Google bets on agents

Google spent the opening day of Cloud Next in Las Vegas turning AI agents into a sales pitch for enterprise software, not a research demo. (reuters.com) (cloud.google.com) At the April 22 keynote, Google said nearly 75% of Google Cloud customers now use its artificial intelligence products, and 330 customers processed more than 1 trillion tokens each over the past 12 months. (blog.google) Google packaged that push into a new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and described the conference theme as the “Agentic Enterprise,” with tools for building, deploying, securing and monitoring software that can carry out multi-step tasks. (blog.google) (cloud.google.com) An AI agent is software that does more than answer a prompt once; it can pull data, call tools, hand work to other systems and finish a workflow with limited human input. Google’s pitch at Next was that companies want those agents inside customer service, supply chains, security operations and employee software. (reuters.com) (cloud.google.com) That shifts the enterprise buying question away from which model writes the prettiest paragraph and toward whether the system can connect to company data, respond quickly and show what happened at each step. Google highlighted orchestration, latency and telemetry — the plumbing for coordinating agents, keeping them fast and tracking their behavior. (reuters.com) (blog.google) Google used customer names to make that case. Capcom is using Google Cloud to help game developers search internal documents and code faster, Home Depot said new agentic tools help customers and store associates with project questions, and Mars said Gemini Enterprise will be its primary artificial intelligence system for employees. (blog.google) (corporate.homedepot.com) (googlecloudpresscorner.com) Home Depot and Google said in January that their tools would give shoppers and contractors real-time help, and on April 22 Google said the retailer’s customer-support system was handling calls four times faster. Google said Home Depot plans to expand the voice-agent system across U.S. stores over the next year. (corporate.homedepot.com) (prnewswire.com) The backdrop is a crowded market. Microsoft has been pushing Copilot and agent tools across Azure and Office, while Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic are all competing to become the layer companies use to automate work, not just generate text. (reuters.com) (mercurynews.com) Google’s cloud business has been growing, but it still trails Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in infrastructure. Cloud Next showed Google trying to use agents as a reason to buy more of its cloud stack at once: models, data tools, security software and custom chips. (reuters.com) (blog.google) The message from Las Vegas was that Google wants enterprise AI judged less like a chatbot and more like a business system. If customers buy that framing, the winners will be the companies that can keep agents connected, observable and fast after the demo ends. (reuters.com) (cloud.google.com)