Marketing automation giant Marketo Inc. today announced a collaboration with Google LLC to develop an artificial intelligence tool that will let enterprises look for potential buyers more efficiently.

The company today also announced that it has acquired Bizible Inc., a Seattle startup that helps companies attribute revenue to particular parts of the sales and marketing process, based on data from customer relationship management, websites and business intelligence tools. Marketo said it’s the largest of its four acquisitions but didn’t disclose a purchase price.

The Google project is an extension of the multiyear hosting deal that the companies struck last year. As part of the agreement, Marketo is set to migrate all of its core operations to Google’s cloud platform by the end of the year, along with petabytes of customer data.

But while that’s certainly a key element, the company said that the new joint development project is about more than just infrastructure. Marketo not only plans to use Google’s cloud platform to power the AI offering but is also working with engineers from the search giant to build out its machine learning features.

Marketo Audience, as the product is called, will be capable of analyzing a firm’s internal contact database to find new leads with a high potential of becoming customers. Specifically, it’s being built to identify so-called lookalike audiences, or groups similar to the prospects that a company has already won over.

Marketo is looking to go much further than the methods used to discover such leads today. On top of basic information such as a potential buyer’s job title, Marketo Audience will also take into account “behaviors and patterns” derived from the raw lead records. That’s according to a blog post by Chief Product Officer Arun Anantharaman.

Marketers will have several options for targeting the leads uncovered by the tool. One of them will be an integration with Google’s Adwords Customer Match, a service that makes it possible to target specific customers as well as broader audiences that share similar characteristics.

Marketo’s announcement of the collaboration comes on the same day that another notable tech firm partnered with the search giant for a cloud project of its own. Fitbit Inc., the publicly traded wearables maker, this morning revealed plans to use Google’s recently introduced Cloud Healthcare Application Programming Interface as part of a new medical data initiative. The goal is to enable more personalized care by combining the biometric readings that its fitness trackers collect about users with their electronic health records.

Image: Marketo