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

Google is positioning AI agents as the centerpiece of its enterprise monetization strategy, announced at its annual Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas. Key moves include unifying AI products under the 'Gemini Enterprise' brand, rebranding and expanding Vertex AI, and introducing new governance and security features for AI agents. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian highlighted a shift from traditional machine learning to custom AI agent building as the primary Vertex AI use case. Google holds back coding announcements for its I/O developer conference, instead framing the enterprise AI battleground around agents and governance. Google Cloud has grown to 14% market share but still trails Amazon and Microsoft, while competing with OpenAI and Anthropic who are also pushing into enterprise applications.