While Salesforce’s revolutionary new AIforce UI and related tech wizardry grabbed most of the Dreamforce headlines last week, intensified partnerships with powerhouses Google Cloud, AWS, Nvidia, and Anthropic will ultimately prove to be even more valuable to customers.
Marc Benioff sagely used his 2-hour Dreamforce keynote to not only lavish great praise on AIforce, Slackforce, Coworker, and other breakthrough innovations, but also showcase the force-multiplying alliances with industry powerhouses that will simplify, accelerate, and optimize customers’ AI transformations.
Early in Benioff’s narrative about the future of business, AI, and Salesforce, he made a simple comment that, while certainly including at least a dash of hyperbole, also captures the wildly disruptive times in which we live and his vision for how Salesforce intends to help its customers thrive in spite of — or because of — the tumult surrounding them.
“With AIforce, everything changes!” Benioff said. Now, for a guy who’s been known to dispense superlatives freely and frequently during keynotes, earnings calls, and interviews — “incredible” and “unbelievable” and “never seen anything like it” are among his favorites — that line might seem rather tame, bordering on pedestrian.
But, what Benioff was really getting at was that the rise of AI and agents and unleashed data is going to be much, much more than a souped-up version of traditional products, or sparkly new features that look great in demos even if they don’t have much impact on business outcomes and operations.
And that in saying “everything changes,” Benioff means that, well, everything changes:
- How people engage with technology in ways never before possible;
- How technology can liberate more and more people to do higher-level work;
- How non-tech people can, for the first time, tell software what to do rather than vice-versa;
- How “trapped” data and knowledge and context and opportunities within Salesforce systems can be unleashed to drive superior business outcomes; and
- How strategic partners are playing bigger roles than ever before in turning all of that potential into quantifiable progress.
In one of Benioff’s dozens of perambulations around the Moscone Center keynote hall, he stopped to chat with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about their new collaboration, and here’s the essence (from their joint press release) of how they expect to make lives better for customers:
“The most valuable thing Salesforce has built isn’t our platform — it’s the accumulated knowledge of how enterprise business actually works. With Koa, the knowledge is put inside the model itself. We trained a reasoning engine that understands the structure of a deal, the lifecycle of a service case, and the workflows that vary across industries. That’s a different kind of intelligence, and it runs entirely inside your trust boundary.” — Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce
“AI is creating a much larger opportunity for software. Every company needs useful AI, tailored to its knowledge, expertise, and work. Nvidia Nemotron open models give Salesforce the foundation to turn decades of enterprise expertise into specialized AI with Koa, creating a CRM model that can reason and securely take action.” — Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia
Benioff also spoke with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about their launch of Claudeforce, which I’ve previously analyzed in a couple of places: Marc Benioff’s Masterpiece: Claudeforce and Anthropic Turbocharge Salesforce and “This is the most excited I’ve ever been; I’ve never been more optimistic.”
And then there were the expanded partnerships with two high-growth hyperscalers — Google Cloud and AWS – whose traditional relationships with Salesforce used to involve almost exclusively infrastructure but that have lately evolved to involve many more ways to impart value and speed and innovation to customers.
Google Cloud: To help customers deploy effective AI more rapidly and more successfully, Salesforce and Google Cloud have agreed to relieve customers of huge chunks of expensive and time-consuming integration and thereby let those customers focus more on business outcomes. From the press release:
“Today at Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce and Google Cloud expanded their strategic partnership to eliminate the friction of fragmented enterprise systems — where data, agents, and applications operate in silos — and accelerate enterprise AI adoption. By running Salesforce on Google Cloud infrastructure and connecting Salesforce’s headless architecture with Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise, agents on either platform can reason and act upon the same data without custom integrations.
“Underpinning this alliance is a resilient technical foundation that aligns the essential layers of enterprise AI: the trusted data, workflows, business logic, and actions of Salesforce, the agentic and reasoning capabilities of Gemini Enterprise, and the everyday interfaces where teams and consumers interact in real-time.”
Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud president of Global Partner Ecosystem, said in the announcement, “Enterprise AI only pays off when agents can understand a company’s business context and act on it. Gemini Enterprise brings Google’s most advanced AI together with a company’s data, applications and everyday workflows in one platform. By bringing Salesforce — where critical customer and business processes already live — into Gemini Enterprise, customers can build trusted agents that reason across their business context and securely take action. And with Hyperforce on Google Cloud, customers gain greater choice in how they deploy Salesforce on our AI-optimized infrastructure.”
AWS: Rahul Pathak, AWS’s vice-president for data and AI go-to-market, described the new partnership with Salesforce as an opportunity for customers to accelerate operations without sacrificing trust, reduce the burden of integrations and migrations, and facilitate the creation of AI cultures.
“The companies moving fastest and delivering differentiation with AI are the ones building on their own data, with the applications and cloud infrastructure they already trust,” Pathak said in the announcement.
“That’s why removing the friction between environments matters. These new integrations with Salesforce give customers data access without migration, model choice at the right economics, and AI agents where their people already work. When enterprises can do all of that seamlessly, AI becomes how they actually operate and drive business outcomes, not just something they’re piloting.”
Final Thought
So, back to the simple but profound comment from Benioff: is, indeed, “everything changing?” I think Benioff is 100% right, and that means that companies like Salesforce can’t just approach the future with a traditional mindset. And, they can’t assume that they themselves can scale out upgrades and innovations on the rather daunting scale of “everything.”
That’s why I think these extended and powerful partnerships are every bit as important as the great new technology Benioff and team showcased at the event.
Because if it’s true that everything is changing, then clearly force-multiplying partnerships become more essential to and more valuable for customers than ever before.
