Google pushes enterprise AI

Google is no longer selling enterprise AI as just a chatbot. It is bundling agent-building tools, cloud infrastructure and big customer contracts into one Google Cloud pitch. (cloud.google.com) At Google Cloud Next on April 22, Google launched Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a system for technical teams to build, scale, govern and optimize AI agents. Google said it folds Vertex AI’s model and agent tools into a new platform with added integration, DevOps, orchestration and security features. (cloud.google.com) Google also said future Vertex AI services and roadmap updates will ship through the new platform rather than as a standalone service. The company positioned that shift as a way to help customers manage “thousands” of agents instead of isolated AI tasks. (cloud.google.com; blog.google) An AI agent is software that can carry out multi-step work with access to company systems, rather than only answering a prompt. Google’s platform is aimed less at office workers and more at the information technology teams that control identity, security, deployment and data connections. (techcrunch.com; cloud.google.com) That focus extends a broader Google reorganization already underway. Google said in October 2025 that Agentspace’s agent creation and orchestration technology had been folded into Gemini Enterprise, and this week it described Gemini Enterprise as the end-to-end system for what it calls the “agentic era.” (blog.google; cloud.google.com) The company paired the platform launch with customer deals large enough to show how it plans to distribute those tools. Merck said on April 22 that it will invest up to $1 billion in a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to deploy an agentic platform across research, manufacturing, commercial and corporate operations, with Google engineers working alongside Merck teams. (merck.com) TechCrunch also reported that Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab signed a new Google Cloud infrastructure agreement valued in the single-digit billions. The report said the deal includes access to Google systems built on Nvidia’s GB300 chips and is not exclusive, meaning the startup can still use other cloud providers. (techcrunch.com) Google is making the same push inside its advertising business. This week it added three “agentic” safety and policy features to Ads Advisor, including tools for policy troubleshooting, security monitoring and certifications, as Google leans on Gemini to automate more account management work. (blog.google; searchengineland.com) That safety message comes with scale numbers Google has been highlighting elsewhere. In its 2025 Ads Safety Report, published last week, Google said it blocked or removed more than 8.3 billion ads and suspended 24.9 million accounts, including 602 million ads and 4 million accounts tied to scams. (blog.google) Google’s pitch to large companies is becoming more specific: buy the models, the agent framework, the security controls and the cloud capacity together. The next test is whether customers treat Gemini Enterprise as a software layer they can standardize on, not just another model to evaluate. (cloud.google.com; techcrunch.com)