Google has reportedly entered a multibillion-dollar, seven-year cloud agreement with Salesforce. According to a report in Bloomberg, Salesforce has signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, part of a larger effort to combine forces and attract corporate customers currently using Microsoft’s productivity and artificial intelligence products.
Incidentally, Salesforce is the technology giant whose CEO Marc Benioff has publicly made fun of Microsoft. In October 2024, Benioff said in an interview to Business Insider that Microsoft has really disappointed so many of our customers. “They’ve really done it by delivering a level of hype around their AI solutions,” he added. In another public jab at Microsoft, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote on Twitter, “When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing.” To this, Microsoft’s public relations chief Frank Shaw fired back, describing Benioff’s strategy as “all about marketing, less about truth or substance.”
Google-Salesforce Cloud partnership
Coming back to the Salesforce partnership with Google, it is said to reflect a broader trend of tech giants forming alliances to offer comprehensive AI-powered solutions. Google aims to leverage Salesforce’s market-leading customer relationship management (CRM) software to gain ground against Microsoft, which has an early lead in enterprise generative AI. The deal allows Salesforce customers to run their critical software, including customer-management tools, Agentforce AI assistants, and Data Cloud products, on Google Cloud. This marks a significant shift for Salesforce, which primarily utilizes Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.
The collaboration will enable seamless integration, allowing customers to use Google Workspace, Salesforce data, and Google’s Gemini AI to streamline tasks like creating sales proposals. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian emphasized the existing overlap in clients and the demand for deeper product integration.
Salesforce’s shift towards AI agents, capable of automated tasks, necessitates increased cloud computing capacity, making the Google partnership crucial. Companies like Wayfair and Accenture are already planning to migrate their Salesforce applications to Google Cloud. Additionally, Salesforce will integrate Google’s Gemini models into its Agentforce platform.
Salesforce CEO called Microsoft Co-Pilot huge disaster
In January this year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, said in a podcast, “This Copilot thing has been a huge disaster for them from a branding and validation standpoint. Customers don’t look at them and don’t take them seriously in AI.” He said this in response to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comments during a podcast that traditional SaaS companies will collapse in the AI agent era. “I think the notion that business applications exist—that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right, in the agent era. Because if you think about it, right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic,” he said, taking an indirect dig at Salesforce.