Google Cloud and Salesforce collaborate to strengthen AI offerings

Image credits: Lionel Ng/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Salesforce and Google Cloud are teaming up to help businesses leverage data and AI through a new strategic partnership.

Announced this morning, the partnership will allow companies to use their data alongside customized machine learning models to anticipate the needs of their customers, Google and Salesforce executives said. The tie-in includes products and services including Google’s BigQuery tools, Salesforce Data Cloud, and Vertex AI, Google’s fully managed AI platform.

This really allows us to democratize AI so that customers can choose which AI they want to use, Salesforce chief product officer David Schmaier told TechCrunch in a phone interview.

It is the second major partnership between Google and Salesforce in recent years. The first, signed in 2017, was largely focused on analytics and big data. The companies have subsequently expanded on the original deal, deepening their data-sharing partnerships and building AI-powered customer service experience and marketing tools.

The move makes sense for Salesforce on its journey to reposition itself as a data company. In recent months, Salesforce has introduced new generative AI tools including EinsteinGPT, an AI assistant for customer relationship management (CRM) tasks like email drafting, and SlackGPT, which answers questions in language natural on a company’s Slack content, servers, and channels.

Salesforce is also investing in the broader generative AI ecosystem, no doubt hoping to sniff out the next blockbuster that could bolster its expanding product portfolio. Salesforce Ventures, the company’s corporate investment arm, this March launched a $250 million fund targeting what it calls responsible generative AI startups.

As for Google, the renewed partnership with Salesforce puts its big data analytics and AI services to the fore, which isn’t insignificant considering Salesforce’s customer base of more than 150,000 organizations.

Google Clouds is probably in a strong position, having posted its first profitable quarter just two months ago. At the same time, the company remains third in the US cloud infrastructure market, behind Amazon and Microsoft.

In our view, this partnership brings together two very big data ecosystems and makes it much simpler and easier for customers to get value,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told TechCrunch in an interview.

In terms of what the new strategic partnership will actually accomplish, Google and Salesforce plan to launch an integration between Data Cloud, which is essentially a sophisticated layer of data integration, and BigQuery that will allow companies to more easily create unified customer profiles. . The integration will give companies access to portions of Google and Salesforces platforms and clouds, much as if their data were hosted in one place.

Elsewhere, new connectors between Data Cloud and Vertex AI will allow companies to bring any AI models they’ve trained or fine-tuned at Vertex through the Salesforce platform. Companies will be able to train and retrain models on customer data from within Salesforce, ostensibly streamlining the model development process.

How might companies actually use the new integrations and connectors? Salesforce provided some examples in a memo ahead of today’s announcement.

For example, a fashion retailer could connect CRM data such as customer purchase history and service interactions with non-CRM data, such as social media sentiment, to implement a custom AI model that predicts the probability that customers buy certain types of clothing based on the data. Or a financial institution could combine CRM and non-CRM data with an AI model to anticipate customers’ spending habits and investment preferences.

So, will Google and Salesforce customers really take the bait? This is the perennial question. But Kurain and Schmaier seemed confident in the robustness of the new cross-platform offerings.

Our general view is that these AI models will get richer and much more sophisticated, said Kurian. The result we are trying to achieve is productivity and efficiency for working people and secondly, the integration of all information to make better decisions.

The Data Cloud and Google Vertex AI integration will be piloted starting in July 2023 and generally available in October 2023, Google and Salesforce say. As for the Data Cloud and BigQuery integration, it will enter pilot in October 2023 and GA in February 2024.