Salesforce Partners with Google Cloud in $2.5 Billion Deal to Reduce AWS Reliance

Salesforce has signed a seven-year partnership agreement with Google Cloud, valued at up to $2.5 billion. Under this agreement, Salesforce customers will be able to run their Agentforce AI agents and CRM software on Google Cloud's infrastructure, leveraging a suite of data analytics products offered by Google Cloud.

This collaboration marks a joint effort between the two companies in integrating capabilities within the fields of AI, customer relationship management, and big data. The aim is to compete with rivals like Microsoft for enterprise clients. Major enterprises such as Accenture and Wayfair have expressed interest in migrating their Salesforce applications and Agentforce agents to Google Cloud.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, stated that this partnership will enable customers to collaborate more smoothly between Salesforce and Google Cloud, deploying their most critical applications on Google's AI-optimized cloud infrastructure. He said, "Our shared customers have been asking us to deliver seamless collaboration between Salesforce and Google Cloud, and this expanded partnership will help them accelerate their AI transformation through Agentforce AI, advanced AI models, and data analytics."

One of the benefits of this collaboration is that customers can use Google Docs to write lead documents and refine details within the document using Google’s Gemini model, which will leverage customer data from Salesforce.

Last year, Salesforce positioned AI agents as the cornerstone of its AI strategy, representing a more sophisticated AI model capable of performing tasks with minimal supervision. Competitors such as Microsoft, ServiceNow, Adobe, Cisco, and Google have adopted similar strategies.

The Agentforce platform is central to Salesforce’s strategy, providing tools for customers to create and customize AI agents that can handle tasks like customer support and sales development. Compared to other solutions that require significant technical expertise, Agentforce offers a technically feasible, low-risk, and easy-to-deploy approach for non-technical users to rapidly build and test AI agents, quickly uncover data discrepancies, and effectively reverse-engineer the entire data cleaning process.

According to Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, while Salesforce has long been a partner with AWS and strengthened this relationship in November 2023, this announcement signals Salesforce's efforts to reduce its reliance on AWS. For Google, this partnership is crucial as it seeks to secure more workloads from SaaS providers.

At the same time, Salesforce needs to make its Agentforce platform multimodal to support its expansion and increase its appeal to enterprises. Mueller noted, "It’s good news for existing and shared customers because Agentforce’s AI will improve, offer more options, and Salesforce customers already using Google Cloud will find it easier to adopt Agentforce."

As Salesforce enhanced its Agentforce product last year, CEO Marc Benioff also stepped up his criticism of Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, calling it a "subpar" product. However, Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, later rebutted, describing Benioff’s strategy as “all marketing spin” with little connection to truth or substance.

Despite the tension between the two companies, reports suggest Salesforce is in talks with Microsoft about utilizing some of its cloud capacity, potentially indicating a temporary truce. Additionally, Salesforce is discussing access to Oracle’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.

Salesforce is expected to announce its latest quarterly financial results on Wednesday, with investors closely watching the progress of Agentforce.