Loads of news came out of a hot Google Cloud Next 2025 in Las Vegas. The most notable announcements? Sovereign AI solutions on-prem, developer innovations that meet timely needs, very applicable multimodality for content and CX, and new elements for building the enterprise agentic AI stack. What was lacking? In the security domain, AI agents notably still find limited use in the security command center and SecOps. Discover what happened at Google Cloud Next 2025 and what to do about it.

Top Developments At Google Cloud Next 2025

  • AI sovereignty: AI plays a significant part in meeting digital sovereignty requirements. Gemini can now run in Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) locally and in air-gapped environments, making AI accessible for regulated organizations. Vertex AI offers access to proprietary, third-party, and open-source models, reducing dependency on non-sovereign tools and providing flexibility. Additionally, Google announced Agentspace, which provides granular IT controls, including role-based access control (RBAC), VPC Service Controls, and IAM integration.
  • Developer innovations: Google unveiled a comprehensive vision for AI-enhanced software development, pushing the boundaries of current paradigms centered on chat interfaces. Agent technology, described as specialized AI services that can collaborate on complex, goal-oriented tasks, is encapsulated within streamlined services like the Agent Development Kit (ADK). The Kanban-style assistant interface breaks new ground in AI coding assistance, aligning well with agile development practices and signaling an evolution in enterprise AI tools beyond chatbots.
  • Multimodal content creation: Multimodal Vertex AI now unifies advanced generative models — Lyria (music), Veo 2 (video), Chirp 3 (speech), and Imagen 3 (images) — into a single platform. This integration enables the creation of fully orchestrated production assets, such as promotional campaigns that include photos, custom soundtracks, and voiceovers from simple text prompts. By consolidating these models with enterprise-grade safety measures, Google streamlines content creation workflows, reduces time to market, and ensures compliance, positioning multimodal Vertex AI as a transformative solution for businesses.
  • AI-centric customer experience: In a demonstration, Google showcased how a bot could assist in finding the right fertilizer for petunias, highlighting the high-quality, human-sounding voice and the integration of video and other channels for complex interactions. The bot’s ability to consult with an agent in the background for more challenging queries demonstrated the potential for AI to enhance customer service experiences significantly.
  • Enterprise agentic AI: Google introduced several elements to build and orchestrate enterprise agentic AI systems. The agent SDK provides a toolkit for constructing agentic architectures, linking reasoners, memory, and necessary tools and data. Interoperability between agents is a market challenge, but Google’s agent SDK supports MCP, a popular agent framework. The Agent2Agent protocol facilitates interagent and interecosystem communication for complex workflows, though it is not a security or governance framework.
  • Security enhancements: Google unified its security portfolio under Google Unified Security (GUS), encompassing SecOps, the security control center (SCC), and Chrome Enterprise Premium, and plans to use agentic AI for security incident and malware analysis, with SCC enhancements such as agentless malware scanning, regulatory compliance management, and attack path simulation. Additionally, Google introduced Model Armor for AI protection and discussed integrating Wiz intellectual property into SCC and GCP cloud security post-acquisition.

What Should You Do Next?

Given the new capabilities in AI sovereignty, agentic AI, and multimodality, here’s what tech and CX leaders can plan to do next:

  • Consider whether these new options address your digital sovereignty needs. Digital sovereignty requirements are growing and becoming more specific in nature. While full sovereignty is challenging, dedicated solutions can address specific needs. Google Distributed Cloud helps regulated sectors leverage Google Cloud functionalities on-prem. S3NS, a Google and Thales company, addresses sovereignty requirements in France under SecNum regulation, with similar constructs in development for Germany. Organizations can achieve digital sovereignty targets using foreign cloud vendors alongside native options. Public-sector organizations and orgs in regulated industries can leverage these options for their sovereign cloud deployments.
  • Multimodal is here, so redefine your content strategy. Google Next made it clear that enterprises are leveraging multimodal platforms like Vertex AI, and so should you. But how do you get started? Identify your core objectives — marketing videos, branded imagery, or full-scale campaigns — and map them to your platform’s functionalities. Collaborate with technical teams to establish thorough safety protocols and ensure regulatory compliance at every stage. Iteratively refine your prompts and outputs to shape engaging multimedia experiences that resonate with your audience. By harnessing generative AI across multiple formats, you can streamline production, adapt swiftly to market demands, and maintain a decisive edge in an evolving creative landscape.
  • Test out a unified agentic AI interface with context. If you leverage Google’s productivity suite, you may be able to unify agents with a single adaptive interface by connecting Agentspace to popular apps like Confluence, Google Drive, Jira, Microsoft SharePoint, ServiceNow, and more — all from within Agentspace.
  • Diagnose changes to user interactions with applications. Enterprise application interfaces with forms, buttons, and workflows are evolving as AI evolves. Google’s agentic approach signals a major shift in user engagement, with software starting with narrow functions (i.e., a customer interacting with an agent and a human supervisor, as demoed at Next). Similar transformations will occur in marketing, employee experience, and other functions. This is a wake-up call for enterprise application and experience leaders. Enterprises must define, standardize, design, and govern how users interact with these new applications.
  • Approach multicloud security success with skepticism. AI agents for Level 1 semiautomatic incident response and malware analysis are promising use cases (i.e., capturing evidence during detection, investigation, and response workflows), but automatic AI-driven cloud configuration security and drift remediation remain too risky. Using SCC for multicloud (AWS and Azure) is feasible but underutilized by Google Cloud Platform customers. Security professionals using GCP should monitor how Wiz IP transforms Google cloud security and whether Google can maintain Wiz as a cloud-agnostic CNAPP and cloud detection and response tool.

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