Salesforce and Google Cloud Announce Expanded Strategic Partnership

SAN FRANCISCO and SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 7, 2023 — Salesforce and Google Cloud today announced an expanded strategic partnership to help businesses utilize data and AI 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.

Two new data and AI innovations will bring real-time data sharing with enhanced predictive and generative AI capabilities, so businesses can use their data and their custom AI models to better predict customer needs and reduce the cost, risk, and complexity of synchronizing data across platforms.

While 80% of business leaders say data is critical in decision-making at their organization, 41% find their data too complex and inaccessible to be useful. These new integrations will help solve the problem of accessing and understanding data and allow companies to use their data to power AI insights across their business that drive better customer experiences.

Salesforce Data Cloud + Google BigQuery

The new integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and BigQuery will enable companies to more easily create unified profiles of their customers to provide new, highly personalized experiences. Salesforce and Google Cloud will provide customers with seamless data access across platforms and across clouds, akin to having their data housed in a single location — with zero-copy or zero-ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) that can reduce the cost and complexity of moving or copying it while maintaining governance and trust.

Salesforce Data Cloud + Google Vertex AI

New integrations between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI will enable customers to bring their own models from Vertex and use them across the Salesforce Platform, addressing the specific needs of their businesses – such as predicting buying behavior or churn likelihood – across their Salesforce Customer 360 data. Zero-copy data access for AI model training can maximize a company’s AI investment by providing immediate access to unified customer data, thereby streamlining the model development process and enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of AI predictions and insights.

How industries will use Salesforce’s Data Cloud and Google’s BigQuery and Vertex AI to improve the customer experience and personalize interactions

“AI and data are revolutionizing the way businesses operate and innovate, and together Salesforce and Google are empowering organizations to unlock the full potential of their trusted data, put AI insights into action, and personalize customer experiences like never before. This partnership paves the way for unprecedented innovation and business value for our customers,” commented David Schmaier, Chief Product Officer at Salesforce.

About Salesforce

Salesforce empowers companies of every size and industry to connect with their customers in a whole new way through the power of AI + data + CRM. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com.

Source: Salesforce

Cushman & Wakefield to Accelerate Progress on Emissions Reduction Targets With Salesforce Net Zero Cloud

Commercial real estate services firm the first in its industry to adopt Salesforce’s leading ESG technology

CHICAGO, June 07, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cushman & Wakefield (NYSE: CWK), a leading global commercial real estate services firm, will collaborate with Salesforce to enhance the company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) tracking and reporting capabilities. A venture to accelerate progress toward the firm’s science-based targets to achieve net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across its entire value chain, Cushman & Wakefield will leverage Salesforce Net Zero Cloud globally to efficiently track, analyze and report reliable ESG data and insights.

"Cushman & Wakefield is deeply committed to building a more sustainable future for our industry and world, which makes enhancing how we track and report ESG progress an important step in our journey," said Nathaniel Robinson, Chief Investment Officer & EVP of Strategic Planning at Cushman & Wakefield. "Implementing Salesforce Net Zero Cloud, in tandem with our experts’ focus on transforming our own and our clients’ operations, further sets us on the right path to achieving net zero GHG emissions."

The real estate sector accounts for approximately 40% of GHG emissions globally.1 Cushman & Wakefield set ambitious emissions reduction targets to not only reduce absolute GHG emissions from its corporate operations, but also in the facilities the firm manages on behalf of its clients, which are some of the world’s largest commercial real estate owners and occupiers. The firm aims to:

Cushman & Wakefield was among the first group of companies to have its net zero commitment approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a global body enabling businesses to set ambitious emissions reductions targets in line with the latest climate science, under its newly released Net Zero standard in 2022.

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"We put transformational digital solutions into the hands of our customers providing a comprehensive view of their carbon footprint so they can take meaningful action. We’re excited to collaborate with Cushman & Wakefield so they can drive change at scale in the commercial real estate industry and reach their net zero goals faster," said Ari Alexander, VP and GM of Salesforce Net Zero Cloud.

Learn more about Cushman & Wakefield’s commitment and progress advancing ESG.

About Cushman & Wakefield

Cushman & Wakefield (NYSE: CWK) is a leading global commercial real estate services firm for property owners and occupiers with approximately 52,000 employees in approximately 400 offices and 60 countries. In 2022, the firm reported revenue of $10.1 billion across its core services of property, facilities and project management, leasing, capital markets, and valuation and other services. It also receives numerous industry and business accolades for its award-winning culture and commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and more. For additional information, visit www.cushmanwakefield.com.

1 Source: Race to Zero

2 Scope 1 covers direct GHG emissions from sources owned or controlled by Cushman & Wakefield. Scope 2 emissions are indirect GHG emissions associated with the purchase of electricity, steam, heat or cooling.

3 Scope 3 emissions are the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by Cushman & Wakefield, but that the organization indirectly affects in its value chain.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230606005976/en/

Contacts

Cushman & WakefieldAixa Velezaixa.velez@cushwake.com

SaleforceSelena Ingresingre@salesforce.com

Google Cloud and Salesforce team up to bolster AI offerings

Salesforce and Google Cloud are teaming up to help businesses leverage data and AI via a new strategic partnership.

Announced this morning, the partnership will allow companies to use their data along with custom machine learning models to anticipate their customer's needs, execs from Google and Salesforce said. The tie-up spans products and services including Google's BigQuery tooling, Salesforce's Data Cloud and Vertex AI, Google's fully managed AI platform.

"This really allows us to democratize AI so that customers get choice on which AI they want to use," David Schmaier, Salesforce's chief product officer, told TechCrunch in a phone interview.

It's the second such major partnership between Google and Salesforce in recent years. The first, inked in 2017, was largely analytics- and big data-focused. The companies subsequently expanded that original agreement, deepening their data sharing collaborations and building AI-infused customer service experience and marketing tools.

The move makes sense for Salesforce on its journey to reposition itself as a "data company." Over the past several months, Salesforce has introduced new generative AI tools, including EinsteinGPT, an AI assistant for customer relationship management (CRM) tasks like drafting emails, and SlackGPT, which answers natural language questions about a company's Slack content, servers and channels.

Salesforce is also investing in the broader generative AI ecosystem, no doubt hoping to sniff out the next hit that might bolster its expanding product portfolio. Salesforce Ventures, the company's corporate investment arm, this March launched a $250 million fund aimed at what it calls "responsible" generative AI startups.

As for Google, the renewed partnership with Salesforce puts its big data analytics and AI services front and center -- which isn't insignificant considering Salesforce's customer base of over 150,000 organizations.

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Google Cloud's arguably in a position of strength, having just two months ago reported its first profitable quarter. At the same time, the company remains third in the U.S. cloud infrastructure market, behind Amazon and Microsoft.

"From our point of view, this partnership brings two very large ecosystems of data together and makes it much simpler and easier for customers to get value," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told TechCrunch in an interview.

In terms of what the new strategic partnership will accomplish concretely, Google and Salesforce plan to launch an integration between Data Cloud -- which is essentially a sophisticated data integration layer -- and BigQuery that'll enable companies to more easily create unified profiles of customers. The integration will provide companies with access across portions of Google and Salesforce's platforms and clouds, akin to having their data housed in a single location.

Elsewhere, new connectors between Data Cloud and Vertex AI will allow companies to bring any AI models they've trained or fine-tuned in Vertex across the Salesforce platform. Companies will be able to train and retrain models on customer data from Salesforce, ostensibly streamlining the model development process.

How might companies actually use the new integrations and connectors? Salesforce provided a few examples in a memo ahead of today's announcement.

A fashion retailer, for example, could connect CRM data like customer purchase history and service interactions with non-CRM data, such as social media sentiment, to deploy a custom AI model that predicts a customer's likelihood to buy certain types of clothing based on the data. Or a financial institution could combine CRM and non-CRM data with an AI model to anticipate a customer's spending habits and investment preferences.

So, will Google and Salesforce customers actually bite? That's the perennial question. But Kurian and Schmaier seemed confident in the robustness of the new cross-platform offerings.

"Our general view is, these AI models are going to get richer and richer and much more sophisticated," Kurian said. "The result that we're trying to enable is productivity and efficiency for people doing work, and then, secondly, integrating all the information to make better decisions."

The Data Cloud and Google Vertex AI integration will be in pilot starting July 2023 and generally available in October 2023, Google and Salesforce say. As for the Data Cloud and BigQuery integration, it'll enter pilot in October 2023 and GA in February 2024.