Google Unveils New AI Agent Tools for Enterprise as Competition Heats Up
Google has rolled out new tools aimed at organizations developing AI agents, stepping further into a space where Anthropic and OpenAI have gained early traction.
At Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, the search giant previewed how these agents would operate. Users and organisations can configure how agents interact with email, files, and other data, with updates fed into an inbox. With millions of businesses already using Workspace as their primary collaboration suite, it should be easier to integrate these bots into day-to-day tasks and automate workflows.
Google already had some agent tooling available through Vertex AI, its platform for building, training, and deploying AI models. The Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform builds on this by adding more agentic capabilities and expanded management tools.
As with the chatbot wave, Google is slightly late to the party. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity have been heavily focused on agentic workflows and coding as the next layer of generative AI. These tools have received positive feedback from a wide range of businesses, many of which are racing to deploy them across various tasks.
Some warn this could mark the beginning of a sharp drop in employment, including Anthropic and Elon Musk, with agent-to-agent collaboration potentially replacing entire teams. Others see it as a governance nightmare, where businesses may struggle to identify where a workflow issue originated or which AI agent caused it.
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Gemini and Google saw a surge in positive feedback and usage following the launch of Gemini 3 late last year, challenging OpenAI’s ChatGPT for engagement. The shift in interest towards coding and agents as key monetization tools appears to have caught Google slightly off guard, as it had been focused on launching slimmer versions of its chatbot and image generation models.
That said, Gemini is not far behind competitors; it was rated higher than Opus 4.6 and GPT-Codex 5.2 in coding tasks, but lacked the breadth of agent services available elsewhere.
In conversations with businesses, Google is reportedly a distant third to Anthropic and OpenAI in enterprise deployments. This mirrors its position in cloud computing, where it has long trailed Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure despite its dominance in search.
Google is not backing down, however, and is clearly positioning Gemini as an AI model for both consumers and enterprises, similar to OpenAI.
While it has not invested in OpenAI, the startup does use Google Cloud for some capacity needs, including access to Google’s AI accelerator chips, which are seen as more efficient than Nvidia GPUs for certain inference workloads.
Google also occupies an unusual position as both competitor and partner to these pure-play AI labs. It has invested $3 billion in Anthropic and is one of the startup’s key suppliers of cloud capacity.
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