Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick, Nick Patience, Dion Hinchcliffe, Ron Westfall, Fernando Montenegro
Publication Date: February 27, 2025
Salesforce and Google have expanded their partnership significantly, with Agentforce gaining access to Gemini models. This collaboration enables agents to utilize images, audio, and video, handling more complex tasks through Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities and extensive context windows. Customers will be able to leverage real-time insights and answers powered by Google Search integrated with Vertex AI. The announcement also noted that Salesforce’s Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360 Apps will operate on Google Cloud infrastructure, offering expanded geographical reach and simplified procurement via the Google Cloud Marketplace. Additionally, Salesforce Service Cloud will integrate closely with Google Customer Engagement Suite, enhancing AI-driven contact center functionalities.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Salesforce announced an expansion to their partnership with Google, under which Agentforce agents will be able to access Google’s Gemini image, audio, and video models.
- Through the partnership with Google, Agentforce agents will be able to handle more complex tasks, and will be able to 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, enabling enhanced AI-enabled contact center capabilities 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.
The News: Salesforce and Google announced a major expansion to their partnership, under which Salesforce’s 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.
The announcement noted that 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.
Furthermore, 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.
Does Salesforce and Google’s Partnership Raise the Bar for AI Agent Capability?
Analyst Take: AI agents are being positioned as the most significant catalyst to driving more efficiency and productivity, across a wide variety of industries, use cases, and roles. As such, leading vendors have recognized the need to clearly illustrate how their particular AI agents will stand out from the crowd.
The announcement between Salesforce, whose CEO Marc Benioff has positioned AI agents as the digital labor platform for enterprises, and Google further strengthens Agentforce as an enterprise-grade, AI agent platform, and also provides Google with a significant chunk of cloud computing revenue.
The integration between Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Customer Engagement Suite provides Google with significantly up-leveled capabilities in the competitive contact center space, which increasingly is seeing deals won or lost based on the vendor’s ability to seamlessly integrate customer, company, and ambient data to generate novel insights that can be used during customer engagements.
New Agentforce Capabilities
Through this partnership, Agentforce agents will be able to access and use Google’s Gemini models for prompt building and reasoning directly within Agentforce. In addition, Agentforce agents will gain additional capabilities through Gemini’s native multimodality, which enables AI to recognize images and detect emotions in voice.
The partnership with Gemini will also help Agentforce agents improve contextual understanding and reasoning, thanks to Gemini’s two million-token context window. This enables agents to retain and reference massive amounts of information, such as entire codebases, years of customer interactions, or product documentation, providing agents with a vast amount of relevant data that can be applied to any interaction.
These advanced capabilities enable the creation of smarter agents that can respond to audio, video, and text, which has major implications for using AI to handle not only routine or low-level tasks, but more complex workflows that require AI to ingest and analyze sentiment, while also providing additional contextual understanding, which will likely help move Agentforce agents appear and function much more naturally and intuitively to customers and workers that use them.
It’s also worth noting that Agentforce will be able to leverage the speed and power provided by Google’s cloud infrastructure. Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), combined with advanced techniques like those used in Google’s NotebookLM, are designed to let Gemini process and understand information, and provide real-time responses even for complex queries. If this capability can be delivered reliably and consistently, it will further elevate the value of Agentforce agents as a viable strategy for increasing productivity and efficiency.
The partnership enhances existing data integration capabilities between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google BigQuery, enabling bi-directional data transfer without relying on CPU processing. This approach preserves enriched metadata, thereby broadening AI-driven insights. Moreover, the partnership offers businesses the flexibility to select AI models and infrastructure, allowing them to create customized AI solutions without being tied to a single provider.
SaaS Providers Should Consider the Bar Raised
This partnership should be considered as a major stake in the ground for Salesforce. Marc Benioff has been touting the superior performance of Agentforce over the past few quarters, but the partnership with Google provides the firepower and infrastructure to ensure that AI agents can be created and deployed with the advanced capabilities and robust infrastructure that will be required to ensure that these work reliably and consistently, even amid massive usage spikes.
We’re still lacking details around how this announcement may impact pricing. Salesforce has touted their per-interaction pricing model, which starts at about $2 per interaction, but the increased functionality provided through this partnership may provide them with an opportunity to generate incremental revenue through an advanced SKU. Of course, it’s also likely that Salesforce will simply position these advanced capabilities as enhancements to its core Agentforce offering, and highlight the new potential benefits that can be achieved above and beyond the previous iteration of Agentforce.
Other vendors will need to quickly take stock of their agent capabilities and infrastructure used to support them. We expect that vendors without a full stack approach (such as Oracle) may be looking to enter into similar partnerships with other cloud vendors, or perhaps with other providers of advanced AI capabilities, in order to match the technological firepower that Salesforce has procured.
Trust as a Key Component of Agentic Workflows
This strategic partnership between Salesforce and Google highlights several interesting aspects in the context of securing AI workloads.
First, as organizations build their strategic AI initiatives using frameworks such as Agentforce, third-party agents will use workload identities with access to sensitive corporate information, which itself is hosted by third parties. This means that the AI governance program that is being put in place will need to accommodate a more complex value chain of entities, particularly in the context of regulatory mandates, including GDPR and the EU AI Act.
The second interesting cybersecurity aspect is that this deal provides further evidence that it will be essential for organizations to have a strong grasp of the data security controls embedded within their strategic provider of AI and cloud services. In this case, the access that Agentforce agents will need to Gemini resources, particularly for corporate data, will be controlled using the concepts that Google Cloud already uses. This means organizations can benefit from having a solid foundation in the trust principles that Google uses, including in areas such as encryption, data residency/sovereignty, and more.
Of note, both Salesforce and Google highlighted the importance of trust in the announcement, spotlighting the use of the Einstein Trust Layer to ensure AI safety.
What to Watch:
- Keep an eye on Salesforce’s pricing and packaging strategy, as there could be an opportunity to either generate incremental revenue through the use of advanced capabilities, or they may choose to simply create more daylight between Agentforce and its competitors.
- Expect to see other SaaS vendors seek out partnership deals that enable them to quickly enhance the functionality of their agent platforms, enabling broader choice in the industry and for IT.
- This move is a direct threat to Microsoft’s full-stack approach, combining Azure with Dynamics365 at the application layer. For CIOs invested in both Salesforce and Google, this enables their preferred choices to work together seamlessly with no manual integration to achieve agentic AI using enterprise data in trusted locations.
- The ability to purchase Salesforce licenses via Google Cloud Marketplace is a disruptor to AWS Marketplace’s revenue stream from Salesforce licenses.
See the complete press release on the partnership between Salesforce and Google on Salesforce’s website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Gemini 2.0, AI Agents, and the Future of IT – A Recap from The CIO Pulse Report
Can SaaS Vendors Deliver Recurring Value via AI Agents?
Salesforce Pitches New Agentforce 2.0 as a Digital Labor Platform
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
Nick is VP and Practice Lead for AI at The Futurum Group. Nick is a thought leader on the development, deployment and adoption of AI - an area he has been researching for 25 years. Prior to Futurum, Nick was a Managing Analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, with responsibility for 451 Research’s coverage of Data, AI, Analytics, Information Security and Risk. Nick became part of S&P Global through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, a pioneering analyst firm Nick co-founded in 1999. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor, known for his expertise in the drivers of AI adoption, industry use cases, and the infrastructure behind its development and deployment. Nick also spent three years as a product marketing lead at Recommind (now part of OpenText), a machine learning-driven eDiscovery software company. Nick is based in London.
Dion Hinchcliffe is a distinguished thought leader, IT expert, and enterprise architect, celebrated for his strategic advisory with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. With over 25 years of experience, Dion works with the leadership teams of top enterprises, as well as leading tech companies, in bridging the gap between business and technology, focusing on enterprise AI, IT management, cloud computing, and digital business. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, industry analyst, and author, known for his insightful and in-depth contributions to digital strategy, IT topics, and digital transformation. Dion’s influence is particularly notable in the CIO community, where he engages actively with CIO roundtables and has been ranked numerous times as one of the top global influencers of Chief Information Officers. He also serves as an executive fellow at the SDA Bocconi Center for Digital Strategies.
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
He is a recognized authority at tracking the evolution of and identifying the key disruptive trends within the service enablement ecosystem, including a wide range of topics across software and services, infrastructure, 5G communications, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics, security, cloud computing, revenue management, and regulatory issues.
Prior to his work with The Futurum Group, Ron worked with GlobalData Technology creating syndicated and custom research across a wide variety of technical fields. His work with Current Analysis focused on the broadband and service provider infrastructure markets.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
Fernando Montenegro serves as the Vice President & Practice Lead for Cybersecurity at The Futurum Group. In this role, he leads the development and execution of the Cybersecurity research agenda, working closely with the team to drive the practice's growth. His research focuses on addressing critical topics in modern cybersecurity. These include the multifaceted role of AI in cybersecurity, strategies for managing an ever-expanding attack surface, and the evolution of cybersecurity architectures toward more platform-oriented solutions.
Before joining The Futurum Group, Fernando held senior industry analyst roles at Omdia, S&P Global, and 451 Research. His career also includes diverse roles in customer support, security, IT operations, professional services, and sales engineering. He has worked with pioneering Internet Service Providers, established security vendors, and startups across North and South America.
Fernando holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and various industry certifications. Although he is originally from Brazil, he has been based in Toronto, Canada, for many years.
