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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Google updates Enterprise tools for agentic AI at Next. 
• A new Agent Platform streamlines automated work and security. 
• Google also upgraded Workspace and data infrastructure. 

As companies use more agents in their workflows, managing them securely and efficiently becomes a primary challenge. Google just created a possible solution, wrapped in the same accessible interface that many teams are used to. 

On Wednesday at Google Cloud Next, the company's annual enterprise conference, Google released its new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform for developers. Evolved from Vertex AI, Agent Platform "brings together the model selection, model building, and tuning services of Vertex AI that customers love, along with new features for agent integration, security, DevOps, orchestration, and more," CEO Thomas Kurian said in the announcement. 

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The platform revamps the current Gemini Enterprise experience and offers over 200 models, including Gemini 3.1 Pro, Nano Banana 2, Gemma open models, and competitive models from Anthropic, such as its just-released Opus 4.7. Since Agent Platform is built on Vertex, Google noted that those services will now flow through Agent Platform exclusively. 

All-in-one agent building 

In the platform, according to Google, developers can design an agent's life cycle start to finish, from building the agents themselves to scaling and governing them. MCP support and an upgraded Agent Development Kit help developers maximize reasoning capabilities by structuring agents into sub-networks. That tiered approach should set agents up to handle complex tasks, Google said, adding that other features like faster runtime and Memory Bank help agents delegate to each other more efficiently and operate with more context for longer. 

"Gemini Enterprise is now an end-to-end system for the agentic era, built for agents that can execute complex, multi-step work processes," Google said in the announcement. 

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The company also emphasized that it has baked security into the new platform through tools such as Agent Identity, which assigns each agent a cryptographic ID. If you'd rather not take any risks, however, you can use Google's new Agent Simulation tool to "stress-test your agents against real-world scenarios before they ship," the company said. 

Once developers are done building and testing, they can publish agents from the platform to the Gemini Enterprise app, where employees can run those agents or build their own with no-code or lower-code options like Google's Agent Studio and Agent Designer. 

A Google employee demonstrated how users can deploy multiple agents in the enterprise app at once to tackle an inventory or marketing challenge, as if they were a team of workers. In the demo, each individual agent handled a specific element of a multi-step project for a furniture company, using the organization's Workspace contents to pull relevant data and strategy points. 

Security 

Running multiple autonomous agents can pose a host of privacy and security risks for any organization, especially when non-developer employees use them. Google emphasized that its revamped Gemini Enterprise addresses this by simplifying guardrails and permissions before users can access agents. The company said it "provides the same level of oversight and auditability found in essential business applications like payroll or quarterly financial reporting."

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The Gemini Enterprise app sits atop Agent Platform, which Google said standardizes governance and security. 

"We provide a single control plane for governance in Agent Platform, so every employee can use and share agents with full IT visibility," the company added. "Both no-code and pro-code agents are managed through a consistent model for identity, security, and auditing." 

Other announcements 

Google also announced Agentic Data Cloud, a new data architecture intended to help scale AI agents. Several new features let developers instantly query data without moving it out of AWS or Azure, leverage new data science tools across multiple surfaces, and enrich files with metadata to give agents more semantic context, among other capabilities. 

At the Workspace level, Google launched Workspace Intelligence, which uses Gemini reasoning to understand "complex semantic relationships within your Workspace apps (such as Docs, Slides, or Gmail) content, your active projects, your collaborators, and your organization's domain knowledge," the company wrote. 

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While that may sound like what Gemini already does, Google framed Workspace Intelligence as an additional tool that Gemini will leverage when automating tasks such as slide generation and project prep. Google noted a few upgrades in the new feature, including proprietary infographics in Docs and advanced personalization tailored to a user's style. 

"Workspace Intelligence retrieves your relevant emails, chats, files, and information from the web to transform ideas into professionally formatted drafts that mimic your exact voice, brand, style, and company templates," Google said.