Why is Salesforce partnering with the biggest names in AI? | MarTech

The tech world is full of seemingly strange partnerships, and some announcements at last week’s Dreamforce conference put that on full display.

Everyone knows that Salesforce wants to be synonymous with AI – and agent AI in particular. It opened Dreamforce with the introduction of Agentforce 360, the latest version of its Agentforce platform.

The good news for Salesforce is that the agentic enterprise the company desperately wants to shape is starting to take shape. But Salesforce can’t expect to be all about its tools.

Partnerships announced at Dreamforce last week bring popular productivity tools (like the Google Workspace apps) and AI-powered tools (like ChatGPT and Gemini) further into the fold.

It’s unlikely that Salesforce can convince people to ditch their familiar tools for Salesforce tools, and the company shouldn’t even try. Not everyone is a Salesforce user.

Salesforce had existing partnerships with OpenAI, Google and AWS. As the future of agents in the enterprise begins to take shape, the companies last week announced expanded partnerships that expand their connections.

Dig Deeper: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Enters the Agent Age

Salesforce and Open AI

Here are some details from the Salesforce OpenAI announcement.

• Agentforce apps will be available in ChatGPT, allowing users to query CRM data and customer conversations or build Tableau visualizations directly in ChatGPT.
• Agentforce product catalogs appear in ChatGPT and support in-app purchases via the Agentic Commerce Protocol and Stripe integration.
• A ChatGPT integration with Slack enables summaries, content authoring, and improved Slack searches via business context.
• OpenAI’s reasoning, voting and multimodal capabilities will be embedded into the Salesforce Agentforce 360 ​​Platform, with OpenAI as a “preferred model” option for agents built in that environment.

Salesforce and Google

This is what Salesforce and Google are working on:

• Integration of Agentforce 360 ​​with Google Workspace, for example CRM apps accessible from Gmail, Sheets, Docs, Drive and Meet.
• Slack’s real-time search API is used to base Gemini responses on an organization’s Slack data, and users can invoke Gemini agents directly in Slack.
• Extensive joint features from Google and Salesforce, such as zero-copy data federation with BigQuery, federated authentication, and Zero Copy with Data 360 and BigQuery.

Salesforce and AWS

The AWS-Salesforce announcement was more technical in nature than the others, but here are some highlights:

• Salesforce Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) can connect to AWS systems like Amazon Redshift without copying data, enabling real-time queries and unified views.
• Native integration between Salesforce Data 360 Clean Rooms and AWS Clean Rooms allows multiple parties to collaborate on insights without exposing raw data, enabling collaborative ad measurement, cross-party analytics, and more.
• Salesforce offerings (e.g. Agentforce, AgentExchange) are available on AWS Marketplace in more than 30 countries, simplifying purchasing, billing, contract management, and deployment.

What does this mean for marketers and MOps professionals?

The agentic enterprise that these companies see as the future of business will rely on a hodgepodge of tools from different vendors. But it takes connective tissue, and they all realize that.

The announcements from OpenAI and Gemini connecting Salesforce tools to Google and ChatGPT platforms mirror announcements earlier this year by HubSpot as it connected to popular LLMs. (These announcements were not without data privacy concerns.)

One of the big questions that remains unanswered is whether all this connective tissue will actually break down the data and organizational silos that plague so many organizations.

In theory, well-connected AI agents could extract data from different parts of the organization, including areas that marketers rarely visit. This is an area that Oracle is focusing on by building agents on top of its Fusion business applications rather than creating another platform.

If this all comes together, one day we may ask, “Where were you when the silos collapsed?” We’re not there yet, but the future looks clearer than it did a year ago.