Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google’s annual cloud conference that artificial intelligence (AI) agents — human-like digital assistants — are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetize AI.
At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that started yesterday, Pichai and key Google executives aim to position the company’s AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry’s most reliable revenue stream.
Mountain View, California-based Google yesterday announced that it was unifying a set of AI products under the name “Gemini Enterprise.”
Photo: Reuters
Most notably, that involves rebranding and bulking up Vertex AI, a tool that allows cloud customers to select from a variety of AI models to use for business purposes.
Google also announced a set of new governance and security features for AI agents. Agents are powerful digital assistants that can plan, decide and act autonomously, a fast-growing field that has sparked worries over safety, reliability and oversight.
“There’s definitely a strategic shift as the models become much more sophisticated,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in an interview. The primary use case of Vertex AI recently shifted from “old-style machine learning” to a sudden explosion in users building their own custom AI agents, Kurian said.
Google is seeking to outflank both its traditional cloud rivals and AI upstarts as pressure mounts to prove returns on massive generative AI spending.
Google Cloud, once seen as a laggard to rivals such as Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, has gained traction with enterprise customers, powered by massive bets on AI and years of heavy investment in data centers, custom chips and networking gear.
In addition to traditional enterprise providers and other hyperscalers, a new class of competitors are quickly emerging in enterprise AI: model providers. So far, coding assistants and plug-ins that connect AI models to existing enterprise software have emerged as lucrative channels for AI revenue and payback on their heavy investments.
After early success powered by the raw strength of their models, OpenAI and Anthropic PBC are now pushing downstream, marshaling resources into applications that utilize those models to perform specialized tasks, including agent-building tools.
Yet while rivals are pushing hard on their coding products, Google, by contrast, kept coding largely out of the spotlight at its cloud conference. Kurian instead cast the AI battleground as one defined by agents, governance and enterprise deployment.
“Some people are using the models to write code. They can use Gemini and also other tools like Claude,” he said. “But in other cases, we have unique things. There’s capability in the platform that nobody else offers.”
The long-term bet to build out a vast suite of in-house offerings, from models to chips, rather than relying on third-party vendors has given Google an edge over other large cloud providers.
This has helped Google to grow its overall cloud market share to 14 percent at the end of last year, though it still trails rivals Amazon and Microsoft, data from Synergy Research showed.
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