Welcome to Google Cloud Next '25 (original) (raw)

Welcome to Google Cloud Next ‘25. Just one year ago, we shared a vision for how AI can fundamentally transform organizations. Today, that vision is not just a possibility – it's the vibrant reality we are collectively building.

We delivered more than 3,000 product advancements across Google Cloud and Workspace in 2024 that have enabled our momentum. There are now over 4 million developers building with the power of Gemini, our most advanced AI model family. This is coupled with a breathtaking 20x increase in Vertex AI usage in the past year alone, driven by the rapid adoption of Gemini, Imagen (our groundbreaking image generation model), and Veo (our industry-leading video generation model). Within Google Workspace, the impact is equally profound, with more than two billion AI assists provided monthly to business users, fundamentally reshaping how work gets done.

All of this is powered by our global infrastructure, which has grown to 42 regions, with new locations in Sweden, South Africa and Mexico, and rapid expansion underway in Kuwait, Malaysia and Thailand. These regions are connected by more than two million miles of terrestrial and subsea cables, and have more than 200 points of presence (PoPs) across 200+ countries and territories, creating a truly global and resilient foundation for the AI-powered future.

Starting today, this network, which moves at "Google speed" -- near-zero latency -- for billions of users worldwide, is now available to enterprises everywhere. We call it Cloud Wide Area Network (or Cloud WAN). It makes Google’s global private network available to all Google Cloud customers. Cloud WAN is a fully managed, reliable, and secure enterprise backbone to transform enterprise wide area network (WAN) architectures. It delivers a remarkable improvement of up to 40%1 in network performance, while simultaneously reducing total cost of ownership by up to 40%2.

The Accelerating Momentum of Google AI

The true measure of our success lies in the transformative impact on our customers. Here at Next ‘25, we're incredibly proud to share more than 500 customer stories from incredible brands, governments and organizations, including: the Government of Singapore, Honeywell, Intuit, L’Oreal Groupe, Mattel, McDonald’s, Mercado Libre, Papa Johns, Reddit, Samsung, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Sphere, the State of Nevada, United Wholesale Mortgage, Verizon and many more – each sharing their unique AI journeys and the tangible business results they've achieved.

Customers are choosing Google Cloud for three fundamental reasons:

  1. AI-Optimized Platform: Only Google Cloud offers an AI-optimized platform with leading price, performance and precision. It includes: advanced infrastructure and databases; world-class models (and grounding for model responses with Google-quality search); a robust developer platform in Vertex AI, including the broadest range of enterprise-ready tools to build multi-agent systems; and the most comprehensive portfolio of purpose-built agents.
  2. Open and Multi-Cloud Capabilities: Google Cloud allows customers to adopt AI agents while connecting them with their existing IT landscapes, including databases, document stores and ISV applications, as well as interoperate with agents from other providers. Organizations get value faster from their AI investments.
  3. Interoperability: Google Cloud offers an enterprise-ready AI platform, built for interoperability, which enables customers to adopt AI deeply,while addressing evolving sovereignty, security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.

Today, at Next ‘25, we’re proud to announce significant new innovations across our entire portfolio, including: our seventh-generation TPU, Ironwood, that delivers new levels of efficiency; innovations in storage, networking and compute that help optimize AI deployments; advancements in Google Distributed Cloud that let customers bring Gemini models on-premises; support for a full suite of generative media models and Gemini 2.5, our thinking models; innovations in Vertex, like Agent Development Kit and Agent2Agent Protocol that enable a multi-agent ecosystem; enhancements to Agentspace that let every employee benefit from AI; and a number of announcements across Workspace, databases, analytics, cybersecurity, our vibrant ecosystem and much, much more.

AI Hypercomputer: Unleashing Unprecedented Computational Power

Our AI Hypercomputer is a revolutionary supercomputing system meticulously designed to simplify AI deployment, dramatically improve performance, and optimize costs. It includes hardware, software, and consumption models — all optimized to deliver more intelligence at a consistently low price for training, tuning and serving AI workloads. Our infrastructure is trusted by leading AI unicorns like Anthropic, Anyscale, Arize and Contextual AI, and global brands including Airbus, Schrödinger, Toyota and many more.

Today, we're introducing:

This builds on our commitment to delivering AI hardware optionality to our customers, including our expansive NVIDIA GPU-based offerings:

Storage is a critical component for minimizing bottlenecks in both training and inference. We're introducing groundbreaking storage innovations:

Software is the key to orchestrating and simplifying access to this powerful hardware. Today, we're introducing three significant enhancements for AI inference:

All of these AI Hypercomputer hardware and software enhancements together enable us to deliver more intelligence – or useful AI output – at a consistently low price. In fact, Gemini 2.0 Flash, powered by AI Hypercomputer, achieves 24x higher intelligence per dollar compared to GPT-4o and 5x higher than DeepSeek-R1.

But not everyone has been able to benefit from all of these advancements. Historically, organizations that face strict regulatory, sovereignty, latency, or data volume issues have been unable to access the latest AI technology since they must keep their data on-premises. Today, we are excited to announce that Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) is bringing Google’s models to on-premises environments. We have partnered with NVIDIA to bring Gemini to NVIDIA Blackwell systems, with Dell as a key partner, so it can be used locally in air-gapped and connected environments. This compliments our GDC air-gapped product, which is now authorized for U.S. Government Secret and Top Secret levels, and on which Gemini is available, provides the highest levels of security and compliance.

Google’s Leading Models: Bringing the Best of Google DeepMind to Cloud Customers

Building upon the groundbreaking research of Google DeepMind, we're delivering rapid innovation across a diverse spectrum of first-party models, each designed to meet the unique needs of various customers.

Gemini, our most capable family of AI models, has been at the forefront of this innovation. Gemini 2.5 models are thinking models, capable of reasoning through their thoughts before responding, resulting in enhanced performance and improved accuracy. Two weeks ago, we brought Gemini 2.5 Pro to Vertex AI in public preview. Pro is optimized for precision, and is great for writing and debugging intricate code or extracting critical information in medical documents.

Today we’re announcing Gemini 2.5 Flash – our workhorse model optimized specifically for low latency and cost efficiency – is coming to Vertex AI. Flash is ideal for everyday use cases like providing fast responses during high-volume customer interactions, where real-time summaries or quick access to documents are needed. Gemini 2.5 Flash adjusts the depth of reasoning based on the complexity of prompts, and you can control performance based on customers’ budgets. These new features make powerful AI easier to use and more affordable for everyday use cases, enabling our customers to build AI that solves complex problems and understands nuance.

Beyond Gemini, we have an incredible suite of generative media models that are driving new levels of efficiency, creativity and customer engagement. In fact, we are the only company to offer models across all modalities–including images, voice, music and video–all of which are available today on Vertex AI. These creative tools are delivering real-world impact for customers like Agoda, a leading digital travel platform, which is creating unique and captivating visuals and videos of travel destinations using Imagen and Veo on Vertex AI, enhancing customer engagement and driving bookings. Innovative app developer Bending Spoons integrated Imagen 3 into its Remini app to launch a popular new AI filter, processing an astounding 60 million photos per day. And Kraft Heinzdramatically accelerated marketing campaign creation from eight weeks to a mere eight hours.

We’re also announcing some groundbreaking advancements:

And finally, at Google, we aim to be the most capable cloud for global research and scientific discovery. To help realize these opportunities, we are bringing the best of Google DeepMind and Google Research together with new infrastructure and AI capabilities in Google Cloud, including:

Vertex AI: The Comprehensive Platform for AI Innovation

These are just some of the models available on Vertex AI, our comprehensive platform for building and managing AI applications and agents, as well as model training and deployment. In the last year alone, we’ve seen more than 40x growth in Gemini use on Vertex AI, now with billions of API calls per month.

Vertex AI Model Garden now has more than 200 models, including Google’s models, 3rd party models from companies like Anthropic, AI21 and Mistral, and open models like Gemma and Llama. Most recently, we added models from CAMB.AI, Qodo, as well as the full portfolio of open source models from The Allen Institute.

Vertex AI usage has experienced explosive growth, increasing 20x last year, resulting in thousands of AI applications built by our customers, like Deutsche Bank, Intuit, Honeywell, Nokia, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and more. Vertex AIis empowering companies to gain significant new efficiencies by automating and accelerating routine, mission-critical processes. For example, e-commerce giant Wayfairis automating its product catalog enrichment process, updating product attributes an impressive 5x faster and achieving significant operational efficiencies. The global energy company AES is leveraging gen AI agents to automate energy safety audits, reducing audit costs by a staggering 99% and slashing audit time from 14 days to just one hour. And Commerzbank is creating AI-assisted summaries of investment advisory calls with its corporate clients, reducing administration time by a remarkable 66%.

With Vertex AI, you can be confident that your model has access to the right information at the right time. You can connect to any data source, leveraging pre-built connectors, existing APIs, and data stored in Google's Data Cloud or other cloud providers, like Amazon S3, Amazon Databases, Azure Cosmos, Pinecone, MongoDB, SQL Server, Oracle and more. We also provide seamless connections to a broad range of applications, including Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday. And, importantly, you always maintain control over your data; your data is never used by Google without your explicit permission.

And for factuality, we offer the most comprehensive approach to grounding on the market today. We combine the unparalleled quality of Google Search with your own enterprise data, ensuring that your AI models are grounded in accurate and reliable information. We have expanded the ability to ground Gemini on trusted third-party sources, including Cotality, Dun & Bradstreet, HG Insights, S&P Global, and ZoomInfo, providing you with even greater context and accuracy. And today, we’re making it possible to ground your agents with Google Maps, helping ensure that agent responses relying on location context are factual and fresh.

We are also announcing new advancements in Vertex AI to improve your ability to manage your AI initiatives:

Expanding Vertex to Enable a Multi-Agent Ecosystem

We believe Vertex is the most open developer AI platform in the cloud and the only one delivering multi-agent solutions – empowering multiple AI agents to work together. Agents are intelligent systems that exhibit reasoning, planning and memory capabilities. They are capable of thinking multiple steps ahead and working seamlessly across software and systems, all to accomplish tasks on your behalf and under your supervision. Agents are poised to play an increasingly vital role in the workforce, collaborating with employees to drive efficiencies, enhance decision-making, and accelerate innovation.

Today, we’re introducing new capabilities to help you move towards a multi-agent ecosystem – regardless of where you stand in your AI journey or which technology stack you've chosen.

Google Agentspace: Empowering Every Employee with AI

We're also empowering enterprises to put AI agents in the hands of every employee with Google Agentspace, and are seeing tremendous interest with customers like Cohesity, Gordon Food Services, KPMG, Rubrik, Wells Fargo and more.

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/image1_ZHMb68C.max-1000x1000.jpg

Agentspace brings together Google-quality enterprise search, conversational AI, Gemini and third-party agents to empower employees to find and synthesize information from within their organizations, converse with AI agents, and take action with their enterprise applications. It delivers a broad set of tools, including pre-built connectors to search and transact with documents, databases and SaaS applications, as well as advanced security and compliance to protect your data and IP.

Today, employees can use Agentspace to access expert Google-built AI agents like NotebookLM, which is already used by more than 100,000 businesses. It allows you to upload multiple source materials — like PDFs, Google Docs, websites, and YouTube videos — and then summarize the content, ask questions about the materials, and format responses in a specific way.

We are announcing several exciting enhancements to Agentspace:

Google Workspace: AI-Powered Productivity

Gemini is not only powering best-in-class AI capabilities as a model, but also supercharging our own products, like Google Workspace – which includes popular apps like Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Meet. Workspace’s AI features have improved employee collaboration and productivity for more than a decade at companies like Freshfields, Rivian, Schwarz Group and millions of other businesses. Today, we are announcing a number of new Workspace innovations to further empower users with AI, including:

High-Impact Agents: Delivering Tangible Business Results

Across our AI portfolio, we're witnessing a surge in the creation of highly-advanced AI agents. Organizations are pushing the boundaries, developing agents that not only excel in coding, data, and security, but also revolutionize customer service and the creative process. Here are five categories of agents where we are already seeing tremendous business impact:

Customer Agents empower your customers to quickly find answers and the right products. They can synthesize and reason across all types of multi-modal information, including text, audio, images, and video; communicate and engage naturally, with human-like speech and dialog; connect across enterprise applications on behalf of the user; and be used anywhere – in the contact center, on the web, on devices, in stores, in cars and more.

We have already introduced Vertex AI Search for Healthcare and Retail, making it incredibly easy for doctors, nurses, and providers to rapidly search and analyze diverse patient data, and for retailers to add product discovery to their websites powered by Google Search. This is helping leading brands like Lowe's revolutionize product discovery, and Globo, the Latin American media giant, create a recommendations experience inside its streaming platform that more than doubled their click-through play rate on videos.

Google Cloud’s own pre-built Customer Engagement Suite is transforming customer service. Grounded in a company’s data, it provides out-of-the-box functionally to build agents across web, mobile, call center, in-store and with third-party telephony and CRM systems. These unique capabilities have led to rapid growth in conversational AI agent usage, helping customers like DBS, aleading Asian financial services group, reduce customer call handling times by an impressive 20%.

Today, we're announcing the next-generation of our Customer Engagement Suite, which will include human-like, high-definition voices; the ability to understand emotions so agents can adapt better during conversations; streaming video support so virtual agents can interpret and respond to what they see in real-time through customer devices; and AI assistance to build custom agents in a no-code interface.

We are also improving conversational customer experiences beyond the call center by offering purpose-built vertical agents that address specific industry use cases, including Food Ordering, Automotive and Retail. Examples of these agents in-action include:

Creative Agents are being used to supercharge creative teams, including those in media production, marketing, advertising, design and more. In some cases, agents are augmenting creative teams to enable content production at massive scale. In others, they are helping reimagine how stories can be told for a new generation of audiences. At Google, we are using this technology, with direction by our marketing teams, to build the Fall Pixel phone ad campaign. A few other examples include:

In addition, we're thrilled to partner with Adobe, the leader in creativity, to bring our advanced Imagen 3 and Veo 2 models to applications like Adobe Express.

Data Agents enable data teams to effectively manage data and business teams to activate it. Our data platform – BigQuery – has 5x more customers than the two leading independent data cloud companies. With BigQuery, you can activate all your data for AI, combining structured and unstructured data, and working with open formats like Apache Iceberg directly integrated into BigQuery. You can also use BigQuery to access data in any storage system, any SaaS application or on any cloud. And as we announced last year, the full range of Oracle Database services, running on OCI, are integrated with BigQuery, Gemini, and Vertex AI, and are beingdeployed natively in 20 Google Cloud locations.

Today we are announcing specialized agents for every member of your data team:

Customers are seeing tremendous benefits from our Data Agents. Mattel, for example, can analyze sentiment and consumer preferences in real time. Using BigQuery, Spotifyharnesses enormous amounts of data to deliver personalized experiences to over 675 million users worldwide, and Unileverreaches millions of retailers in emerging markets, processing 75,000 orders daily. Bayer built an agent that combines Google search trends and internal data to forecast flu trends, improving public health outcomes. And public sector organizations like the State of Nevada are using agents to speed up benefit claims.

Coding Agents: At Google, AI is powering tools across our software development life cycle, including tools that help developers code. In fact, at Google today, more than 25% of new code is already generated by AI and reviewed by Google engineers.

Gemini's fast performance, large context window, and advanced reasoning capabilities make it exceptionally well-suited for coding assistance. We offer Gemini Code Assist in Google Cloud, Android Studio, Firebase Studio and your favorite IDE, and our enterprise version understands your code base, standards, and conventions. Today, we're announcing new Code Assist agents to help with everything from modernizing code to assisting with the full software development lifecycle:

Security Agents can dramatically increase the speed and effectiveness of security analysts. The integration of AI across our security products is just one reason why organizations around the world are making Google part of their security team. Our capabilities have been adopted by thousands of organizations like Charles Schwab, Dun & Bradstreet, Government of Singapore, Vertiv, Vodafone, and more.

We offer critical cyber defense capabilities for today’s challenging threat environment, and today, we're introducing a number of new innovations:

Commitment to Openness and Partnership

Realizing the full potential of gen AI requires an enterprise AI platform that offers a broad, practical set of end-to-end capabilities, optimized for both cost and performance. This platform must also be open, seamlessly integrate with existing systems, and be supported by a strong partner ecosystem.

At Google Cloud, we are committed to continuous innovation AND making it easy to integrate it with your existing technology landscape. Our commitment to interoperability enables you to:

In closing, this is an extraordinary time to be working with these transformative technologies. We at Google are deeply committed to helping you innovate by delivering world-class infrastructure, models, platforms and agents; offering an open, multi-cloud platform that provides flexibility and choice; and building for interoperability, accelerating time to value from your AI investments.

The opportunity presented by AI is unlike anything we've ever witnessed. It holds the power to improve lives, enhance productivity and reimagine processes on a scale previously unimaginable. Google's been bringing machine learning into our products for more than 20 years, and our investment in AI is deeply rooted in our core mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. With Google Cloud, we extend this mission, viewing AI as the most potent catalyst for helping you – our customers, developers and partners – advance your missions.

1. Cross-Cloud Network provides up to 40% improved performance compared to the public internet. 2. Cloud WAN provides up to a 40% savings in total cost of ownership (TCO) over a customer-managed WAN solution. 3. Compared to other managed and open source Kubernetes offerings based on our internal benchmarks.

Posted in