Google Cloud ushers in the “agentic enterprise” era: new tools to build and manage AI agents

We already gave you a preview last year: 2026 is, officially, the year AI agents take the wheel. As part of Google Cloud Next ‘26, the company introduced the concept of the Agentic Enterprise: organizations where artificial intelligence no longer just answers questions, but perceives, reasons, and acts autonomously to generate tangible results.

What Google announced at Google Cloud Next 2026

The headline announcement was the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a comprehensive platform designed so that technical teams can build, coordinate, and optimize fleets of AI agents. According to Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, this is not about “standalone services,” but rather a vertically optimized solution that connects data, people, and applications in a single intelligent workflow.

It is built on four pillars:

1. Build: It uses an Agent Developer Kit (ADK) with a graph-based framework to define agent logic. It also includes Agent Studio, a low-code interface for creating agents using natural language.
2. Scalability: It makes it possible to move prototypes into production with response times of less than one second and support for long-running agents, which can operate autonomously for up to seven days without losing context.
3. Governance: It assigns a unique cryptographic Agent Identity to each one, making it possible to audit their actions and ensure they follow company policies.
4. Optimization: It includes user simulation tools for stress testing and observability dashboards to monitor performance and costs.

To make all of this work at the speed today’s market demands, Google has strengthened its infrastructure with its new 8th Generation TPUs (optimized for ultra-fast training and near-zero-latency inference), ensuring that agents can process massive volumes of data in milliseconds.

The Gemini Enterprise app

This is the unified environment where employees interact with agents and collaborate on projects. Its most powerful features are:

• Agent Designer: for creating sophisticated agents based on triggers or events.
• Canvas: an interactive space for editing Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 documents without leaving the app.
• Shopping Agents: agents capable of managing the entire purchasing process, from product search to checkout, using natural language. So yes, we are getting closer and closer to agentic commerce.
• Gemini Enterprise Projects: Workspaces where the agent’s memory is limited exclusively to that team’s files and conversations, turning it into an “expert” in a specific topic
• Skills: Quick shortcuts (using the “@” mention) for repetitive tasks, such as applying brand guidelines to a document or formatting reports automatically.
• Inbox: A notification center for tracking agent activity, where users can see which tasks have been completed or whether human intervention is needed to make a decision.

Success stories: Who is leading the agentic revolution?

The most interesting thing about this Next ‘26 is not just the promises, but the real results major global brands are already achieving:

• WPP: the advertising giant is using Gemini to transform its creative processes. The result? They launch an AI-based campaign every four days (twice as fast as before) and have already created more than 100,000 agents on the platform.
• Virgin Voyages: it has incorporated more than 50 specialized agents to reduce campaign creation time by 40%, personalizing actions based on user behavior.
• FairPrice Group: with AI agents, it is improving the grocery shopping experience across both physical and digital touchpoints.
• Vodafone: It uses agents to proactively resolve service disruptions, which is expected to generate savings of 100 million euros by 2030.
• Macquarie Bank: It has managed to recover more than 100,000 employee work hours thanks to intelligent automation.
• Capcom: The video game developer is using agents for playtesting and forecasting tasks, freeing up its creatives to focus on designing new gaming experiences.

Security in the agentic ecosystem

Google is not overlooking security, introducing agent-based agentic defense in collaboration with Wiz, to protect applications autonomously from code to cloud. It is also maintaining its open-ecosystem philosophy: users will be able to integrate third-party agents such as Atlassian, Salesforce, Slack, or ServiceNow, and use models from other partners such as Anthropic’s Claude 4.7.

Google also introduced Google Cloud Fraud Defense, the natural evolution (and a much more powerful one) of what we previously knew as reCAPTCHA. This new end-to-end platform does not just distinguish between humans and bots, but is also capable of analyzing the legitimacy of the AI agents themselves that interact with your business. By being able to differentiate authorizations and behaviors in real time, it protects the entire customer journey. In this way, it protects companies against scraping attacks and account takeovers and, most importantly, ensures that every transaction is legitimate and secure.

I suppose now it is up to us to decide which processes we want to delegate to our new digital “coworkers”.

Image: GPT Images 2.0