AI agents move to production

Artificial intelligence agents are moving out of conference demos and into day-to-day work at large companies. Google used its Cloud Next event in Las Vegas on April 22 to show customers already deploying them. (reuters.com) Reuters reported that Google cast agents as a core way to make money from enterprise artificial intelligence, with customers including Capcom, Home Depot and Mars. Google Cloud also said nearly 75% of its customers now use its artificial intelligence products. (reuters.com) An artificial intelligence agent is software that does more than answer a prompt once. Google described its new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform as a system to build, run and govern agents that can handle multi-step work across company tools and data. (cloud.google.com) (crn.com) Google’s customer examples were concrete. Home Depot said in January that it was rolling out agentic tools for shoppers and store workers, and on April 22 Google said the retailer’s new customer-service voice agent would expand to all U.S. stores over the coming year. (corporate.homedepot.com) (prnewswire.com) Mars said on April 22 that it was making Gemini Enterprise the main artificial intelligence system for its global workforce. The company said employees would get assistants built to handle complex, multi-step tasks across work. (googlecloudpresscorner.com) Google framed the pitch around a problem companies now have after a year of experimentation: too many isolated bots. The company renamed and expanded parts of Vertex AI into the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to manage what one industry report called “hundreds or thousands” of agents at once. (theregister.com) (crn.com) That puts Google in a race with Microsoft, Amazon and startups to turn generative artificial intelligence from a chat feature into paid business software. Reuters reported that investors have pressed technology companies to show clearer returns from the heavy spending required to build and run these systems. (reuters.com) The sales pitch is also changing for users. Home Depot said its tools are meant to guide a customer from “how-to” advice to finished purchases and service interactions, while Google said agents can work across search, phones, stores and internal workflows instead of staying inside one chat box. (corporate.homedepot.com) (cloud.google.com) The next test is whether these systems keep working once they touch live orders, support calls and employee tasks at scale. Cloud vendors spent 2024 and 2025 selling the idea of agents; in 2026, they are selling deployments. (reuters.com)