Salesforce, Google ink $2.5B deal to bring Gemini to Agentforce

Google's Gemini will be integrated into Agentforce and Salesforce will be available on the Google Cloud Platform as part of a seven-year, $2.5 billion partnership agreement between the two companies.

Salesforce, which relies mainly on AWS for hosting and AI services, unveiled its Agentforce generative AI bot platform at Dreamforce last September. The bot is based on OpenAI's large language models (LLMs). Salesforce quickly upgraded to Agentforce 2.0 late last year, which enabled some agent autonomy and made Slack the nerve center for building and launching AI agents.

The partnership deal with Google will add Gemini services to Agentforce's back end and give Salesforce users the option to run Salesforce Agentforce, Customer 360 CX apps, and Data Cloud on the Google Cloud Platform. While Salesforce users could use Google AI LLMs in a bring-you-own-LLM feature, baking Gemini natively into Salesforce gives users a less steep development curve.

Details of the agreement were first reported by Bloomberg, which also revealed that blue-chip customers Wayfair and Accenture plan to migrate their Salesforce instances to Google Cloud Platform.

The big news, however, is that Gemini will be part of Agentforce, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research firm Valoir.

The Salesforce-Google deal appears to be a hedge Salesforce is making against OpenAI, Wettemann continued. Some LLMs can perform specific tasks better --and in some cases, more efficiently -- than others, and the deal also helps control costs for Salesforce and its customers.

"If I am Microsoft, and OpenAI raises its pricing, does Microsoft have some control over that? Yeah, but not a lot," Wettemann said. "For Salesforce, if OpenAI raises its pricing … they don't have a ton of leverage. I want to have other options -- both for the cloud layer and for the model layer -- that are relatively frictionless."

At the feature level, connecting Gemini to Agentforce will give bots the ability to recognize not only text but also images and audio for content and sentiment analysis. Image-recognition AI, available later this year in Agentforce, will bring immediate utility to processes in certain verticals, Salesforce said, such as auto insurance claims.

The companies also plan to integrate their customer service platforms and services more tightly. Salesforce Service Cloud will feature services from Google's Customer Engagement Suite. New features slated for later this year include Gemini-powered real-time language translation and improved agent-to-agent handoffs across phone and text channels.

Google and Salesforce also said they plan to explore deeper integrations between Slack and Google Workspace to give human and digital agents unified customer data access. Potential features would include connecting Google Drive and Gmail to Slack natively.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.