Google expands Gemini Enterprise, consolidates Vertex AI services to simplify agent deployment

Google Cloud has expanded its Gemini Enterprise offering and consolidated existing services in a move intended to help developers manage agents, improve cross-team collaboration, and help enterprises deploy third-party agents.

Gemini Enterprise is now the central platform for all AI work within the organization, with a new ‘Inbox’ within the platform providing a single source for managing AI agents at enterprise scale.

The new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform subsumes the features of Vertex AI, including model and agent building capabilities, and combines them with DevOps, agent orchestration, and security functionalities.

For building AI agents within the platform, users get access to the low-code Agent Studio, the open source code-first framework Agent Development Kit (ADK), and access to over 200 frontier models via Model Garden.

Beyond agent creation, the platform includes Agent Runtime, which handles agent orchestration and retains persistent context for long-form tasks, as well as Agent Identity, Agent Gateway, and Agent Registry, which together help IT teams to track agent identities and enforce AI guardrails.

Comcast used ADK and Agent Runtime to rebuild its Xfinity Assistant, which is now capable of performing personalized troubleshooting for customers.

“Agent Runtime has been a massive accelerator, allowing us to deploy a sophisticated multi-agent architecture that increases digital containment while ensuring secure, grounded interactions via Gemini,” said Rick Rioboli, CTO, Connectivity & Platforms at Comcast.

“We aren't just reducing repeat interactions by solving customers’ issues the first time; we're redefining the customer experience at scale.”

Post-deployment, admins can track and score agent behavior within the platform via Agent Evaluation, Agent Observability, and Agent Simulation. These assess agent activity in the wild, provide insights into multi-step agent reasoning to help debug errors, and test agents against synthetic user prompts.

Employees can now build and deploy agents using natural language and reusable skills within the Gemini Enterprise app, chat directly as well as manage all agent activity via a central dashboard called Inbox in Gemini Enterprise.

In a demo, Erica Chuong, Applied AI, forward deployed engineering manager NorthAM at Google Cloud, showed how an agent within Gemini Enterprise could help an employee at a furniture retailer relaunch a defunct product line.

Chuong set off a series of agents to analyze interior design trends, identify unsold stock, and come up with plans for a relaunch campaign.

“With that one prompt, multiple agents complete a series of tasks in minutes instead of hours,” said Chuong.

“It knows exactly which agents to call to come up with a plan. My market research agent, powered by Deep Research, analyzes the latest Google search information alongside our own sales and CSAT data.

“My data insights agent is connecting to our global product catalog, regardless of location or format. It knows that dead stock refers to stale inventory, and it uses our agentic data cloud to identify the right data sets. My product strategy agent pulls everything together.”

Collaboration with agents

A core aspect of Google Cloud’s new end-to-end Gemini Enterprise is encouraging workers to share AI interactions with their co-workers.

Via a new offering called Projects, employees can share sources with an agent including their enterprise Google Workspace, OneDrive, or chats in a third-party collaboration software, to help come up with new ideas and brainstorm and produce data-driven business plans.

Another new feature, Canvas, helps workers to co-create Google Docs and Slides with one another directly within Gemini Enterprise. These documents can then be shared in Microsoft 365 formats if needed, for external collaboration and feedback.

In the name of furthering collaboration and AI-driven results within the enterprise, Google Cloud has also announced interoperability with third-party agents within the Gemini Enterprise app. This allows users to deploy third-party agents directly within the Agent Gallery, for easy access to validated agents powered by partner developers.

As an example at time of the announcement, the firm pointed to agents from organizations including Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday.