Google makes an interesting choice with its new agent-building tool for enterprises

Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the Google Cloud Next conference on Wednesday with a video in which he announced one of the company’s biggest new products: Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Google’s tool is intended for building and managing agents at scale. This is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Bedrock AgentCore and to Microsoft Foundry.

Given that AI, and agents in particular, are furthest along for technical tasks like coding, and that the tech is so new to the enterprise that security remains a real concern, Google has made an interesting choice with this tool. Agent Platform is particularly geared at IT and technical teams.

The business folks, meanwhile, are directed toward what Google calls its Gemini Enterprise app, introduced in the fall. They can work with agents built by IT or build their own for tasks like scheduling meetings, performing trigger-based processes, creating shortcuts for repetitive tasks, or creating and editing files without needing to switch apps, Google says.

Google also underscored that the underlying models these tools tap into include Google’s own Gemini LLM and Nano Banana 2 image generator, as well as Anthropic’s Claude. The company announced support for Claude Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku — in other words, flagship, reasoning, and lower-cost models, including the new Opus 4.7 that launched last week.