The AI agent race is on – and Google wants to win it

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signalling to investors at Google’s annual cloud conference that AI agents — human-like digital assistants — are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetise artificial intelligence.

At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that starts Wednesday, Pichai and key Google executives will seek 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.

Other top AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have aggressively shifted resources to business customers in recent months.

Mountain View, California-based Google announced on Wednesday that it was unifying a set of AI products under the name “Gemini Enterprise”. Most notably, this 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.

Custom agents

“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 and Microsoft, 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.

Read: Google wins big as Apple rewires Siri with Gemini

At GE Appliances, that shift is already tangible. Marcia Brey, a senior executive and Google customer, said that Google’s suite of tools and the enterprise data already stored in Google Cloud allowed her logistics and distribution team to deploy AI faster compared to other products the company had tested.

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 are now pushing downstream, marshalling resources into applications that utilise those models to perform specialised tasks, including agent-building tools.

But 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, saying that some coding announcements were being held back for its I/O developer conference in May.

“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% at the end of 2025, though it still trails rivals Amazon and Microsoft, according to data from Synergy Research.  — Kenrick Cai, (c) 2026 Reuters