Salesforce and Google expand partnership to boost AI-powered customer service

Salesforce and Google have expanded their strategic partnership to provide businesses with greater flexibility in building and deploying AI-powered agents. The partnership empowers customers to develop tailored AI solutions that meet specific needs rather than being tied to a single model provider.

The collaboration is expected to help particularly in areas such as customer service. Some of its highlights include:

• AI agents with multimodal capabilities: The integration of Google’s Gemini models into Salesforce’s Agentforce enhances agents' ability to handle complex tasks across different input formats—whether audio, video, or text.

• Expanded contextual understanding: Gemini enables agents to process and reference large amounts of data, such as years of customer interactions or detailed product documentation. Features like real-time voice translation address language barriers, while tone and audio analysis provide deeper insights into customer sentiment. Agentforce can also leverage real-time insights from Google Search via Vertex AI.

• Enhanced speed and efficiency: Gemini delivers rapid responses for even the most complex queries, significantly reducing response times and operational costs.

• Improved customer service through integrations: The partnership strengthens connections between platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud, Google’s Cloud Engagement Suite, Slack, and Google Workspace. Unified data, streamlined workflows, and advanced agent capabilities enable intelligent agent-to-agent handoffs, improving the management of multi-step customer interactions.

There are several real-world applications of these collaborations. For instance, an insurance company can receive input from diverse sources, including photos of damage and audio voicemail from a witness, which can help the insurance provider deliver better customer experiences by processing all these inputs to assess a claim’s validity. The company can even use text-to-speech to contact the customer with a resolution, streamlining the traditionally lengthy claims process.

Speaking about the expanded partnership, Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce president and chief engineering and customer success officer “We are giving customers a choice in the applications and models they want to use. Salesforce offers a complete enterprise-grade agentic AI platform that makes it easy to deploy new capabilities easily and realise business value fast.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, added, “Salesforce’s selection of Google Cloud as a major infrastructure provider means enterprise customers can now deploy some of their most critical applications on our highly secure, AI-optimised infrastructure—with minimal friction. Our mutual customers have asked us to be able to work more seamlessly across Salesforce and Google Cloud, and this expanded partnership will help them accelerate their AI transformations with agentic AI, state-of-the-art AI models, data analytics, and more.”