Google bets on enterprise AI agents

Google is turning AI agents into a sales pitch for its cloud business, with Sundar Pichai telling customers and investors at Google Cloud Next on April 22 that the tools sit at the center of how the company plans to make money from artificial intelligence. (reuters.com) At the Las Vegas conference, Google framed agents as software that can carry out multi-step work for employees, not just answer prompts. Reuters reported the company is pushing them as “production-ready infrastructure” for enterprise customers, a steadier source of revenue than consumer chatbots. (reuters.com) Merck said on April 22 that it will use Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise in a multi-year partnership valued at up to $1 billion to build an agentic platform across research and development, manufacturing, commercial and corporate functions. The drugmaker said the system is meant to speed internal work and support patient-facing outcomes. (merck.com) SAP and Google Cloud said the same day that they are expanding their partnership so customers can use Joule Agents inside SAP customer-experience software, with Gemini Enterprise acting as a hub for agents that take actions across SAP and Google systems. The companies said the first use case is marketing, including campaign creation, launch and optimization. (sap.com) The pitch marks a change from last year’s race to show off bigger models. Google is now selling AI as workflow software that plugs into payroll systems, marketing platforms, research pipelines and internal data stores that companies already pay to run. (reuters.com) That puts the contest closer to the budgets that run information-technology departments. Reuters reported that Google is trying to deepen its push into enterprise software, an area where Microsoft has long used Office, Azure and business applications to lock in corporate customers. (reuters.com) Google’s partner announcements also show that agents are being sold as systems that need setup, integration and oversight, not as off-the-shelf bots. Merck said its program will combine the work of both companies’ engineers, while SAP described a shared architecture linking customer data, business applications and agent actions. (merck.com, (sap.com) Google used the conference to argue that this is where artificial intelligence spending is heading: away from demos and toward contracts that sit inside daily operations. The size of the Merck deal and the SAP tie-up suggest the company is betting that the next phase of the AI market will be won in back offices, labs and marketing departments. (reuters.com), (merck.com), (sap.com)