• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 7, 2023

Google Cloud and Salesforce on Wednesday announced an expanded partnership to help businesses use data and generative artificial intelligence (GAI) to deliver more personalized customer experiences, better understand customer behavior, and run more effective campaigns at a lower cost across marketing, sales, service, and commerce.

Executives in the press briefing held earlier this week declared Salesforce an AI company. “In fact, we’re using the new term, generation AI,” said Michael Affronti, senior vice president and general manager of Commerce Cloud at Salesforce.  “We believe we’re a part of a new generation for users across the world and marketplace. Every company needs to be an AI company.”

The Google Cloud and Salesforce partnership allows companies to use first-party data along with custom machine-learning models to anticipate customer needs.

The deal includes integrations between Salesforce Data Cloud with Google’s BigQuery, a unified platform for training, running, and managing ML models, and Google’s Vertex AI platform, which provides the ability to build machine learning (ML) models or deploy and scale them easily using pre-trained and custom tools.

Two data and AI innovations bring real-time data sharing with enhanced predictive and GAI capabilities.

Some 60% of marketers say GAI will transform their role, but worry about accuracy, according to a study released by Salesforce today. Some 41% find their data too complex and inaccessible to be useful, and 71% believe that GAI lacks human creativity and contextual knowledge.

As a result, 66% percent of marketers say human oversight is needed to successfully use generative AI in their role. 

While marketers are excited about the opportunities of GAI to transform their work, many feel unprepared to take full advantage of it, with 43% saying they don’t know how to get the most value out of the technology, 39% saying they do not know how to safely use it, and 34% don’t know how to effectively use generative AI at work.

Salesforce and Google hope to change that perception. The two companies plan to integrate Salesforce Data Cloud and BigQuery, and between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google Cloud's Vertex AI.

The integration between Data Cloud and Vertex AI will allow companies to bring any trained AI models in Vertex into the Salesforce platform. Companies can train models on customer data from Salesforce.