Google's Enterprise AI Push

Google used its Cloud Next conference on April 22 to put AI agents at the center of its pitch to big business. (reuters.com) At the Las Vegas event, Alphabet said those agents — software that can carry out tasks with limited human input — would sit across Google Cloud products and help turn artificial intelligence demand into enterprise sales. (reuters.com, cloud.google.com) Google tied that message to named customers. Merck said on April 22 that it would invest up to $1 billion over multiple years with Google Cloud to build an “agentic” platform across research and development, manufacturing, and corporate functions. (merck.com, reuters.com) Boston Consulting Group expanded its alliance with Google Cloud the same day, saying the firms would use Gemini Enterprise to help clients redesign workflows, business functions, and operating models around AI systems. (bcg.com, cloud.google.com) An AI agent is the industry’s term for software that does more than answer prompts. Companies are selling it as a digital worker that can retrieve data, make decisions inside set rules, and complete multi-step jobs such as customer support, coding, or document handling. (reuters.com, bloomberg.com) That framing has become central to the cloud race. Google is trying to convert the surge in interest around generative AI into recurring revenue for cloud infrastructure, business software, and consulting-led deployments, while competing with Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, and Anthropic for enterprise budgets. (reuters.com, bloomberg.com) Google paired the sales push with more tooling. At Next, it introduced Gemini Enterprise as a broader workplace offering and described a unified stack for building, deploying, and managing agents, alongside new chips and infrastructure aimed at running those systems at scale. (cloud.google.com, crn.com) The partner strategy was part of the announcement, too. Google said it was setting aside a $750 million fund to help services firms and software partners build agent-based offerings on its cloud, a sign that it wants consultants and industry specialists to pull more enterprise work onto Google’s platform. (crn.com, thenextweb.com) For customers, the pitch is less about chatbots than about replacing pieces of routine office and technical work with software tied to company data and internal systems. For Google, the test is whether those pilots become long contracts like the Merck deal and broader transformation projects like the BCG partnership. (merck.com, bcg.com, reuters.com)