What Google Cloud announced in AI this month – and how it helps you – Google Cloud

Editor, Google CloudThe front door to AI in the workplaceEditor’s note: Want to keep up with the latest from Google Cloud? Check back here for a monthly recap of our latest updates, announcements, resources, events, learning opportunities, and more.In September, we brought you new how-to guides, model updates, and security innovations to help you find-and-fix. From Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar to Mantis, there’s no shortage of new ways to apply AI to your work.Notably, we announced Gemini 4 Argon, our next era of frontier intelligence. Gemini 4 Argon delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense. You can learn more here.Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built.Build and test your proof of concept with $300 in free credit for new customers. Plus, all customers get free monthly usage of 20+ products, including AI APIs.This month, we focused on making AI highly practical for your business, including its associated costs. This meant tailoring our models for specialized industries – starting with Financial Services and Legal –  and helping you keep your budgets under control. Let’s dive in! FinOps for the AI era: New flexible billing and cost controls for agents: To help you get better return on AI, we announced expanded billing flexibility and new cost management tools for agent workloads across Gemini Enterprise and developer tools like Google Antigravity in Gemini Enterprise and Android Studio. Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services: We’re bringing Google’s agentic AI directly into the workflows of capital markets and corporate banking.Gemini Enterprise for Legal: Gemini Enterprise for Legal provides an integrated, fully governed environment configured for rapid deployment across firms and corporate legal departments. Expanding Google Antigravity for enterprise customers: Antigravity is available now as part of eligible Gemini Enterprise app subscriptions, including out-of-the-box administrative and spend controls.Tokenomics: Why smart teams spend more on AI, on purpose: Hear from Eric Lam, Head of Value, Delta, Google Cloud Consulting about how disciplined organizations are moving past reactive sticker shock over AI bills and embracing tokenomics. Meet the researcher fighting AI hallucinations at Google Cloud: Cyrus is a senior research scientist at Google. Lately, his focus has shifted to large language models, specifically a persistent issue known as hallucination, which is when an artificial intelligence model lacks the correct facts but confidently invents an answer anyway.What sports cars can teach us about optimizing AI spend: More tokens doesn’t always mean better AI. Read our conversation with Mike Clark, Director of Product Management for Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, on how to balance horsepower with efficiency and get the highest return out of every dollar you spend on AI.Looking for a steer on your foundation or inspiration for your next project? Take a look at some of our favorite how-to guides from August: 10 questions every startup should answer before moving to production with their AI prototype: These ten are scoped to the prototype-to-production transition itself. Each question ends with a short, runnable snippet you can copy into your own project today. Adjacent decisions that matter just as much but aren’t specific to that move, your data layer and RAG architecture, CI/CD, network design, are deliberately out of frame here.Your chance to start building AI agents from the absolute basics: Agent Valley is a free, 5-week live learning series designed to take you from scratch to building your very own hands-on agent systems. And instead of staring at boring terminal lines, you’ll be building and playing inside a tiny, low-poly virtual world!Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built. Since launching the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform a few months ago, we’ve watched businesses move from basic experiments to serious, production-grade builds. We want to make it even easier — and more secure — for you to scale those systems.Along with a batch of new platform updates, this month we’ve put together 13 practical demos and 20 diagnostic questions to help your engineering teams align on a strong architectural blueprint. Let’s dive in! What’s new in Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform: In this helpful recap, we announced some of our most popular capabilities are available for everyone, from Agent Runtime to Agent Identity.Now in preview: Find and fix software vulnerabilities with CodeMender: As adversarial AI threats accelerate attacks on code, security teams must counter them with machine-speed defenses that can automate code remediation and fight AI with AI. You can learn more about CodeMender and review the documentation here.Solve harder problems with AlphaEvolve, now available to everyone on Google Cloud: AlphaEvolve is a code optimization and discovery agent built on top of Gemini that helps solve the hardest algorithmic problems and achieve breakthroughs for your business and research. If automation requires delegation, then delegation requires trust. But letting an AI agent run on its own is a big leap for any business. While the productivity gains are clear, the fear of losing control is very real. This month, we sat down with our experts to discuss how leaders can navigate this shift by focusing on transparency, predictability, and setting clear boundaries for how agents handle weird data exceptions.Here’s our picks for the month to learn more.How leaders can scale AI by trading control for trust (Q&A): We sat down with Michael Gerstenhaber, VP of Product Management for Gemini Enterprise, to discuss why the future of AI is about defining safe boundaries.What makes an AI agent trustworthy: Context is fast becoming one of the most valuable assets a company owns. Prajakta Damle, Senior Director, Product Management, shares what it takes to get trustworthy AI right. What if you’re looking for a steer on your basic foundation, inspiration for recipes, or some inspiration? Take a look at some of our favorite how-to guides from July: Automate your agent development lifecycle using any coding agent: Stuck prototyping? With Agents CLI skills, you can go through the different phases of the entire agent lifecycle without ever leaving your coding agent.Why AI apps fail in production (And how Google solved it): Only 5% of AI prototypes make it to production, and the other 95% fall into the validation abyss. How can you move confidently into production? 13 hands-on demos to build on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform: Not sure where to start with Agent Platform? Here’s 13 ways you can stir up some creativity. Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built.Our main focus in June was helping your teams build, scale, and secure AI. Today, we’re sharing a fresh roundup of updates designed to help you run smarter, more secure applications while keeping everything under your control. We even shared a cool virtual shopping demo at Cannes to show how retailers can make product discovery more exciting. Let’s dive in! Introducing the Open Knowledge Format: We introduced the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), an open specification that formalizes the LLM-wiki pattern into a portable, interoperable format. This is a vendor-neutral, agent- and human-friendly standard for representing the metadata, context, and curated knowledge that modern AI systems need.Collaboration with Apple on its expanded Private Cloud Compute (PCC) systems: Our collaboration with Apple is built on a foundation of deep commitment to privacy that leverages Google Cloud’s security and privacy technologies. At the heart of this collaboration is our Confidential Computing portfolio and our Titanium security architecture.Claude Fable 5: Available on Google Cloud: Claude Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, is now generally available on Google Cloud. This launch is the latest proof point of our ongoing commitment to bring the industry’s latest models straight to our Agent Platform. Cloud Atelier: How Gemini Enterprise is helping restyle the retail playbook: This year at Cannes, we showcased Cloud Atelier — a destination-based, virtual shopping experience that highlights how retail brands can turn this classic dilemma into an exciting moment of product discovery. How Google Cloud Security uses AI internally: To counter machine-speed, AI-driven threats, we’ve worked hard to transition Google Cloud’s security posture to an autonomous, proactive model. By embedding specialized AI agents directly into our software development lifecycle (SDLC), we’ve created automated guardrails that protect code at a scale and speed unreachable by human teams — and we’re taking steps to make those same guardrails widely available.The 4 lessons that guided AI Threat Defense: We introduced Chris Betz as the new CISO of Google Cloud. For his first Cloud CISO Perspectives, Chris shares four key lessons we learned about using AI to the defender’s advantage while building AI Threat Defense.5 lessons from red teaming AI applications: To help you build AI securely, Mandiant has developed a proactive, risk-based approach centered on the Good AI Assessment (GAIA) Top 10, outlined in our new report, Secure Development of Generative AI Applications: A Proactive Approach. How to unlock true ROI in software development – a deep dive into the latest DORA research: To help you evaluate the costs and business benefits of AI, we recently shared the DORA: ROI of AI-assisted software development report. This research offers a practical approach to help your team work through early adoption challenges, align engineering plans, and drive business growth.Agent Factory Recap: 100X engineering with AI agents in Google Antigravity 2.0: In this episode of the Agent Factory, Shir Meir Lador, Head of AI Engineering, Google Cloud Developer Relations, sat down with Rody Davis, one of Google’s top agentic engineers. They dive into the massive shift from traditional IDEs to agent-first platforms, the reality of code reviews in an AI-driven world, and how to use “skills” to perform at a 100X level.Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built. We’ve had a busy month! Between announcing Gemini Spark and Gemini 3.5 at Google I/O – and unveiling Google AI Threat Defense, our latest AI-powered cybersecurity solution, we had a lot to share with Google Cloud customers. Keeping up with the latest news takes time, so we gathered the most important announcements, thought leadership, and technical guides in one place to help you quickly catch up.To learn more about our I/O announcements, here’s everything you need to know for Google Cloud customers, and top news for startups.Introducing Google AI Threat Defense to help you outpace the adversary: Google Cloud is introducing a comprehensive AI-powered cybersecurity solution — Google AI Threat Defense — an always-on autonomous security platform. Learn more here.Gemini 3.5: Our latest family of models combines frontier intelligence with action – starting with Gemini 3.5 Flash. Gemini Omni: Our new model is a leap forward in world understanding, multimodality, and editing, letting you generate any output from any input, starting with video. Google Antigravity: Google Antigravity’s expanded capabilities and new integration with Agent Platform bring agentic development to your entire organization.Gemini Spark: For Gemini Enterprise and Workspace customers, Gemini Spark is your 24/7 personal AI agent that helps you work more efficiently by autonomously taking action on your behalf, under your direction. Google Workspace: Google Pics, our new image generation and editing tool, and new voice features in Gmail, Docs and Keep, help reimagine how you work.Managed Agents API on Agent Platform: Allows developers to build and run custom agents inside secure, Google-hosted environments that seamlessly integrate with Agent Platform.CodeMender: A powerful AI security agent provided through Agent Platform, CodeMender can help find and fix vulnerabilities in your code.Nano Banana 2 and Nano Banana Pro are generally available: Available today via Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, organizations are already putting the models to work. Learn more here. Cloud CISO Perspectives: How Google + Wiz changes multicloud strategy for CISOs: Vinod D’Souza, director, Office of the CISO, shares highlights from his RSA Conference fireside chat with Anthony Belfiore, chief strategy officer, Wiz. While threat actors have seen gains from the adversarial misuse of AI, Google and Wiz are tackling these challenges head-on by combining Wiz’s deep cloud telemetry with Google’s world-class AI and quantum research to help CISOs and their organizations meet the needs of the agentic enterprise era. Read more here.What Google I/O ’26 means for developing agents on Google Cloud: Dig deep into how Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and the new developer tools shared at I/O fit together, unpack the spectrum of choice for building, and share what we’d actually try first. Learn more here.Five must-have guides to move agents into production with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform: Here is a look back at our five-part series covering the architecture patterns and best practices you need to move your agents into production. Learn more here.How to build an AI-ready security program for the public sector: From industrial control systems to decades-old municipal databases, here’s our CISO guidance to prep AI-ready security programs for the public sector. Learn more here.Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built. We hosted Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas on April 22, announcing incredible innovations from Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to our eight-generation TPUs. We also expanded the Gemini Enterprise app in collaborative ways – now, with new features like Projects, you can work side-by-side with your agents and colleagues. If you missed the livestream, take a look at our Day 1 recap. It’s been incredible to see how customers have been applying AI in thousands of ways — so far, we’ve counted more than 1,300 examples. 1. Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform: Our new, comprehensive platform to build, scale, govern, and optimize agents. Moving forward, all Vertex AI services and roadmap evolutions will be delivered exclusively through the Agent Platform, rather than as a standalone service, to power the next generation of agent development. The platform is designed around four core pillars — build, scale, govern, and optimize — that allow teams to collaborate seamlessly. Learn more about Agent Platform here.2. Gemini Enterprise app has all the key components to let teams discover, create, share, and run AI agents in a single environment. At Next ‘26, we introduced several new capabilities in the Gemini Enterprise app:Agent Designer uses the same no-code agent designer experience of Agent Platform and lets employees build sophisticated schedule- and trigger-based agents using any enterprise connector. It gives you a virtual flowchart of your agent, allowing you to inspect, test, and approve workflows, ensuring total transparency for executing critical business processes.  Long-running agents are designed to execute complex business processes. They can work autonomously in secure cloud sandboxes, giving agents the ability to orchestrate business logic, write code to build custom tools, and complete multi-step work like reconciliation activities or sales prospect sequencing — without needing constant prompting. Inbox in Gemini Enterprise provides a central location to monitor, guide, and help manage all of your agent activity, including your long-running agents. Notifications are intuitively categorized into actionable groups like “Needs your input,” “Errors,” and “Completed.” Projects create a dedicated space where the agent’s memory is confined to the files and conversations your team adds. By connecting it to data sources including Google Drive, NotebookLM, and Google Group Chats, the agent becomes an expert on a specific topic and can provide team members daily briefings or status updates without digging through months of documents.Skills create simple shortcuts using an “@” mention for repetitive tasks such as applying brand guidelines, formatting a report, and accessing specific data.Canvas gives our customers an interactive editor directly within Gemini Enterprise. It allows teams to easily create and edit Docs and Slides, and even export to Microsoft 365 files, within the same experience. Agent Gallery provides access to third-party agents from partners like Adobe, Atlassian, Lovable, and ServiceNow, and is adding more third-party connectors for Asana, Mailchimp, Workday, and more. These integrations enable your agents to retrieve data and execute tasks with your systems-of-record. 3. AI Hypercomputer: Designed specifically for demanding AI workloads, our AI Hypercomputer is an advanced, purpose-built architecture that unites performance-optimized hardware for compute, storage, networking, open software and machine learning frameworks — as well as flexible consumption models — into a single, integrated system. We are announcing innovations at every layer of the AI Hypercomputer:4. The Agentic Data Cloud: A new data architecture built for the speed and scale of agentic AI. The Agentic Data Cloud delivers an AI-native architecture, allowing agents to perceive, reason, and act on your behalf in real-time, including: Cross-Cloud Lakehouse, standardized on Apache Iceberg, is our Lakehouse that enables you to leave your data in AWS or Azure (coming later this year) while querying it instantly — without the friction of vendor lock-in or the cost of data movementKnowledge Catalog constructs a unified, dynamic context graph of your entire business enabling you to ground agents in all of your business data and semantics. With Smart Storage and the Object Context API, files in Google Cloud Storage are instantly tagged and enriched with metadata before an agent touches them. Then our Knowledge Engine uses Gemini to autonomously tag, define logic and instantly map complex relationships across your entire enterprise, providing the semantic definition your agents have been missing. 5. Protecting the agentic enterprise: Security built for the AI era. Our full-stack AI approach, from the chips to the models, gives you a competitive advantage with better integration and velocity to help protect customers. Not only can Google action insights from the world’s largest threat observatory and Mandiant frontline experts, but we also bring cutting-edge insights and breakthroughs from Google DeepMind, to help make your platforms more secure.You can catch up on all our security announcements from Next ‘26 here. Guide to prompting Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS (text-to-speech): The new TTS model introduces a high level of controllability by allowing you to steer the delivery using more than 200 audio tags. We’ll share how to get strong results from the model, whether you are building accessible gaming soundtracks, banking systems, or audiobooks. Learn more about the model here. Ultimate prompting guide for Lyria 3 models: Lyria 3, Google’s family of music-generation models, is designed to give you granular control over vocals, instrumentation, and arrangement. So we spent weeks testing against every musical genre and use case we could imagine. We put together this guide to share exactly what we learned and how you can get the best results.How to find the sweet spot between cost and performance: This guide will walk you through Google Cloud’s flexible gen AI infrastructure options, showing you how to find that sweet spot on the efficient frontier between cost and performance. We’ll start with the foundational pay-as-you-go (PayGo) models and then explore how to layer on more specialized options to build a robust and cost-effective gen AI strategy.Essential AI and cloud security now on by default: To support the next generation of AI innovators, we are offering on by default essential AI security and cloud security in Security Command Center Standard. Securing AI inference on GKE with Model Armor: Here’s how to secure AI inference on Google Kubernetes Engine with Model Armor and high-performance storage.Cloud CISO Perspectives: AI, security, and the workforce of the future: You can’t bring traditional security to an AI fight, so how do we defend against AI-powered attacks, boost defenders with AI, and secure AI use? Drop in on this RSA Conference fireside chat between Francis deSouza, Google Cloud COO and President, Security Products, and Nick Godfrey, senior director, Office of the CISO.Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built.March was a busy month for our AI teams. We launched Gemini Embedding 2, rolled out a highly cost-effective Veo 3.1 Lite model, and officially welcomed the Wiz team to Google Cloud to help redefine security in the AI era. Alongside these launches, we created comprehensive guides to help you get the most out of these models, from prompting formulas for Nano Banana 2, to practical advice for optimizing your TPU training. Here’s a quick look at the latest news and resources to help your team build what’s next.Here’s a fun bonus: Check out our ultimate prompting guide for Veo 3.1 to get started.Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built. In February, we’re giving developers more reasoning power with Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude 4.6, and faster creative scaling with Nano Banana 2. We’re also opening up new training programs and step-by-step guides to help you tackle the hardest parts of the AI lifecycle, from capacity planning to mounting defenses against AI-powered attacks.Here’s a rundown of our latest news, tools, and resources to help you build what’s next.Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built. We used to have to learn the language of computers. In 2026, they’re learning ours.We kicked off the year by exploring the future of agentic commerce, where AI agents navigate the web to find and buy products for us. Our leaders call this the “invisible shelf” — a world where commerce isn’t tied to a specific website. To make this reality scalable, we announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a shared language that allows agents and retailers to understand each other. We brought that same fluency to our creative and technical tools:Updates to Veo 3.1 allow creators to use simple inputs — like reference images — to generate precise, mobile-ready video.Natural language queries: With Comments to SQL in BigQuery, we’re removing the language barrier to data. Engineers can now write queries by describing their intent in natural language, prioritizing the question over the code.Let’s dive in.1. Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience (CX): Specifically built for agentic retail, this platform transforms fragmented search, commerce and service touch points into one seamless journey — whether you need a shopping assistant, a support bot, agentic search or help with merchandising. 2. We announced Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): A new open standard for agentic commerce that works across the entire shopping journey — from discovery and buying to post-purchase support. UCP establishes a common language for agents and systems to operate together across consumer surfaces, businesses and payment providers. So instead of requiring unique connections for every individual agent, UCP enables all agents to interact easily. UCP is built to work across verticals and is compatible with existing industry protocols like Agent2Agent (A2A), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Model Context Protocol (MCP).3. We updated Veo 3.1, including improvements to Ingredients to Video and Portrait mode: Veo is getting more expressive, with improvements that help you create more fun, creative, high-quality videos based on ingredient images, built directly for the mobile format. This includes:Improvements to Veo 3.1 Ingredients to Video, our capability that lets you create videos based on reference images. Native vertical outputs for Ingredients to Video (portrait mode) to power mobile-first, short-form video creation.State-of-the-art upscaling to 1080p and 4K resolution 1 for high-fidelity production workflows.These updates are launching in the Gemini app, YouTube, Flow, Google Vids, the Gemini API and Vertex AI.4. Vibe querying with comments-to-SQL: Crafting complex SQL queries can be challenging. Often, engineers simply want to express their data needs in plain English directly within their SQL workflow. That’s why we’re introducing Comments to SQL in BigQuery. This feature makes writing queries using natural language – ‘vibe querying’ – a reality. Learn more in the blog.Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud customers, read our monthly recap, Cool stuff customers built.Learn about the latest announcements, innovations, and guides when it comes to Google Cloud AI.By Andrea Morange • 43-minute readBy Siddharth Deekshit • 5-minute readBy Carolina Parada • 6-minute readBy Nathaniel Zollinger • 7-minute readBy Michael Gerstenhaber • 3-minute readsource