Google Cloud went big on its shift to agentic in its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, where it set out its vision to move to agentic enterprise automation at its London Summit this week. That transition comes with a raft of tools – mostly announced earlier this year at Google Cloud Next – designed to allow organisations to move to multi-agent systems that can reason and execute complex business workflows autonomously.
Speaking at the event at Tobacco Docks, Maureen Costello, vice-president for the UK, Ireland, and Sub-Saharan Africa at Google Cloud (pictured above), told attendees the era of experimentation is being supplanted by a drive for operational deployment.
According to Costello, AI agents got but one mention at the previous year’s event, but have now become the central pillar of the provider’s roadmap as it seeks to scale multi-agent enterprise systems.
“The agentic enterprise is happening right here, right now,” she said. “Leading UK businesses are moving past basic pilots. They’re deploying multi-agent systems – agents that can think, reason, collaborate and execute complex business workflows.”
The slew of tools fell into three core product pillars: frontier models, agent platforms and personal productivity tools.
Firstly, there is a refresh of the Gemini frontier model family. Google confirmed that Gemini 3.5 Flash – a model performance-optimised for agents and coding tasks – will be available to UK customers by the end of June. This will be followed by Gemini 3.5 Pro later in the year and Gemini Omni, a multi-modal model designed for extreme speed and low latency across text, audio and video inputs.
The provider also introduced a series of agentic platforms aimed at developers and business users. The Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform is targeted as a centralised mission control for managing autonomous workflows. It is complemented by Agent Designer v2, a low-code tool that uses natural language to build agents across disparate applications. For engineering teams, Antigravity 2.0 brings an agent-first code environment available via desktop or command-line interface.
The agentic enterprise is happening right here, right now,. Leading UK businesses are moving past basic pilots. They’re deploying multi-agent systems – agents that can think, reason, collaborate and execute complex business workflows Maureen Costello, Google Cloud
The expansion into the personal productivity space was marked by Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal assistant intended for enterprise laptops and mobile devices. These tools are underpinned by the Knowledge Catalogue, which Google describes as a universal context engine designed to index and categorise enterprise data to make it accessible for AI reasoning.
Meanwhile, on the hardware and security front, the provider unveiled its eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), custom AI hardware designed to improve efficiency for training and inference. This was paired with the launch of Google AI Threat Defence, a cyber security solution that uses autonomous agents to monitor for and mitigate AI-powered threats in real time.
How Unilever is using the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform
During the keynote, Google showcased its strategic partnership with Unilever, signed earlier this year. The consumer goods giant is using the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to drive brand discovery and marketing. The deal is notable as it marks a significant expansion of Google’s footprint within Unilever, and effectively supplanted legacy Microsoft-centric ecosystems for advanced AI workloads.
We’re working with Google to go deeper on agentic commerce, building our guardrails and our observability layer as we embed AI across our global business Sam Kini, Unilever
Sam Kini, chief digital and technology officer at Unilever, explained that the company is systematically unpacking its core business processes through an agentic lens. Kini noted that the path to purchase is fundamentally changing, and requires organisations to become “AI native” to stay relevant in emerging commerce channels.
“We believe that having the right balance of pace and control is key,” said Kini. “You have to be brave and you have to be prepared to throw out the playbook. We’re working with Google to go deeper on agentic commerce, building our guardrails and our observability layer as we embed AI across our global business.”
How Google Cloud is investing in the British economy
The provider also showcased its ongoing commitment to UK infrastructure, centred on the scheduled opening of a datacentre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, later this year. This project forms part of a broader £5bn investment programme in the UK’s AI economy, which also includes a partnership to upskill 100,000 civil servants in AI technologies by 2030.
“Sovereignty isn’t just a policy requirement. It requires physical steel in the ground. Google Cloud is investing heavily in the British economy … ensuring that every British organisation has the tools, talent and technology to relentlessly innovate,” said Costello.
The ‘wait and see’ era of AI is over. If there was one word I could bring to mind that really looks at how the UK is behaving right now, it is acceleration. We are shifting from writing code to having agents build and deploy code for us at scale Alex Rutter, Google Cloud EMEA
To assist with the governance of these sprawling agent environments, Google introduced Agent Gateway. This tool serves as a single control point to govern first- and third-party agents across multiple clouds, providing OTEL (Open Telemetry)-compliant telemetry and granular “agent identity” tracking. This allows administrators to treat agents like a digital workforce, to monitor dependencies and actions.
Alex Rutter, managing director for AI at Google Cloud EMEA, argued that the “wait and see” era of AI is over for the UK market, adding that the focus is now on “AI fluency” and the ability of organisations to deploy industry-specific agents that solve problems at the edge.
“The ‘wait and see’ era of AI is absolutely over,” said Rutter. “And if there was one word I could bring to mind that really looks at how the UK is behaving right now, it is acceleration. We are shifting from writing code to having agents build and deploy code for us at scale.”
Rutter further noted that the addition of Agent Observability provides deterministic instrumentation across the entire agent flow, giving businesses the absolute visibility they need into why an agent is behaving a certain way before it impacts production.
As UK businesses transition from proofs of concept to production-ready agentic solutions, the competition between hyperscalers is intensifying. By positioning its “unified stack” – from custom TPUs to high-level agent platforms – Google is attempting to capture the next wave of enterprise spending by offering a more integrated, “agent-first” alternative to traditional productivity suites.
