The collaboration will enhance Vodacom core solutions and establish a powerful platform for creating new, disruptive products and services specifically tailored for the African market.

Under the terms of the collaboration, Vodacom will harness the capabilities of Google Cloud‘s secure, scalable infrastructure to unify its vast data assets, and then apply generative AI models, including Gemini, Veo, and Imagen, across its business. This will result in improved operational efficiencies for Vodacom and also deliver new AI-powered services for African consumers.

“This collaboration is more than a technology upgrade; it is a deep commitment to Africa’s digital revolution,” said Shameel Joosub, CEO of Vodacom. “Integrating Google Cloud’s data and AI solutions into our business will modernise our infrastructure and fundamentally shift our operational paradigm. This collaboration is essential for us to build and deploy solutions that address the unique challenges and opportunities of the continent, ensuring the transformative power of AI is accessible to millions of customers and businesses across Africa.”

Maureen Costello, vice president, UKI and SSA, Google Cloud said,

“Google Cloud is proud to support Vodacom in accelerating AI across Africa. By providing access to our most advanced generative AI models from Gemini and our leading data infrastructure, we are supporting Vodacom’s ambitious vision to build technology solutions that improve the lives of Africans.”

The primary goals of the collaboration are centered on three strategic pillars:

• Data modernisation and unification: Vodacom will migrate and unify its critical data platforms onto Google Cloud’s data cloud, including BigQuery. This enables Vodacom to achieve real-time insights, enhanced data governance, and a single, secure source of truth for business decisions. This foundation is essential for deploying large-scale AI models.
• Accelerated AI adoption in Africa: Vodacom will harness Google Cloud’s AI capabilities, like Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform and Google’s Gemini models, to rapidly integrate intelligent services into its offerings. This includes optimising network performance, enhancing customer service with AI-powered personalised care, and combating fraud through advanced machine learning models – effectively bringing powerful AI capabilities closer to African consumers.
• Product innovation for the future: By using Google Cloud’s AI capabilities, Vodacom will focus on developing cutting-edge solutions for the African market. Initial focus areas include creating new fintech services for greater financial inclusion, developing enterprise solutions, and designing consumer experiences to improve content accessibility and education.

The collaboration announced today builds on the existing strategic relationship between Vodacom Group’s parent company, Vodafone, and Google Cloud, demonstrating a commitment to scaling digital innovation and providing enterprise-grade security and reliability across all markets.

• Agentforce will be able to use Google’s Gemini models, allowing agents to work with images, audio, and video, handle more complex tasks using Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities and two-million-token context windows, and act using real-time insights and answers grounded in Google Search with Vertex AI.

• Salesforce Service Cloud will become more tightly integrated with Google Customer Engagement Suite, bringing enhanced AI-enabled contact center capabilities including real-time voice translation, intelligent agent-to-agent handoffs, personalized agent recommendations, and AI-driven conversational insights across all channels.

• Salesforce’s Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360 Apps will run on Google Cloud infrastructure, with access to new regions and simplified procurement through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Salesforce and Google has announced a major expansion of their strategic partnership, delivering choice in the models and capabilities businesses use to build and deploy AI-powered agents.

The AI landscape is evolving so quickly that businesses are struggling to keep pace with  innovations like autonomous agents.

This expanded partnership provides crucial flexibility, empowering customers to develop tailored AI solutions that meet their specific needs, rather than being locked into a single model provider.

Google Cloud is at the forefront of enterprise AI, with millions of developers using its cutting edge Gemini models and AI optimised infrastructure

This expanded partnership lets Salesforce customers build Agentforce agents with Gemini and deploy Salesforce on Google Cloud.

It builds on their existing collaboration, which enables seamless data sharing between Google BigQuery and Salesforce via zero copy technology.

This gives businesses the AI, data, and trust they need to integrate autonomous agents into their operations.

“Through our expanded partnership with Google Cloud and deep integrations at the platform, application, and infrastructure layer, we’re giving customers choice in the applications and models they want to use,” said Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce president & chief engineering and customer success Officer.

“Salesforce offers a complete enterprise-grade agentic AI platform that makes it easy to deploy new capabilities easily and realise business value fast. Google Cloud is a pioneer in enterprise agentic AI, offering some of the most powerful, capable models, agents, and AI development tools on the planet. Together we are creating the best place for businesses to scale with digital labour.”

“Salesforce’s selection of Google Cloud as a major infrastructure provider means enterprise customers can now deploy some of their most critical applications on our highly secure, AI-optimised infrastructure — with minimal friction,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.

“Our mutual customers have asked us to be able to work more seamlessly across Salesforce and Google Cloud, and this expanded partnership will help them accelerate their AI transformations with agentic AI, state-of-the-art AI models, data analytics, and more.”

“At Wayfair, we’re deeply committed to using data and AI to create exceptional customer experiences,” said Fiona Tan, CTO of Wayfair. “The Salesforce and Google Cloud partnership, particularly the availability of Salesforce on Google Cloud infrastructure and the integration of Agentforce and Gemini, offers powerful new capabilities to personalise interactions and empower our teams to better serve our customers.”

Why it matters:

Agentic AI isn’t just emerging, it’s already here and represents a $2 trillion market opportunity, according to a study from Salesforce.

In fact, 84% of CIOs believe AI will be as significant to businesses as the internet. To fully realise this potential, businesses need an agentic strategy with openness, trust, and choice at the centre.

This includes:

• Data: Highly secure and unified access to all your data, no matter where it resides, with a zero-copy architecture and enriched metadata for deeper insights. This breaks down data silos across platforms so customers don’t have to sacrifice choice for an integrated experience, unlike solutions that hoard data access or require users to cobble together disparate solutions.
• AI: Unparalleled choice and flexibility with leading AI models, including predictive, generative, and multi-modal options. This allows businesses to tailor solutions to their specific needs and avoid being locked on a single provider’s AI capabilities.
• Trust: A multi-layered approach to protect your data and infrastructure with encryption, data residency options, and a choice of infrastructure providers. Additionally, robust guardrails, bias detection, explainability, and toxicity controls are built-in to ensure responsible AI development and deployment.
• Actions: Seamless integration of automation, analytics, and applications across platforms to streamline workflows and drive efficiency across the organization. This allows businesses to maximize the impact of AI agents by connecting them to their existing tools and systems, unlike solutions with limited integrations or closed Ecosystems.

Data: Real-Time Responses in Agentforce with Google Search

Agentforce will be able to leverage Grounding with Google Search through Vertex AI, building on the secure data foundation established through the zero copy partnership between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google BigQuery.

This integration empowers Agentforce agents with the ability to reference up-to-the-minute data, news, current events, and credible citations, substantially enhancing their contextual awareness and ability to deliver accurate, evidence-backed responses.

For example, in supply chain management and logistics, an Agentforce agent could track shipments and monitor inventory levels in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and proactively identify potential disruptions using real-time data from Google Search, including weather conditions, port congestion, and geopolitical events. Availability is expected in the coming months.

AI: Unlocking the Power of Choice and Flexibility with Gemini and Agentforce

Businesses need the freedom to choose the best models for their needs rather than be locked into one vendor. In 2025, Google’s Gemini models will also be available for prompt building and reasoning directly within Agentforce.

With Gemini and Agentforce, businesses will benefit from:

• Agents with multi-modal capabilities: Gemini’s native multimodality lets agents “see” and interpret the world, enabling AI to recognize images (like error codes) and detect emotions in voice. Integrating this into Agentforce creates smarter agents that respond to audio, video, and text.
• Expanded contextual understanding and reasoning: Gemini’s 2 million-token context window lets agents retain and reference massive amounts of information, like entire codebases, years of customer interactions, or product documentation.
• Increased speed and efficiency: Google’s Tensor processing Units (TPUs), combined with advanced techniques like those used in Google’s NotebookLM, enable Gemini to process and understand information with exceptional speed and efficiency, delivering real-time responses even for complex queries. This translates to faster response times and reduced operational costs.

For example, an insurance customer can submit a claim with photos of the damage and an audio voicemail from a witness.

Agentforce, using Gemini, can then help the insurance provider deliver better customer experiences by processing all these inputs, assessing the claim’s validity, and even using text-to-speech to contact the customer with a resolution, streamlining the traditionally lengthy claims process. Availability is expected this year.

Trust: Salesforce Platform deployed on Google Cloud

Customers will be able to leverage Salesforce’s unified platform (Agentforce, Data Cloud, Customer 360) on Google Cloud’s highly secure, AI-optimized infrastructure, benefiting from features like dynamic grounding, zero data retention, and toxicity detection provided by the Einstein Trust Layer.

Once Salesforce products are available on Google Cloud, customers will also have the ability to procure Salesforce offerings through the Google Cloud Marketplace, opening up new possibilities for global businesses to optimize their investments across Salesforce and Google Cloud and benefitting thousands of existing joint customers.

Action: Enhanced Employee Productivity and Customer Service with AI-Powered Integrations

Millions use Salesforce and Google Cloud daily. This partnership prioritizes choice and flexibility, enabling seamless cross-platform work.

New and deeper connections between platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite, as well as Slack and Google Workspace, will empower AI agents and service representatives with unified data access, streamlined workflows, and advanced AI capabilities, regardless of platform.

Salesforce and Google Cloud are deeply integrating their customer service platforms – Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite – to create a seamless and intelligent support experience.

Expected later this year, this unified approach empowers AI agents in Service Cloud with:

• Real-time Voice Translation and Sentiment Analysis: Google Cloud AI in Service Cloud will enable real-time voice translation breaking down language barriers. New agent assist features within the Service Cloud desktop will analyse tone of voice and audio cues for deeper customer sentiment understanding.
• Agent-to-Agent Intelligent Handoffs: Across all channels, virtual agents built on Google Conversational Agents will be able to seamlessly connect with Agentforce in Service Cloud for more efficient management of multi-step, customer interactions. Salesforce and Google Cloud are also exploring deeper integrations between Slack and Google Workspace, boosting productivity and creating a more cohesive digital workspace for teams and organisations. The companies are currently exploring use cases such as:
• The ability for users to leverage enterprise search in Slack to access and act on files in Google Drive.
• The ability to more easily share information between Gmail and Slack, enhancing communication and knowledge sharing.

The result is a more connected and productive work environment, where businesses can choose the best tools for their needs from employee productivity to customer service while benefiting from a seamless and intelligent workflow across platforms.

Expanding Partnership Capabilities and Integrations

This partnership goes beyond core product integrations to deliver a more connected and intelligent data foundation for businesses.

This is just the beginning; Salesforce and Google Cloud are committed to ongoing innovation and deeper collaboration to empower businesses with even more powerful solutions.

Expected availability throughout 2025.

• Deeper integrations across Data Cloud, BigQuery, and Cortex Framework will make it easier than ever for customers to securely ground their AI agents in all of their enterprise data.
• New native Tableau, Looker, and BigQuery integration will allow customers to manage and visualise business data across all platforms in one single UI with standardized business logic and data definitions.

While today’s chatbots are limited to queries and prompts, agentic AI has “agency,” with the ability to act autonomously and independently, adapt, complete complex tasks, make decisions and proactively achieve objectives.

Optiva’s agentic AI-powered BSS will enable communication service providers (CSPs) to achieve measurably improved outcomes by enhancing operational efficiency, cost savings, customer experience and business productivity.

The agentic AI platform is already being used in digital BSS transformations by Optiva customers in the Middle East and the Americas.

According to Gartner, by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from just 1% in 2024.

The quickly maturing technology can drive huge productivity gains and add trillions in economic value to the global economy.

McKinsey cites customer operations (improving customer and agent experiences) and sales (boosting personalization, content creation, and productivity) as the top areas for driving GenAI revenue, with AI agents being the next frontier.

Optiva’s agentic AI-powered BSS and virtual AI agents, integrated with the Optiva BSS Platform and Optiva Charging Engine, enable intelligent process automation, hyper-personalized customer experiences and faster resolution times for CSPs.

By leveraging Google’s Gemini models, these AI agents enhance natural language understanding, proactive customer engagement and intelligent automation, reducing OPEX and accelerating time to market.

Gemini models also power real-time insights using BigQuery and Looker, helping CSPs optimize and create innovative offerings, improve usage and billing transparency and drive new revenue streams, ensuring they stay competitive in an evolving telecom landscape.

“Integrating agentic AI into Optiva’s BSS solutions marks a pivotal step forward in the telecom industry. We are not simply developing AI agents to streamline operations and improve customer experiences — we are establishing the foundation for a future where these agents can work together seamlessly. This will create an intelligent, interconnected ecosystem that drives exponential value for telcos of the future,“ said Chrisaman Sood, AI Product Strategist at Optiva.

Key returns on investment (ROI) and benefits of Optiva’s agentic AI BSS ecosystem include:

• Enhanced Customer Experience: Customer care AI agent Amica can automate customer queries and cases, significantly improving resolution times and customer satisfaction. Comprehensive automation also streamlines processes from customer onboarding to support, delivering a superior customer experience.
• Increased Operational Efficiency: Operations management AI agent Kairos proactively enhances operational efficiency, delivering a reduction in ticket resolution time and manual efforts. This enables operators to address critical issues faster and optimize resource allocation.
• Hyper-Personalized Engagement: Sales AI agent Sophos empowers CSPs to engage customers with hyper-personalized offers and plans, improving sales efficiency and fostering customer loyalty.