‘How do I completely reimagine the business process through agent-ification? That’s a very material paradigm shift,’ says Kevin Ichhpurani, president of Google Cloud’s global ecosystem.
Google Cloud executives are calling the vendor’s new $750 million fund of new resources and incentives available to its 120,000-member ecosystem “an unprecedented investment in partner success” as the vendor looks for ways to better enable solution providers to meet artificial intelligence demand and opportunity.
Kevin Ichhpurani, president of Google Cloud’s global ecosystem, told CRN in an interview as the Mountain View, Calif.-based artificial intelligence and cloud giant concluded its annual Google Cloud Next 2026 event in Las Vegas that the fund should help solution providers adjust to how AI and AI agents are changing channel economics.
“(In) the old paradigm it was, let me digitize a process that already existed,” Ichhpurani said. “Here are all the technical skills you need. Here’s your rate card. In the new paradigm, the engagement with the customer is very different. The customer is looking for an outcome. So you start looking at different business outcomes the customer needs. Then how do I completely reimagine the business process through agent-ification? That’s a very material paradigm shift.”
[RELATED: 5 Big Google Cloud Security And Wiz Announcements At Next 2026]
Google Cloud Next 2026: What Partners Need To Know
Peter FitzGibbon, senior vice president and head of the Google solution line at Insight Enterprises—No. 20 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in an interview that growing adoption around Google’s Gemini Enterprise offering is one of the biggest business drivers for his practice in recent months.
For Insight, opportunities exist around unlocking Gemini Enterprise’s value for customers, helping them handle employee training and change management plus establishing governance around Gemini Enterprise, FitzGibbon said.
Gemini Enterprise has already sold more than 8 million paid seats, according to the vendor.
“Agentic development has absolutely gone mainstream,” he said. “There is no more tire-kicking going on like we had in 2024 and ’25. The customers that are leaning into it are leaning into it hard.”
Partners continue to play a major role in Google’s business, Ichhpurani said. About 80 percent of incremental revenue for Google Cloud has come thanks to partners, Ichhpurani said. The marketplace co-sell business grew 90 percent. Partner-related bookings more than doubled.
“That bodes well for future growth for all of us,” he said.
David Smith, Google’s recently appointed channel chief and head of partner programs who came to the AI and cloud giant after about 30 years with rival Microsoft, told CRN in an interview that Google is infusing AI tooling into its partner program to make it the most agentic one available to any solution provider.
In addition to exploring features such as AI-generated statements of work (SOWs), Google has a vision for 90-day agentic transformation sprints rather than an annual cadence of innovation, Smith said. Partners can expect more competencies to help them skill up and differentiate themselves from others in the ecosystem.
Smith said the event put him closer to his goal of meeting 500 Google partners in his first 100 days on the new job. He met with about 200 partners in two days of Google Cloud Next 2026.
Google partners should also see new opportunities as the technology giant continues to integrate its recent Wiz acquisition, with Wiz partners also potentially seeing opportunities if they consider growing Google practices.
Inside Google Cloud’s $750M Partner Fund
The fund is focused on large-scale training and enablement and collaborations where Google forward-deployed engineers. The FDEs will work with partners in hands-on workshops and enable partners, Ichhpurani (pictured above) said.
The fund includes pre-sales investments like co-funding minimum viable products (MVPs) that take customer production data, show a business outcome and then scale more broadly. The fund includes post-sales activity such as incentives for driving customer go-lives and activating usage.
Partners can leverage Google’s agentic platform, build agents on top, and integrate the agents into Gemini Enterprise for greater distribution, he said.
Outcome-based business models services partners might pursue that make more sense in the AI agent era include measuring the number of deflected customer service inquiries, the number of patients who are not readmitted into a hospital after surgery and marketing conversion rates.
“That’s what we see the future is,” he said. “And that’s what we’re enabling the ecosystem to accomplish.”
Satish Thomas, Google Cloud’s vice president of applied AI and platform ecosystem who, like Smith, also left a long career with Microsoft–about 20 years, starting as an intern, and joining Google in January–told CRN in an interview that the $750 million fund is on top of close to $250 billion in commit total addressable market (TAM) that customers can leverage for acquiring partner solutions, which is leveraged in Google’s marketplaces.
Agent Marketplaces: Google Cloud Marketplace, Gemini Agent Gallery
Thomas said that the vendor wants to build the world’s largest ecosystem of Google-made and third-party agents across industry, function and business process.
Agents are discoverable and deployable through the Google Cloud Marketplace, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Gallery and the Google Workspace suite of productivity applications, he said.
“There’s an agent for that–just like we had an app for that,” Thomas said, in reference to Apple’s marketing slogan from the early days of iPhone 3G. “In all my years in the industry, I’ve never been more excited for what we’ll all do together as an ecosystem on behalf of our customers.”
For Google customers, AI is shortening the time needed to create work and make decisions, Thomas said. Users are looking for systems of action with agents uncovering patterns and continuously optimizing processes on a user’s behalf as opposed to a static system of record.
Google’s marketplace investments are not just aimed at its biggest solution providers, Thomas said. Solution providers of various sizes, industry specialties and business models should see opportunities.
System integrators and other solution providers are already building repeatable agents for deployment through the marketplace, he said, with partners able to help with last-mile delivery as well.
While partners have already widely adopted Google’s marketplaces for fulfillment, Thomas said the vendor is investing in making the marketplace better for discovery and procurement.
AI Transformation Across Industries
Partners play a role in unlocking AI transformation in a variety of industries, Ichhpurani said, from remaking how pharmaceutical companies do clinical trials to how insurance companies handle claims. Google has narrowed down the top AI use cases it sees from customers to 120 different job families with significant opportunity for agent-ification and a $20 trillion-plus opportunity.
That is a shared opportunity with partners, he said. Google has FDEs that can work with partners to build prepackaged agents and distribute them to Google’s marketplace.
Notably, Salesforce this month launched an FDE Partner Network to arm select solution providers with greater technical expertise and give direct links to internal Salesforce product teams.
Google’s Differentiation
As Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI upstarts start to build channel partner programs of their own and entice enterprises with their products, Google remains the vendor to bet on due in part to the full technology stack it brings to market, executives told CRN.
“There is nobody else, literally, that can go toe to toe with Google in terms of what we can bring to partners of all dimensions,” Smith said. “ISVs, SIs of all sizes and capabilities, as well as some of our big, important scale partners.”
As an illustration of the breadth of Google’s product portfolio, the vendor’s news during Next 2026 included revealing the eighth generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) aimed at neural network workloads among other infrastructure innovations, Thomas said. Google also has offers at the various AI transformation layers, from agents and applications to models and data and security.
“We’re solving probably the toughest challenge for a lot of these businesses, which is distribution and enterprise trust,” Thomas said. “It’s that holistic, the whole Google Cloud coming to bear in the context of solving for those business outcomes and helping our customers along that AI journey.”
Google’s data platform can unlock the fuel that powers AI and AI agents no matter the cloud the data sits on, a powerful tool when customers still need to organize their data before putting AI into place, he said.
Partners need to keep bringing their industry, domain, business process, engineering and change management expertise to help apply Google’s stack to outcomes, Ichhpurani said.
“Think of Gemini Enterprise as the platform, and the partner then turns it into a solution,” he said.
