Salesforce Adds AIforce Plus Google Cloud, AWS, Nvidia, and More

Bob Evans (0:00)

Hello, my friends, welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. Last week at Salesforce's big annual event, Dreamforce, there was a huge launch of some interesting, powerful, important new technologies, but I think equally important was the heightened partnerships formed between Salesforce and some real powerhouses in the industry, including Google Cloud, AWS, Nvidia, Anthropic and others. And I think these partnerships in the age of AI are becoming more significant, more vital for customers than ever before. Now, early in his two-hour keynote, Marc Benioff said, the arrival of our new AIforce UI changes everything. Now, lots of things are changing to begin with. I think AIforce is going to have a big impact. It is going to change some stuff, but it's also going to change in this sense of everything changing.

No one company can handle all of those changes. I think the corresponding expansion of partnerships that Salesforce undertook with these other great companies here is a sign now that customers want the simplicity, speed, wide-ranging, end-to-end solutions that are going to require all of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies to continue to be as aggressive as possible and expansive and open-minded in the sort of partnerships they form.

So again, I think my point here, the new technology, but these partnerships, the capabilities those unlock for customers, how much they can reduce migrations and integrations, the complexity, the contractual issues that go back and forth, the sense of who's responsible for what. I think these are enormously important. I wanted to touch on some of the key outcomes of these different partnerships that came up here at Dreamforce. So with Google Cloud, the heart of this is really Gemini Enterprise, the integration, the models being used there, tighter integration with Salesforce's data and applications, and Agentforce really going to lead to some powerful new outcomes for customers. With AWS, again, it's wide-ranging. They've had a partnership for a long time. Good to see here in both of these cases with these hyperscalers, that the expansions include what's going on with Cloud infrastructure, but they're also much broader than that. It isn't just all about what they've done before, it's also opened the door to new things here in the AI revolution. With Nvidia, and Benioff talked with CEO Jensen Huang, who showed up there at Dreamforce, and they talked about how with Nvidia's Nemotron, they're now developing data at that level in the chips, new reasoning capabilities that's going to make the data more trustworthy, more capable, drive greater insights for customers. The Anthropic thing with Cloudforce, I talked about a week or so ago, and I think that that was really a brilliant move by Benioff.

Instead of him and Salesforce saying, we can handle all of this, they enlisted Anthropic and Claude to be able to come in and let customers do more immediately with these new technologies. In fact, Benioff at the Dreamforce keynote went into some detail about how there were a lot of insights, there was a lot of data, there's a lot of context, a lot of metadata, a lot of the regulatory issues, a lot of governance issues all caught up within Salesforce systems that could not be unleashed. So it was an admission by Benioff that Salesforce can do a lot of this stuff, it can't do all of it. This partnership, he said, is going to unleash a lot of new insights and capabilities that were never possible before. I think that it's exactly that outcome that customers are looking for here. It's not just the AI capabilities that any one of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies can deliver, but it's that plus the extended and broad and deep and end-to-end capabilities that the partners can bring to bear as well. That is going to be, I think, the defining foundation for how these Cloud Wars Top 10 companies move more aggressively into the future, being able to offer more and more to customers than any one of those companies could offer individually. Got a detailed article about this with lots of interesting comments in it and perspectives. That will be up on cloudwars.com later this morning. Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.