Google today added a Gemini Enterprise offering to its portfolio that promises to make it simpler to embed artificial intelligence (AI) agents across every business workflow.
Based on the foundational Gemini AI models, this latest offering provides organizations with both a set of pre-built agents developed by Google, including a preview of a Data Science Agent for building and fine-tuning AI models, and a no-code workbench that enables end users to create their own AI agents to automate workflows.
Other AI agents provided in Gemini Enterprise will also include Google Vids, which enable end users to transform one type of information, such as a presentation, into a completely different format, such as a video with a complete AI-generated script and voiceover, as well as an AI agent that enables real-time speech translation that was developed for Google Meet.
Gemini Enterprise also provides a central governance framework through which organizations can visualize, secure, and audit all their AI agents, which can be more easily discovered using an AI Agent Finder tool.
Google is also making its Google Skills training platform available for free, in addition to launching a Gemini Enterprise Agent Ready (GEAR) program, a new educational sprint designed to empower one million developers to build and deploy agents. There is also now a Delta team of Google AI engineers that organizations can call on for more complex challenges.
Finally, Google is expanding its AI ecosystem via alliances with Box, OpenText, ServiceNow, and Workday to enable cross-platform workflows.
The overall goal is to provide organizations with a complete AI stack for building and deploying AI agents, says Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. Those AI agents will then become the new front door for invoking AI, he adds. “We’re integrating all the parts into a super easy to use platform,” says Kurian.
It’s not clear to what degree AI agents are now being used to automate workflows but as more end users are exposed to them many of them are now able to automate tasks with little to no understanding of prompt engineering required. That capability is expected to drive significant gains in productivity, with the Futurum Group projecting that AI agents will drive $6 trillion of economic value by 2028.
While most business executives are understandably anxious to derive value from AI investments as quickly as possible, usage of the first wave of AI technologies based on copilots has been uneven at best. AI agents, however, might make it easier to realize the promise of AI by reducing the need to have the skill required to combine the right set of prompts to reliably and repeatedly automate a task.
Exactly what impact that will have on hiring remains unclear but there is no shortage of cumbersome tasks that most end users would happily automate if it was simpler to do. By embedding AI agents into every application, Google is trying to make it simpler to accomplish that goal using a set of tools that will be pervasively available.
Longer term, of course, automations will inevitably become more complex and, by extension, powerful, as it becomes possible to orchestrate multiple AI agents. In the meantime, however, there is a clear need to expose end users to AI agents they can experiment with and eventually embed into existing workflows. Once that is achieved it should then become a lot easier to use a familiar set of tools to create the next great innovation using the unique knowledge humans have about how to deliver value to an end customer.
