Google pushes enterprise AI

Google is steering its artificial intelligence push toward corporate software, putting AI “agents” at the center of what it sells to paying business customers. (usnews.com) At Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas on April 22, Alphabet used its annual cloud conference to pitch those agents as the main way it plans to make money from AI. Reuters reported Google is also unifying several business AI products under the “Gemini Enterprise” name, including a reworked Vertex AI offering for companies. (usnews.com) Google paired that product push with new partnerships announced the same day. Salesforce and Google Cloud said customers will be able to deploy agents across Slack, Google Workspace, Salesforce Agentforce and Gemini Enterprise, with shared context and end-to-end workflows across both companies’ systems. (salesforce.com) Boston Consulting Group expanded its alliance with Google Cloud on April 22 to help clients move past AI pilots and roll out Gemini Enterprise across larger parts of their operations. Merck announced a separate partnership the same day, saying it will use Gemini Enterprise to build what it called an “AI-enabled enterprise” across its business and research operations. (bcg.com) (merck.com) An AI agent is software that can take a goal — like answering a customer question or updating a record — and carry out several steps across different tools with limited human input. Google’s pitch is that companies will pay more for systems that can do work inside email, chat, documents, databases and customer-service software than for a standalone chatbot. (cloud.google.com) (salesforce.com) That helps explain why Google is spending so much time on workflow links and data access instead of consumer demos alone. Google said at Next ’26 that Workspace Intelligence gives Gemini real-time grounding in Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides, while administrators can control which data sources the system can use. (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com) The strategy also reflects where the competition has moved. Google Cloud said this year’s conference was built around the “Agentic Enterprise,” and its announcements ranged from a Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to security and customer-service tools designed to run inside existing business software. (cloud.google.com) (blog.google) For Google, the bet is that enterprise buyers care less about novelty than about whether AI can plug into the software they already use and run reliably in production. The company’s April 22 announcements were aimed at that buyer: large organizations that want AI tied to Slack, Workspace, Salesforce and internal data, not just another chatbot window. (usnews.com) (salesforce.com)