In an expansion of their existing strategic partnership, Salesforce and Google have entered into a seven-year, $2.5 billion deal that will allow Salesforce customers to build Agentforce agents using Gemini and to deploy Salesforce on Google Cloud. The companies plan to more tightly integrate connections between platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite, as well as Slack and Google Workspace, “empowering AI agents and service representatives with unified data access, streamlined workflows, and advanced AI capabilities, regardless of platform,” the companies said.

Salesforce has relied mainly on AWS for hosting and AI, but SiliconANGLE says this deal indicates the company is “looking to lessen its reliance” on that cloud giant.

TechTarget, notes that “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.”

In addition, “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,” says TechTarget, one of the outlets to report deal terms.

TechRadar emphasized the importance of giving customers choice as to which models they used, “flexibility [that] should in theory prevent them from seeking alternative solutions, keeping them spending their money with Salesforce.”

Deeper integrations across Google’s 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,” Salesforce explained in a press release.

Through Google’s Vertex AI, Salesforce customers will be able to access grounding with Google Search, which provides “up-to-the-minute data, news, current events, and credible citations.”

The agreement “suggests a concerted effort by the two companies to integrate their AI, customer relationship management and big data capabilities, as they push to win over enterprise customers from rivals such as Microsoft,” writes SiliconANGLE.

TechRadar points out that “the news comes during the emergence of agentic AI, a sector that’s estimated to be worth $2 trillion,” at a time when “84 percent of CIOs believe artificial intelligence will be as significant as the Internet.”