Google Cloud unveils new innovations at Next 2025

New innovations unveiled designed with ease of use and adaptability for users.

In his keynote at Google Cloud Next 2025, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud stated that they have delivered more than 3,000 product advancements across Google Cloud and Workspace in 2024. Kurian also pointed out that there are now over 4 million developers building with the power of Gemini, as well as a 20x increase in Vertex AI usage in the past year alone, driven by the rapid adoption of Gemini, Imagen (image generation model), and Veo (video generation model).

Within the Google Workspace, Kurian also highlighted that the impact is equally profound, with more than two billion AI assists provided monthly to business users, fundamentally reshaping how work gets done.

The success of the growth and adoption of these products goes down to not only its capabilities but also the user experience it provides. As several new innovations were announced at Next 2025, at the core of it all was the simplicity the products are bringing to customers and users in their digital journey.

“The chance to improve lives and reimagine things is why Google has been investing in AI and machine learning for more than two decades. We see it as the most important way we can advance our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet during his speech at the summit.

New innovations from Workspace to the Vertex AI platform

In Google Workspace, Google unleashed a slew of new AI innovations for which includes its popular applications like Gmail, Docs, Drive and Meet. Help me Analyze is a new feature that transforms Google Sheets into a user’s personal business analyst, intelligently identifying insights from data without the need for explicit prompting.

Workspace Docs’ new Audio Overview lets users create high-quality, human-like audio read-outs or podcast-style summaries of your documents. Meanwhile, the new Google Workspace Flows helps users automate daily work and repetitive tasks like managing approvals, researching customers, organizing emails and summarizing daily agendas.

According to Kristina Behr, VP, Product Management, Collaboration Apps, Google Workspace, the way that Google designed all of its AI tools across all of the Workspace products is focused on enabling the flow of work in a really intuitive way.

In a media briefing session prior to the summit, Behr stated that most users would be able to get used to these new innovations quickly. Not only are there no complicated codes involved, but Behr also said that Google did a lot of work to study how people are using Workspace and how AI can be used to supercharge those experiences.

Google’s Vertex AI platform enables the building and managing of AI applications and agents, as well as model training and deployment. Vertex AI usage experienced a 20X increase in growth last year, resulting in thousands of AI applications built by customers.

Google unveiled four new key enhancements to Vertex AI at Google Next, including new Dashboards to help monitor usage, throughput, latency, and troubleshoot errors.

Another improvement came via new training and tuning capabilities. Google said users can now manage custom training and tuning with their own data on top of foundational models in a secure manner across all first party model families including Gemini, Imagen, Veo, embedding, and translation models, as well as open models like Gemma, Llama, and Mistral.

Vertex AI’s new Model Optimizer leverages Gemini to automatically direct users query to the most performant model and tools, based on their quality, speed and cost preferences.

The fourth new enhancement to Vertex AI is dubbed Live API. To enable conversational interactions, Live API offers streaming audio and video directly into Gemini to let agents process and respond to media in real time.

When asked about the model’s feasibility and usability for customers, Amin Vahdat, VP & GM, ML, Systems & Cloud AI said Google has a powerful and intuitive interface that allows the developers to make things all within a GUI at the same time.

“We're really proud of the Agent Development Kit and we actually already have a number of code samples. Users can see exactly what it looks like, but the ability to essentially have the right level of abstraction, you can build very powerful scalable, easy to test, easy to deploy agents. We do pride ourselves in the ease of use, the adaptability and the ability to write very quickly,” said Vahdat.

New capabilities in Agentspace

At Google Cloud Next, the company unveiled five new enhancements to Agentspace including new seamless integration with Chrome Enterprise, allowing employees to search and access all their enterprise resources directly from the search box in Chrome.

“It really is designed to have a powerful integrative search but also reasoning capabilities over a range of enterprise data out of the box for employees. In other words, we've already seen this and just tremendous uptake from customers already where the ability to leverage enterprise data from a variety of different sources is all at your fingertips. It's not something that takes really almost any time to get up to speed on because people really treat it as intuitive as something that they wish they had all along,” explained Vahdat.

Another new capability unveiled today is Agent Gallery, which provides employees a single view of available agents across the enterprise—including those from Google, internal teams, and partners to make agents easy to discover and use.

The third new innovation on Agentspace is dubbed Agent Designer. This is a no-code interface for creating custom agents that automate everyday work tasks or enhance knowledge, helping employees adapt agents to their individual workflows and needs.

The fourth new enhancement is Google Cloud’s new Idea Generation agent. This agent uses a tournament-style framework to effectively rank ideas based on employee-defined criteria, and can help employees refine or generate new ideas, brainstorming, and problem-solving.

Another new agent from Google is its Deep Research agent, which explores complex topics on a user’s behalf to provide findings in a comprehensive, easy-to-read report.

With additional reporting from Mark Haranas