Google pushes AI agents

Google used its Cloud Next event on April 22 to recast AI agents as enterprise software it expects companies to buy, run and manage at scale. (usnews.com) At the Las Vegas conference, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian said the company’s tools had moved past experimentation and into production for large business customers. Reuters reported Google is unifying products under the Gemini Enterprise name and expanding governance and security features for agents. (usnews.com) Google’s centerpiece was the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a reworked version of Vertex AI that the company said will let customers build, scale, govern and optimize agents in one system. Google’s own description called it “mission control” for companies trying to manage thousands of agents instead of testing one or two. (blog.google) An AI agent is software that can plan steps, make decisions and carry out tasks with limited human input, which is why companies are now worrying less about demos and more about oversight. Reuters said Kurian described a recent shift from “old-style machine learning” toward a surge of customers building custom agents for business use. (usnews.com) Google tied that software pitch to hardware. At Cloud Next, it also introduced eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units, the custom chips it uses to handle heavy AI workloads, and said more than half of its 2026 machine-learning computing investment would go to the cloud business. (blog.google) The spending behind that push is large even by Big Tech standards. Alphabet said in February that 2026 capital expenditures would reach $175 billion to $185 billion, with the money going to AI compute capacity, cloud demand and other strategic investments. (cnbc.com) Google also put cash behind adoption, announcing a $750 million fund for partners to build and deploy agentic AI. The company said the program will support software vendors, systems integrators, training, engineering help and usage incentives across its 120,000-member partner ecosystem. (cloud.google.com) The sales logic is straightforward: consultants and software partners often decide which cloud tools big companies actually deploy. Google said partner-built agents from companies including Accenture, Adobe, Deloitte, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday will be surfaced inside the Gemini Enterprise app. (cloud.google.com) Google is making this pitch while OpenAI and Anthropic are also chasing enterprise contracts, and while Amazon and Microsoft are spending heavily on cloud AI infrastructure. Reuters said Alphabet is under pressure to show returns on its generative AI spending as enterprise customers become the industry’s most dependable revenue source. (usnews.com) Google’s argument now is less about who has the smartest model than who can help a company run fleets of them safely. Its latest numbers were aimed at that point: nearly 75% of Google Cloud customers use its AI products, and 330 customers processed more than 1 trillion tokens each over the past 12 months. (cloud.google.com)