Accenture doubles down on agents

Accenture and Google Cloud on April 22 launched a new program to put artificial intelligence agents into large companies, with Accenture supplying the engineers to get them running. (accenture.com) The companies said the Gemini Enterprise Acceleration Program combines Google Cloud engineers, Google DeepMind models and Accenture’s “forward deployed” engineers and industry specialists. Accenture said the effort is aimed at “global enterprises” and was announced at Google Cloud Next ’26 in Las Vegas. (accenture.com) (cloud.google.com) An AI agent is software that does work in steps instead of just answering a prompt once. Google used this year’s Next conference to pitch an “Agentic Enterprise,” with tools to build, govern and monitor long-running agents across company systems. (cloud.google.com) Accenture said the new program will draw on “thousands of AI-skilled engineers,” while Google gives early access to frontier models in the Gemini family. The companies also said Accenture will feed client results back into model refinement. (accenture.com) The pitch is less about selling a model by itself than about getting agents through procurement, security review, data integration and workflow redesign inside big companies. Accenture framed the offer around scaled delivery, industry-specific use cases and “measurable business outcomes,” not just experimentation. (accenture.com) Google has been building that services channel for more than a year. In April 2025, it said partners had already built more than 1,000 AI agent use cases for customers, and cited an International Data Corporation study saying global systems integrators could grow their Google Cloud AI practices by as much as 100% that year. (cloud.google.com) Accenture and Google Cloud were already moving in this direction before this week’s launch. In October 2025, Accenture said its joint center of excellence with Google Cloud had expanded into agentic AI and that more than 450 Accenture-built agents were available on Google Cloud Marketplace. (accenture.com) Accenture is also spreading the same model beyond Google. On April 16, it announced a separate strategic tie-up with WaveMaker to help companies with annual revenue up to $3 billion modernize applications using an agentic platform with built-in guardrails for code generation. (wavemaker.com) (thenewstack.io) That leaves Accenture in a familiar role as demand shifts from pilot projects to production rollouts: selling the labor, controls and industry process work needed to make new software fit into old enterprises. The new Google Cloud program gives it a larger lane to do that with Gemini. (accenture.com) (cloud.google.com)