Google is replacing Vertex AI with a new platform for building enterprise AI agents

This is less a product announcement than a distribution and control grab: Google is trying to turn AI agents into a cloud-native workflow layer where it can monetize model usage, orchestration, and governance simultaneously. The second-order effect is that enterprise buyers may increasingly standardize on a single vendor for agent identity, policy enforcement, and runtime, which raises switching costs far beyond model quality alone. That is structurally bullish for GOOGL because it deepens cloud attach rates and makes Workspace a sales funnel into the AI stack.

The competitive pressure lands most directly on AMZN and MSFT because the race is shifting from “best model access” to “best operating system for agents.” If Google can make long-lived agents, cross-platform communication, and auditability feel turnkey, it can steal share from multi-cloud buyers who care more about governance than raw inference benchmarks. The real risk for AWS and Azure is not immediate displacement, but that they get commoditized into compute pipes while Google captures the higher-margin control plane.

For CMCSA and PYPL, the upside is more operational than narrative: both are credible proof points that agentic workflows are moving from pilots to production, which should compress implementation cycles for adjacent enterprises over the next 2-4 quarters. The broader cybersecurity angle is important: once agents can hold state for days and transact across systems, identity and policy enforcement become budget line items, not optional features. That supports a faster spending cycle in security-adjacent cloud tooling even if overall IT budgets stay flat.

The contrarian view is that this may be too early to matter financially for the hyperscalers: enterprise agent adoption is still gated by liability, data access, and workflow redesign, so revenue lift could lag the headline product cycle by 6-12 months. Also, Google’s “full-stack” pitch is only durable if customers believe it will remain open enough to avoid lock-in; otherwise procurement teams will default back to multi-cloud hedging. Near term, the market may overestimate the immediate win rate for Google and underestimate the long-run margin expansion from governance-heavy AI infrastructure.