Why is Salesforce partnering with the biggest names in AI?

The tech world is full of what appear to be odd partnerships, and some of the announcements at last week’s Dreamforce conference put that on full display. 

Everyone knows Salesforce wants to be synonymous with AI — and agentic 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 wants very badly to take shape is starting to form. But Salesforce can’t expect it to revolve around its tools alone.

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

It’s unlikely Salesforce can convince people to abandon their familiar tools for Salesforce tools, nor should it 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 increase their connections.

Dig deeper: Salesforce Marketing Cloud enters the agentic era

Salesforce and OpenAI

Here are some of the details from the Salesforce-OpenAI announcement. 

• Agentforce apps will be available in ChatGPT, allowing users to query CRM data, customer conversations or build Tableau visualizations directly in ChatGPT.
• Product catalogs from Agentforce will appear in ChatGPT and support in-app purchases via the Agentic Commerce Protocol and Stripe integration. 
• A ChatGPT integration with Slack will enable summarization, content drafting and improved Slack search via enterprise context. 
• OpenAI’s reasoning, voice and multimodal capabilities will be embedded in the Salesforce Agentforce 360 Platform, with OpenAI as a “preferred model” option for agents built in that environment.

Salesforce and Google

Here’s 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 ground Gemini responses in an organization’s Slack data, and users can invoke Gemini agents directly in Slack.
• Expanded Google-Salesforce joint features, 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 of the 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 joint advertising measurement, cross-party analytics and more.
• Salesforce offerings (such as Agentforce, AgentExchange) are available on AWS Marketplace in more than 30 countries, simplifying procurement, billing, contract management and deployment. 

What does this mean for marketers and MOps pros?

The agentic enterprise these companies see as the future of business will rely on a hodgepodge of tools from a variety of vendors. But it’s going to need connective tissue, and they all realize it.

The OpenAI and Gemini announcements connecting Salesforce tools to Google and ChatGPT platforms echo announcements earlier this year by HubSpot when it connected to popular LLMs. (Those announcements were not without concern over data privacy.)

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

In theory, well-connected AI agents could uncover data from various parts of the organization – including areas where marketers rarely tread. This is a point Oracle is focusing on by building agents on top of its Fusion business applications instead of creating another platform.

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