Dive Brief:
- Google is handing tech leaders new tools to support adoption of AI agents, including the introduction of Agentic Data Cloud at Google Cloud Next ‘26. The AI-native architecture aims to turn legacy enterprise data platforms into reasoning engines, according to a Wednesday announcement.
- The Agentic Data Cloud powers a universal business context engine for AI agents and a cross-cloud lakehouse to connect an organization’s data estate and eliminate silos, the announcement said.
- The new cloud product targets boundaries between data platforms and AI agent functionality, according to Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and practice lead, CIO and technology buyers, at The Futurum Group. “For CIOs, this can be compelling because it directly addresses multicloud data sprawl and governance gaps,” he said in an email to CIO Dive.
Dive Insight:
As vendors bet big on autonomous agents executing tasks on businesses’ behalf, they’re recognizing a growing need for agents to operate across clouds and gain access to critical data and context.
Businesses are leaning toward hybrid cloud architectures, with 84% of cloud leaders intentionally selecting multiple clouds, according to Kyndryl’s 2025 Cloud Readiness Report. Yet agentic AI success hinges on connected infrastructure that allows data and intelligence to move, the report said.
Google and AWS launched a collaboration in December to address this challenge and simplify multicloud connections, with Microsoft Azure planning to join the initiative later in 2026. More recently, CoreWeave collaborated with Google Cloud to enable AI training and inference across their cloud products, even in some instances across AWS, Microsoft Azure and on premises.
Cross-platform integrations are happening across vendors. Software company Databricks expanded cloud partnerships with Microsoft and Google Cloud last year. Meanwhile, Snowflake, a cloud-based data platform, restructured its data cloud to support enterprise AI agent adoption, connecting its cloud platform to Google Drive and Salesforce Data Cloud.
With Agentic Data Cloud, Google is taking aim at latency and fragmentation challenges between data insights and actions — a core enterprise pain point, Hinchcliffe said. Through this approach, Google appears to be making the data layer actionable by enabling cross-cloud access, continually enriching context and allowing agents to operate directly on the data, he added.
The move helps position Google as the most AI-native cloud offering, while AWS focuses on infrastructure and Microsoft targets applications and workflows, Hinchcliffe said.
“Google is betting that whoever owns the data context layer for agents will control enterprise automation outcomes,” Hinchcliffe said. “If Google succeeds, it doesn’t need to win the entire cloud stack, it just needs to become the system where enterprise data is understood well enough for their agents to act better than other agents, which is in fact the highest-value layer in an agentic enterprise.”
Along with Agentic Data Cloud, Google also launched Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, allowing companies to build, scale and govern AI agents, according to a Wednesday announcement. The Agent Platform marks the next stage of Vertex AI, the announcement said.
Moving forward, Vertex AI will be delivered through the Agent Platform rather than as a standalone service to power agent development.
