Google bets on AI agents
- Google pushed AI agents to the center of its enterprise growth strategy at Cloud Next, pitching them as task-performing digital assistants. - Customers such as Home Depot, Mars and Capcom were showcased as using Google Cloud AI for operational advantage. - The push couples new chip and infrastructure investments with a sales pitch focused on automating workflows and monetising usage (reuters.com).
Google used its Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on April 22 to make AI agents the center of its pitch to big business. (reuters.com) At the event, Google described agents as software that can carry out tasks for workers, not just answer prompts, and said nearly 75% of Google Cloud customers now use its artificial intelligence products. Google also said 330 customers processed more than 1 trillion tokens each over the past 12 months. (blog.google) Google paired that software pitch with infrastructure spending. It said its seventh-generation Ironwood Tensor Processing Units and Axion custom processors are now generally available for customers building and running AI systems. (blog.google) The company used customer names to show how the sales pitch is supposed to work inside large organizations. Google highlighted Home Depot, Mars and Capcom as companies using its cloud tools to automate parts of retail, employee work and game development. (blog.google) Home Depot said in January that it expanded its partnership with Google Cloud and rolled out new “agentic AI” tools, including a Magic Apron assistant for shoppers and professionals and voice-agent tests in select stores. The retailer said the tools are meant to give real-time project help and free associates for harder customer requests. (corporate.homedepot.com) Mars announced on April 22 that it will use Gemini Enterprise as the primary AI system for its global workforce. The company said employees will get assistants built to handle multi-step tasks across its business. (googlecloudpresscorner.com) The timing matters for Alphabet because investors have been pressing large technology companies to show how heavy AI spending turns into revenue. Alphabet is scheduled to report first-quarter 2026 results on April 29. (abc.xyz) Google is also trying to widen the contest beyond chatbots. Reuters reported that the company’s enterprise push is focused on selling automation for workplace tasks and charging for the computing and software usage those systems generate. (reuters.com) That leaves Google arguing that the next phase of the AI race will be won inside corporate workflows, where agents book work, retrieve data and complete steps that employees used to do by hand. Cloud Next was its clearest attempt yet to turn that argument into a cloud business story. (reuters.com)
