Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai is intensifying Google’s focus on business software solutions, announcing at the company’s yearly cloud conference that sophisticated digital assistants powered by artificial intelligence will serve as the foundation for generating profits from AI technology.
During the three-day Las Vegas event that began Wednesday, Pichai and other top Google leaders are working to demonstrate that their AI technologies are ready for businesses to implement, targeting corporate clients who have become the tech industry’s most dependable source of income.
Leading AI competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic have also dramatically redirected their efforts toward commercial clients in recent months.
The California-based tech giant revealed Wednesday that it is consolidating several AI products under a single brand called “Gemini Enterprise.” The most significant change involves expanding and rebranding Vertex AI, a platform that enables cloud users to choose from multiple AI models for their business operations.
The company also introduced new oversight and security capabilities for AI agents. These sophisticated digital helpers can make plans, decisions, and take independent action, representing a rapidly expanding technology area that has raised concerns about safety, dependability and control.
“There’s definitely a strategic shift as the models become much more sophisticated,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian explained during a Reuters interview. He noted that Vertex AI’s main application has recently changed from traditional machine learning to a rapid increase in users creating their own specialized AI agents.
Google aims to surpass both established cloud competitors and emerging AI companies as mounting pressure demands proof of returns on enormous generative AI investments.
Google Cloud, previously considered behind competitors like Amazon and Microsoft, has built momentum with business customers through substantial AI investments and years of significant spending on data centers, specialized processors, and network equipment.
This transformation is already visible at GE Appliances. Senior executive and Google client Marcia Brey told Reuters that Google’s collection of tools and the business data already housed in Google Cloud enabled her logistics and distribution team to implement AI more quickly than other products her company had evaluated.
Rather than traditional enterprise providers and other major cloud services, a new category of competitors is rapidly appearing in business AI: companies that provide AI models.
Programming assistants and add-ons that link AI models to existing business software have become profitable sources of AI income and returns on substantial investments.
Following initial success driven by their models’ capabilities, OpenAI and Anthropic are now expanding into applications that use those models for specific tasks, including tools for building agents.
While competitors emphasize their programming products, Google took a different approach at its cloud conference, giving coding minimal attention. Kurian instead described the AI competition as centered on agents, oversight and business implementation, explaining that some coding announcements were reserved for the company’s 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 stated. “But in other cases, we have unique things. There’s capability in the platform that nobody else offers.”
Google’s long-term strategy of developing an extensive range of internal offerings, from models to processors, instead of depending on outside suppliers has provided an advantage over other major cloud providers.
This approach has helped Google increase its total cloud market presence to 14% by the end of 2025, although it remains behind competitors Amazon and Microsoft, based on Synergy Research data.
