Nathaniel Whittemore

No lock-in.

Remember, this is Microsoft saying that.

A time traveler from the 90s would be gobsmacked.

And then there was Google.

This week was Google's Cloud Next conference, and agents were 100% the star of the show.

CEO Sundar Pichai said that agents, and particularly enterprise agents, will be the key to AI monetization efforts.

The central release is a unified platform called Gemini Enterprise.

or in full, the Gemini's enterprise agent platform.

The platform seems to be functionally a rebrand and relaunch of Vertex AI, which is Google's agent design and orchestration tool.

Google has added a new set of governance and security features to allow enterprises greater control over their agent deployments.

And Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian described that this platform update was a response to shift in customer behavior.

He said, there's definitely a strategic shift as the models become much more sophisticated.

The primary use case of Vertex AI recently shifted from old-style machine learning to a sudden explosion in users building their own custom AI agents.

Now, alongside the new look Gemini Enterprise, Google has filled out a bunch of necessary features to make their agentic offering complete.

They now have Data Agent Kit, which provides a set of agent skills and plugins to make building agents a more streamlined process.

Knowledge Catalog, which provides a unified context engine for the entire enterprise.

In Google Workspace, the company has added Gemini for Google Slides.

The agent can now be steered to follow your brand or corporate style, as well as working from your templates.

And there were literally dozens of other features or products announced, with the clear overall goal being to deliver everything one could possibly need to deploy and operate enterprise-grade agents at scale.

SiliconANGLE argued, the real story isn't AI, it's the control plane.