Google bets on agents

Google is turning AI agents into the main way it sells enterprise software, putting them at the center of its cloud strategy. (reuters.com) At Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas on April 22, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was unifying products under “Gemini Enterprise” and pitching agents as digital assistants that can handle business tasks across systems. (reuters.com) (blog.google) Google Cloud also announced a $750 million fund for its 120,000-member partner ecosystem, with money and engineering support aimed at consultants, software vendors, and resellers building and deploying agents. (googlecloudpresscorner.com) (cloud.google.com) The product pitch is shifting from single chatbots to software that can move through a workflow: read data in one system, make a decision, and trigger an action in another. Salesforce and Google said their expanded tie-up will let agents work across both companies’ platforms with shared context. (salesforce.com) (prnewswire.com) SAP and Google are making a similar bet on “multi-agent” setups, where several specialized agents coordinate on customer service and commerce tasks instead of one model trying to do everything alone. (news.sap.com) (reuters.com) That changes what enterprise buyers have to manage. Once an agent can reach into finance, sales, support, and internal documents, the hard part is not just the model; it is identity, permissions, and logs that show what the agent did and why. (reuters.com) (blog.google) Google’s answer is to bundle those controls into the platform. The company said Gemini Enterprise includes governance, security, and observability features, alongside tools for building, deploying, and monitoring agents. (reuters.com) (blog.google) The sales motion matters too. Google is leaning on firms such as Accenture, Deloitte, and other integrators because large companies usually buy new business software through consultants that stitch together old and new systems. (reuters.com) (googlecloudpresscorner.com) Rivals are making similar moves. Bloomberg reported that Google’s agent push is part of a broader race with OpenAI and Anthropic to supply the tools companies use to automate work, not just generate text. (bloomberg.com) (reuters.com) Google’s message in Las Vegas was that the next enterprise interface may not be a dashboard or a form. It may be an agent that asks for access, gets approval, and then moves through several systems on a company’s behalf. (reuters.com) (cloud.google.com)