- Google made a play for the enterprise AI market with the debut of a new Gemini product
- Notably, it's making its AI tech available across non-Google applications
- Hybrid cloud capabilities are missing, but could be on the way
Google is attempting to loosen Microsoft Copilot’s death grip on the Enterprise AI market. The company today just introduced Gemini Enterprise, a business-friendly version of its AI tech that enables Google’s models and agents to be deployed across a range of business applications.
While it sounds simple, this is kind of a big deal, Gartner Senior Director for Digital Workplace Joe Mariano told Fierce.
“What Google is doing is breaking down its AI walls, not hiding the services behind a large suite of products such as Google Workspace or Google Cloud Platform,” he said. Thus, “an organization with zero Google footprint in their company could now start utilizing core Gemini chat and agentic services across the spectrum of applications they have.” And yes, that includes Microsoft 365.
The agentic AI market will be worth a whopping $3.3 trillion by 2029, according to Gartner’s estimates. That means Google has to act fast to loosen the vise grip Microsoft currently has on the enterprise market.
According to a Gartner report issued in September, 65% of 360 enterprise leaders surveyed said they planned to standardize on Microsoft agentic services, compared to 26% on Google, 8% on Salesforce and 4% on SAP.
So what’s in it?
As Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian explained on a briefing with journalists, Gemini Enterprise comprises five key elements: the brains (aka models), the workbench, the taskforce (agents), the context (data) and governance.
Zooming in, the workbench allows businesses to chat with all their enterprise systems, find and summarize information and apply low- or no-code tools to build agents. Governance allows enterprises to monitor and audit what their agents are up to and keep them secure. That's important, given rising concerns about the new risks agentic AI is bringing to table.
“What we’re doing is bringing AI to every user by providing them a single front door through which they can chat with all of their enterprise data, search for information and use agents to do a variety of tasks on their behalf. All of this is fed with enterprise context,” Kurian said.
He added that a number of enterprises – yes, including telecoms – are already using Gemini Enterprise.
The catch
J. Gold Associates Founder Jack Gold said in a note to investors that Gemini Enterprise is Google’s recognition that “agentic AI needs to be democratized so individual users, groups or departments can easily employ such capability without needing to be in a long queue within IT’s often resource-limited creation capability.”
But a hybrid strategy is lacking in the current offering, Gold said.
“Gemini Enterprise currently runs in the Google Cloud environment, with minimal if any compute taking place locally,” he wrote. “While many companies have accepted full cloud solutions, moving to a more distributed approach should be something that Google provides longer term, and which they are no doubt working on.”