A year ago, we gathered at Google Cloud Next, buzzing with the early promise of generative AI and its potential to reshape our workplaces. Fast forward to this year’s event in Las Vegas, and that promise has blossomed into powerful, scalable reality. We’re now squarely in what we call the agentic era, where AI isn’t just assisting; it’s actively partnering with you, autonomously tackling tasks and driving unprecedented efficiency.
At Cloud Next, we unveiled a comprehensive suite of tools and platforms designed to empower you to build and deploy intelligent, helpful AI agents that can truly transform your business. These aren’t just theoretical advancements; they represent a fundamental shift in how work gets done. Let’s dive into the biggest announcements that are making the agentic era a practical reality for enterprises worldwide.
Welcome to the Agentic Era: AI That Works For You
For the innovators and technical teams building the future, we proudly introduced the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. This is a complete, end-to-end workspace engineered to help you build, govern, and scale your AI agents with unparalleled ease and access to the world’s most advanced models. It’s a unified environment where development meets deployment, all powered by Google Cloud’s robust infrastructure.
This platform provides direct access to our most capable AI models, tailor-made for diverse business needs. You’ll find Gemini 3.1 Pro, our flagship model, perfect for navigating complex workflows and understanding nuanced contexts. For those creating stunning visual assets, Gemini 3.1 Flash Image (also known as Nano Banana 2) delivers exceptional results, while Lyria 3 ensures professional-grade audio generation.
Crucially, we’re expanding our commitment to open choice by also adding Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 to the lineup, giving you even more flexibility. Building with these powerful models doesn’t require a machine-learning PhD, thanks to Agent Studio. This intuitive low-code interface allows both seasoned developers and business users to effortlessly build and test agents using natural language, democratizing AI development.
Beyond building, we’re bringing the power of AI agents directly to your workforce through the innovative Gemini Enterprise app. To ensure accessibility for everyone, our no-code Agent Designer lets any user craft custom, trigger-based workflows without writing a single line of code. This means greater agility and personalized automation across your entire organization.
For more intricate, multi-step business processes, new long-running agents can now operate autonomously in the background within secure cloud sandboxes. This frees up your human teams to concentrate on strategic tasks, while AI handles the heavy lifting. With multiple AI helpers at work, we’ve also introduced a central, intuitive Agent Inbox, allowing you to easily monitor, guide, and manage all your AI operations from one place.
Powering the Future: Unprecedented Compute & Data Solutions
Running millions of AI agents and training advanced models demands immense computing power, and that’s precisely what our AI Hypercomputer delivers. This purpose-built system is designed specifically for the massive scale of the agentic era, featuring the eighth generation of our custom Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips. These are the engines that drive the AI revolution, optimized for speed and efficiency.
The new TPU 8t is engineered for incredibly fast AI model training, while the TPU 8i is optimized for inference, delivering an impressive 80% better performance per dollar. Furthermore, we are among the first to offer the new NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, complementing our existing suite of NVIDIA GPUs and our super-efficient Google Cloud Axion processors. This diverse compute offering ensures you have the right tools for any AI workload.
To fully leverage this powerful compute infrastructure, data must move at lightning speed. We unveiled the Virgo Network, a custom-built system designed to connect massive supercomputers with unparalleled bandwidth. This network, combined with storage breakthroughs like Managed Lustre, can now move an incredible 10 terabytes of data per second, eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating your AI initiatives.
An AI agent’s effectiveness is directly tied to the information it can access and understand, which is why we’re introducing the Agentic Data Cloud. This represents a completely new way of organizing your data, enabling AI to take action in real time. At its heart is the Knowledge Catalog, a dynamic map of your entire business that autonomously tags and connects data points using Gemini, ensuring your agents understand your company’s unique context and terminology.
The Agentic Data Cloud also includes Cross-Cloud Lakehouse, reflecting our belief that you shouldn’t have to migrate all your data to harness the power of our AI. Standardized on Apache Iceberg, this innovative solution allows you to leave your data precisely where it resides—even in AWS—and query it instantly, with zero friction. This flexibility maximizes the value of your existing data investments.
Smart Security and Seamless Collaboration
As cybersecurity threats grow increasingly sophisticated, human defenders need advanced AI on their side. We’re combining Google’s world-class threat intelligence with Wiz’s leading security platform to provide comprehensive agentic defense. This powerful integration empowers you with intelligent agents that can proactively protect your digital assets. Specialized new agents include:
- The Threat Hunting agent, which autonomously seeks out threats and writes security rules.
- The Detection Engineering agent, designed to identify coverage gaps and create new detections.
- The Third-Party Context agent, providing vital contextual data from external sources.
The addition of Wiz, now a part of Google Cloud, significantly expands and deepens our ability to protect the applications you build and run. Wiz has broadened its support to include Databricks, more AI studios, and various multicloud platforms-as-a-service, ensuring robust security across diverse environments. Furthermore, the new Technology Intel Center centralizes a critical feed of new feature releases, migration updates, and end-of-life notices across cloud and AI tech providers, keeping you informed and prepared.
We’re also embedding agentic power directly into the tools you use every day to connect with your team and customers. With Workspace Intelligence, we’re breaking down the silos between Docs, Drive, Meet, and Gmail. You can now use Ask Gemini in Chat to synthesize information from across your entire Google Workspace, enabling immediate action like scheduling a meeting or drafting a brief, all without ever leaving your chat window.
Real-World Impact: Agents Transforming Businesses Today
One of the most exciting aspects of Cloud Next is witnessing how organizations are already leveraging this groundbreaking technology to achieve tangible results. Leading the way, The Home Depot is using Gemini to power both phone and in-store assistants, providing shoppers with expert advice and faster answers, enhancing the customer experience. Similarly, Papa John’s is delighting diners with our Ordering Agent, which uses AI context to remember “the usual” order, streamlining the process and getting customers what they want more quickly.
Beyond customer-facing applications, AI agents are revolutionizing internal operations. Companies like Mars and Citadel Securities are deploying AI tools to streamline their quantitative research, whether for sophisticated marketing strategies or complex market making. These deployments highlight the versatility and power of AI across vastly different industries and use cases.
Globally, Unilever is deploying agents throughout its vast organization, aiming to better serve its 3.7 billion consumers. These examples vividly demonstrate that the agentic era is not just on the horizon; it is here now, actively transforming how businesses operate, innovate, and connect with their customers. The future of work is collaborative, intelligent, and agent-powered.
Source: Google Blog (The Keyword)
