Google pushes enterprise AI

Google is turning its workplace software into a system that can assign, run, and track artificial intelligence agents inside everyday business tools. (reuters.com) At Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas on April 22, Alphabet executives Sundar Pichai and Thomas Kurian said those agents are central to how Google plans to make money from artificial intelligence in enterprise software. Google said it is folding more of its business AI products under the “Gemini Enterprise” name and expanding Vertex AI, its platform for building custom business agents. (reuters.com) (blog.google) Google Cloud also announced a $750 million fund for partners on April 22, aimed at consulting firms, software vendors, and resellers that help companies build and deploy those agents. Google said the money will support prototyping, deployment, training, and embedded engineering teams across its 120,000-member partner ecosystem. (prnewswire.com) An AI agent is software that does more than answer questions: it can plan steps, use apps, and complete tasks with limited human input. Reuters reported Google is adding tools to create agents, monitor their work, and give them a dedicated inbox where they can post updates inside a company. (reuters.com) Google is pushing that idea into Chrome too, where the browser becomes the place the agent works instead of just a window onto websites. Google said Gemini in Chrome can use “auto browse” to understand what is open in live tabs and handle multi-step tasks, while Chrome Enterprise has described the browser as becoming “agentic and secure.” (blog.google) (cloud.google.com) In practice, Google says Chrome can pull details from Gmail, Calendar, Google Flights, Maps, Shopping, and YouTube through Connected Apps, then use that context to complete work. TechCrunch reported the enterprise version is being pitched for tasks including booking travel, entering data, and scheduling meetings. (blog.google) (techcrunch.com) That makes control of the surrounding software more valuable than the model alone. If an agent is booking flights, reading email, checking calendars, or routing referrals, the company that owns those systems controls the data, the permissions, and the final handoff. (blog.google) (techcrunch.com) Google is making that pitch as enterprise customers become the steadiest source of artificial intelligence revenue for the industry. Reuters reported OpenAI and Anthropic have also shifted aggressively toward business customers, while Pichai said Alphabet still expects to spend $175 billion to $185 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, with just over half of machine-learning compute investment going to the cloud business. (reuters.com) Google’s own numbers show why it is leaning in. The company said nearly 75% of Google Cloud customers now use its AI products, 330 customers processed more than 1 trillion tokens each over the past 12 months, and direct customer API traffic rose to more than 16 billion tokens per minute from 10 billion last quarter. (blog.google 1) (blog.google 2) Kurian told Reuters that the “experimental phase” is over, but Google is also selling governance and security controls alongside the agents as companies worry about reliability and oversight. The company’s closing argument is that the agent will not live in a separate chatbot window; it will sit inside the browser, the inbox, and the work software employees already use. (reuters.com) (cloud.google.com)