Salesforce in Talks With Microsoft, Oracle and Google About Cloud Deal to Handle AI

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has long been a vocal critic of Microsoft. A couple of years ago, he accused the company of violating antitrust laws in how it sells software bundles. More recently, he has slammed its artificial intelligence chatbot for giving inaccurate responses and being difficult to use.

But that history hasn’t stopped Salesforce from including Microsoft in negotiations it is having with several cloud providers—also including Google and Oracle—about a major new cloud agreement, said Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce’s president and chief engineering officer, in an interview earlier this week. The deal is likely to be worth more than $1 billion over several years, said a Salesforce manager with direct knowledge of the deal.