Salesforce and Google Cloud have formed a strategic relationship to help organizations use data and AI.
This morning, Google and Salesforce executives stated that the agreement would let enterprises leverage existing data and proprietary machine-learning models to predict client needs. Google’s BigQuery, Salesforce’s Data Cloud, and Vertex AI, Google’s fully managed AI platform, are involved.
“This really allows us to democratize AI so that customers get choice on which AI they want to use,” Salesforce chief product officer David Schmaier told TechCrunch in a phone interview.
Google and Salesforce’s second major alliance in recent years. The 2017 deal focuses on analytics and big data. The corporations increased their data sharing agreement and created AI-powered customer support and marketing capabilities.
Salesforce’s “data company” rebranding makes sense. In recent months, Salesforce has released numerous generative AI tools, including EinsteinGPT, an AI assistant for customer relationship management (CRM) tasks like email writing, and SlackGPT, which answers natural language questions about a company’s Slack content, servers, and channels.
Salesforce is also investing in the productive AI ecosystem, likely looking for the next big thing to add to its product lineup. In March, Salesforce Ventures created a $250 million fund for “responsible” generative AI businesses.
The renewed relationship with Salesforce, which has over 150,000 customers, highlights Google’s big data analytics and AI capabilities.
After its first profitable quarter two months ago, Google Cloud is in a strong position. The company ranks third in U.S. cloud infrastructure behind Amazon and Microsoft.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said, “From our point of view, this partnership brings two very large ecosystems of data together and makes it much simpler and easier for customers to get value.
Google and Salesforce will integrate Data Cloud, a sophisticated data integration layer, with BigQuery to help enterprises develop unified customer profiles. Companies will have access to Google and Salesforce’s platforms and clouds, essentially centralizing their data.
New Data Cloud-Vertex AI connectors will let enterprises use Vertex-trained AI models on Salesforce. Companies may train and retrain models using Salesforce customer data, simplifying model development.
How can firms use new integrations and connectors? Salesforce gave examples in a memo before today’s release.
A fashion retailer might use CRM data like customer purchase history and service interactions and non-CRM data like social media sentiment to create a custom AI model that forecasts a consumer’s likelihood to buy certain clothes. A financial institution might use CRM and non-CRM data with an AI model to predict client spending and investment preferences.
Will Google and Salesforce customers bite? The eternal question. Kurain and Schmaier sounded confident in the new cross-platform offers’ robustness.
“Our general view is, these AI models will get richer and richer and much more sophisticated,” Kurian added. “Productivity and efficiency for workers, and then integrating all the information to make better decisions.”
Google and Salesforce said the Data Cloud and Google Vertex AI connection would be piloted in July 2023 and accessible in October 2023. Data Cloud and BigQuery integration will begin a pilot in October 2023 and GA in February 2024.
