. Availability is expected this year.

Trust: Salesforce Platform deployed on Google Cloud

Customers will be able to use Salesforce's unified platform (Agentforce, Data Cloud, Customer 360) on Google Cloud's highly secure, AI-optimized infrastructure, benefiting from features like dynamic grounding, zero data retention, and toxicity detection provided by the Einstein Trust Layer.

Once Salesforce products are available on Google Cloud, customers will also have the ability to procure Salesforce offerings through the Google Cloud Marketplace, opening up new possibilities for global businesses to optimize their investments across Salesforce and Google Cloud and benefiting thousands of existing joint customers.

Action: Enhanced Employee Productivity and Customer Service with AI-Powered Integrations

Millions use Salesforce and Google Cloud daily. This partnership prioritizes choice and flexibility, enabling seamless cross-platform work. New and deeper connections between platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Cloud's Customer Engagement Suite, as well as Slack and Google Workspace, will empower AI agents and service representatives with unified data access, streamlined workflows, and advanced AI capabilities, regardless of platform.

Salesforce and Google Cloud are deeply integrating their customer service platforms — Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Cloud's Customer Engagement Suite — to create a seamless and intelligent support experience. Expected later this year, this unified approach empowers AI agents in Service Cloud with:

• Real-time Voice Translation and Sentiment Analysis: Google Cloud AI in Service Cloud will enable real-time voice translation breaking down language barriers. New agent assist features within the Service Cloud desktop will analyze tone of voice and audio cues for deeper customer sentiment understanding.
• Agent-to-Agent Intelligent Handoffs: Across all channels, virtual agents built on Google Conversational Agents will be able to seamlessly connect with Agentforce in Service Cloud for more efficient management of multi-step, customer interactions.

Salesforce and Google Cloud are also exploring deeper integrations between Slack and Google Workspace, boosting productivity and creating a more cohesive digital workspace for teams and organizations. The companies are currently exploring use cases such as:

• The ability for users to use enterprise search in Slack to access and act on files in Google Drive.
• The ability to more easily share information between Gmail and Slack, enhancing communication and knowledge sharing.

The result is a more connected and productive work environment, where businesses can choose the best tools for their needs from employee productivity to customer service while benefiting from a seamless and intelligent workflow across platforms.

Expanding Partnership Capabilities and Integrations

This partnership goes beyond core product integrations to deliver a more connected and intelligent data foundation for businesses. This is just the beginning; Salesforce and Google Cloud are committed to ongoing innovation and deeper collaboration to empower businesses with even more powerful solutions. Expected availability throughout 2025.

• Deeper integrations across Data Cloud, BigQuery, and Cortex Framework will make it easier than ever for customers to securely ground their AI agents in all of their enterprise data.
• New native Tableau, Looker, and BigQuery integration will allow customers to manage and visualize business data across all platforms in one single UI with standardized business logic and data definitions.

About Salesforce

Salesforce helps organizations of any size reimagine their business with AI. Agentforce — the first digital labor solution for enterprises — seamlessly integrates with Customer 360 applications, Data Cloud, and Einstein AI to create a limitless workforce, bringing humans and agents together to deliver customer success on a single, trusted platform.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

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