Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has revamped the channel go-to-market strategy, introduced a slew of AI innovation and tells partners there are ‘billions of dollars’ on the table for those who get in on agentic AI.
When it comes to trucking, the last thing you want is a logistics delay that keeps your drivers off the road.
That’s the challenge one international distribution company was facing before Premier Google Cloud partner Pythian stepped in with a “game-changing” solution that leveraged Google Cloud’s arsenal of agentic and generative AI technology, including Gemini, Workspace and Vertex.
The customer was grappling with the impact of using manual, handwritten bills of lading—legal documents that outline the contractual terms of shipments—for drivers at the company’s distribution centers.
“For thousands of drivers, it took well over an hour to get that detail back into their systems so they could go back on the road. That’s important because they make money by picking up and delivering packages, so waiting around isn’t good for business,” said Brooks Borcherding, CEO of Pythian, Ottawa, Ontario. “We used Gemini and Vertex to use computer vision to find the fields that matter and automatically update their distribution system so each driver is back on the road. The ROI is powerful because each driver saved about 55 minutes of that hour of waiting, which means each individual driver can be back on the road delivering again much faster now. … Overall, they’re getting about two more hours on the road for every single driver, every single day. That was a game-changer for them.”
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Thanks to its massive impact, the international distribution customer is now deploying Pythian’s AI solution into its 40 other distribution centers, which is one of the reasons why the solution provider’s AI sales with Google Cloud skyrocketed annually by “several hundreds of percentages” last year, Borcherding said.
Pythian’s success with Google-based AI solutions comes as Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian is putting a full-court press on the company’s competitors with the move in January to offer Gemini 2.0 automatically as part of certain Workspace licenses instead of as a separate up-to-$30-per-user, per-month add-on, a move some solution providers saw as controversial.
“Why did we include Gemini for every user? It’s very simple. Because when you’re going through a fundamental technology shift, you need to make it accessible and available to everyone so they can change the way they do things,” said Kurian in a recent interview with CRN.
While some solution providers told CRN they are concerned about the impact the move will have on their margins, Kurian argued that the automatic inclusion of Gemini with Workspace will in fact be a boon for partner profitability as it will drive new AI opportunities and increase market competition against Microsoft’s Copilot AI offerings.
“Since every Workspace customer 1744043207 has Gemini, partners are building offerings with every customer. But with Microsoft, you can’t assume that [every user has Copilot] because people have to pay extra for Copilot,” Kurian said. “Which one is simpler for a partner to build an AI business around?”
Kurian sees the Gemini-Workspace tie-up as one piece of a master plan to capitalize on the next wave—agentic AI—with huge financial upside for channel partners.
“Agentic AI is the biggest opportunity for partners, with billions of dollars of economic impact in terms of productivity from delivering agents within customers,” said Kurian. “That’s where we see the future.”
Google owning every layer of the AI stack itself—from its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure to the data layer with solutions like BigQuery, to AI platforms Agentspace and Vertex—gives it a huge advantage over its rivals, said Kurian, who has boosted Google Cloud sales by over 700 percent since becoming CEO in 2019.
“We have our own DeepMind AI research team that’s building first-party models and agents that allow us to iterate quicker to advance the boundaries, while other companies tend to depend on third parties,” Kurian said. “It’s like you’re an electric vehicle company. We have control of the battery technology and everything else associated with it. Others don’t even use their own batteries but are more just about assembly. That’s a big difference.”
Google Cloud’s roaring AI innovation engine is linking together technologies throughout the AI stack—from its AI-accelerating Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Gemini 2.0 large language models (LLMs) to its AI Agent Builder technology and popular Workspace end-user portfolio.
“It’s not just Gemini with Workspace, but it’s Gemini plus [the] NotebookLM [AI-enhanced note-taking tool], plus Google’s Deep Research, plus agentic AI, etc.—they’ve made it super compelling and a real differentiator versus Copilot and Office 365,” said Pythian’s Borcherding. “It allows a customer to create a series of micro-LLMs for themselves that are already grounded, already trained against their data and have the appropriate access control. Now we’ve got this real value-add application that is really distinguished with a lot of Google’s core capabilities.”
In the past year, Google Cloud said partners have more than doubled the number of AI engagements with customers, while channel partner funding has increased 2X for AI opportunities and 4X for Workspace services deals.
“We are substantially expanding our investment in the channel in 2025,” said Kurian. “We are monetarily investing a lot more in our partner ecosystem to build AI solutions on top of our platform. Because we enable an open platform and interoperability, it allows the addressable market for our solutions to be as wide as possible, which, in turn, is creating a lot of opportunities for our partners.”
With Gemini now easily accessible to many Workspace users, Kurian expects partners to win more Workspace deals with Gemini, building custom AI agents for customers. At the same time, he is boosting channel enablement via the Google Cloud Marketplace and a revamped partner program aimed at fueling co-selling between services partners and Google field teams.
Google Cloud’s ‘Powerful’ Agentic AI Charge
The Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud company is pouring funding into creating innovative AI agents that go beyond chatbot capabilities to automatically make decisions and take actions for the customer without a person having to prompt the system.
“The word ‘copilot’ basically says, not the pilot, meaning I’m assisting a human,” said Kurian, alluding to the name of Microsoft’s competing Copilot toolset. “There’s some benefit to that. But what our AI agents are all about is I can have the agent play the front role and only bring in a human when I need to. The opportunity we have with partners
here for the future is much larger than what we’ve already accomplished.”
IT research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from virtually zero in 2024.
Kurian is arming channel partners with a slew of innovation, including its recently launched Agentspace platform that binds together Gemini’s advanced reasoning with Google’s enterprise-quality search and data capabilities that give AI agents access to all of a client’s data and applications with prebuilt connectors. Agentspace is a launch point for partners to build custom AI agents that apply generative AI contextually and allow enterprises to scale their AI ambitions.
“Partners can now take our Agentspace and Vertex AI platforms to create an agent to do literally anything,” said Google Cloud global channel chief Kevin Ichhpurani. “We have partners building agents in retail for returns. We have partners’ agents in medicine that are leveraging our AI to automate the entire process of taking notes and updating the [electronic medical record] systems. Agents that are looking at object defect detection and predictive maintenance on the shop floor,” said Ichhpurani, president of Google Cloud’s global partner ecosystem. “These are powerful solutions.”
Many Google Cloud partners told CRN they’ve built AI agents across industries for use cases such as providing predictive maintenance on the manufacturing floor, helping insurance companies better address claims, automating returns for retailers, providing financial forecasting for analysts, reviewing IP patents for government agencies, generating code for e-commerce organizations and automating core business processes for customers—just to name a few.
Chicago-based Google Cloud partner 66degrees, for example, created a legal AI agent for law firms that is driving productivity and cost savings for customers.
“We’ve created this agent for a handful of different clients—especially highly regulated industries—to be able to go in and [review] the master services agreement, the statement of work, the initial contracts that these companies use, and so much more,” said Ben Kessler, CEO of 66degrees. “We’ve trained the agents to review contracts, assist in legal functions, read updates in public policy for a particular country—so taking unstructured or structured data sources into this agent.”
Customers are selecting 66degrees’ agent, in some cases, in favor of spending their budget on legal associates who would need to spend countless hours on a particular project.
“Instead of a person who could cost $150,000 to $200,000 a year from a salary standpoint, our agent is able to do this work in minutes,” Kessler said.
66degrees’ AI business with Google exploded over 300 percent in 2024 compared with 2023, while the company’s entire Google Cloud business increased over 40 percent.
Revamped Partner Program Aimed At Co-Selling AI
Google Cloud’s CEO understands that selling agentic AI services and solutions can be a tricky task, which is why the company revamped its flagship Partner Network and Partner Advantage programs.
Google Cloud’s revamped partner program is focused on increasing go-to-market teamwork and co-selling opportunities between partners and Google sales reps to drive partners’ AI services and agents. With the update, Kurian said Google’s field organization will start co-selling with more services partners as part of its go-to-market with enterprise customers.
“We are a products company,” said Kurian. “We want partners who can deliver services and solutions to customers. … Everything we will now be doing around co-sell is essentially to facilitate—if a partner builds a solution and a customer likes that solution, we are not just supporting them with technology, but we can also take them into our customer base.”
For the past several years, Google Cloud has pushed partners away from simply reselling a Google product like GCP or Workspace. Instead, the company has driven channel dollar incentives toward partners who provide strategic value-add services that help solve customers’ business challenges.
“Our partner program was very much geared toward reselling or very resell-oriented,” said Ichhpurani. “We are already co-selling on the ground every day with partners, but the program itself is being completely revamped in order to really enable a co-sell motion with simplicity for partners. As a partner, you will now have a much easier process to register deals, to get [credit] for the work you’re doing like, ‘Hey, I opened a door on this account. I did a POC [proof of concept] or an assessment on this account. I moved additional workloads in this account.’”
In addition, partners will gain points to move up in the program based on how much co-selling they do alongside Google, with incentives tied to those activities.
“The days of the reseller model are over, whereas the days of the services partner are thriving at this point,” said 66degrees’ Kessler. “All we can think about—and the vast majority of our revenue—is services. We intentionally shifted our business model this way.”
Partners are bullish that the revamped partner program along with the Google Cloud Marketplace opportunities and continual launching of new AI innovation from Google is a formula for success.
One of the main reasons why partners such as Pythian and 66degrees say their AI business is so hot right now is because Kurian built Google Cloud’s AI portfolio from the ground up with a key component in mind: openness.
Kurian’s Open AI Strategy Is Fueling Growth
When Kurian stepped into his CEO role at Google Cloud following a 22-year stint leading product development at Oracle, he knew keeping the company’s platform open was critical to its future.
“Maintaining an open platform allows us to interoperate, which is key in the AI era,” said Kurian. “The reality is any agent that people are buying has to interoperate within a company’s existing systems and existing cloud technology. Our agents interoperate with AWS [Amazon Web Services], [Microsoft] Azure and other cloud providers, as well as with other packaged applications like Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP. … So that openness allows customers to say, ‘I actually like this technology. It works with what I have,’ rather than ‘I need to rip everything out in order to use the technology.’”
Google’s ability for its AI agents to interoperate across other vendor agents and AI technology is a major reason Accenture, the $71 billion company that sits atop the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500, is betting big on Google Cloud.
“Everything is engineered from Thomas’s strategic intent for Google Cloud to be open. It’s pretty remarkable to actually start strategically from there and then line up all engineering to support that, which is what he’s done,” said Accenture’s Scott Alfieri, the global leader of Accenture’s massive Google Business Group consisting of tens of thousands of employees dedicated to driving Google sales. “An open cloud provides customers choice and allows partners to bring our specialization around industry and function as well as elite engineering, together to create new market positions.”
This year, Google Cloud and Salesforce teamed together to add Gemini to Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, meaning all Salesforce customers can begin using Gemini to power their AI agents. Customers are now able to unify their data analytics across Looker, BigQuery and Salesforce’s Tableau.
“When we think about where Salesforce plays and where Google plays in the market, it’s just this beautiful complementary matchup that only someone like Google can do,” said Alfieri. “You now are able to select Gemini so that when you’re building agents—let’s say it’s in a contact center situation, which is where a lot of our work is—you’re now using the generative AI engine and R&D investments that are realized around the world from Google, to now allow agents to be utilizing the best LLMs that exist in the marketplace that are multimodal.”
Dublin, Ireland-based Accenture has created a slew of unique AI agents for its massive global customer base, such as its Health Document AI Accelerator that leverages Accenture technology on top of Vertex and Google’s health-care-specific foundation model MedLM. The agent interprets medical data from various data sources—like imaging and test results—to provide better personalized patient care, optimized payer services and instant retrieval of information.
Demand for AI solutions is so high that Google and Accenture launched a joint Generative AI Center of Excellence last year that currently includes over 55 prototypes and assets with more than 670 industry and functional use cases.
“We’re seeing a high demand for AI agents here because agentic is that next generation from a chatbot, where now you have the ability to have an entire mosaic of subsequent, more discrete agents that are called for specific point needs,” said Alfieri. “We’re actually bringing an AI agent control layer that has tremendous interoperability to truly drive business processes.”
Alfieri sees 2025 as the beginning of the “agentic AI era,” which he said is going to be the biggest AI channel opportunity over the next two to three years.
“In 2024, [Google Cloud] did over 2,200 product releases. Just think about the base of product expansion that’s happening,” he said. “The Google Cloud Platform with Gemini, Agentspace, Workspace—what all those AI capabilities allow us to do is unprecedented.”
Google Cloud’s Roaring AI Engine
Kurian’s R&D efforts over the past year have been staggering as Google Cloud’s AI portfolio has accelerated customer AI adoption thanks to platforms like Vertex, which lets data scientists and engineers create, train, test, monitor, tune and deploy machine learning and AI models.
Another home run has been Google’s Model Garden, which lets partners and customers choose from over 160 AI models including Google’s Gemini and Imagen, open-source models like Meta’s Llama and Mistral AI, as well as third-party models like Anthropic Claude. In addition, partners hailed Google’s AI Agent Builder, which lets developers build and deploy AI agents grounded in their own data while giving clients the convenience of a no-code agent building console.
Google Cloud not only offers platforms for partners to build AI services and agents on top of, but also its own packaged agents for Workspace and GCP. Partners told CRN use cases include selling Google’s packaged data agent to help financial firms improve data analysis forecasting, as well as Google’s packaged cybersecurity agents to better identify external threats and vulnerabilities for their clients.
“We’re working on agents right now where the agent can book the hotel reservation for you and can help modify your reservation,” said 66degrees’ Kessler. “We’ve created these horizontal agents for people that have been quite successful.”
Gemini 2.0 Boosts Agentic AI Opportunities
Underpinning much of Google Cloud’s AI portfolio is the company’s new Gemini portfolio of LLMs: Gemini 2.0.
Gemini 2.0 not only delivers a slew of generative AI capabilities—from content generation and data analysis of image, audio and video—but was built to enable agentic AI workflows while also introducing new reasoning capabilities. The new Gemini provides multimodal understanding, coding, function calling and the ability to follow complex instructions, which strengthen agentic experiences.
Kurian said Gemini 2.0 understands more of the world, can think multiple steps ahead and acts on behalf of users with their supervision. These are market differentiators that only Google Cloud can offer with its vast history and market dominance in data analytics, he said.
“An agent is only as good as the information or data that feeds it,” Kurian said. “Our strength in data analytics allows us to feed these AI models and agents with very high-quality information. That’s something we are known for. Some of the other players don’t have the strength that we do in analytics and data.”
With the new Gemini 2.0 inside Workspace, Google is taking its collaboration and productivity suite of Gmail, Drive, Sheets, Meet and more—which combined have more than 3 billion users—to the next level.
New core technologies recently introduced to Workspace include Agentspace and NotebookLM, an AI-powered research and writing assistant with features like data protection and AI-generated audio overviews. Gemini Deep Research also now allows Workspace users to perform complex research with multistep analysis, generating reports exportable to Google Docs.
“Google is the only vendor that has eight technologies with over a billion users each. There is no competitor. So just the grounding data for their model would overwhelm any other implementation by any other vendor,” said Pythian’s Borcherding.
Accenture, for its part, is leveraging this end-to-end AI portfolio to help the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office use Workspace with Gemini to review patents. The solution provider giant is also using Workspace’s language translation technology to boost production for a large airline manufacturer.
“Through Workspace, we brought forward all the airline manufacturers’ engineering documentation as well as all the instruction manuals. So you’re bringing data to the front for the individual engineer. And then with Google, you’re also able to drive language translation where needed—that’s true personalization,” said Alfieri.
Google Cloud Marketplace Driving Partner AI Sales
Another major initiative Kurian is leading to accelerate agentic AI customer adoption for partners is the Google Cloud Marketplace. Channel partners can currently sell their AI agents on the online marketplace just like an ISV.
Critically, customers can now spend their Google Cloud commitments and decrement them dollar-for-dollar when purchasing a partner’s AI agents on the online marketplace just like it’s a Google product.
“Partners can publish a human resources agent, for example, on our marketplace so that people can consume it in the same way they consume a Workday application,” said Kurian. “Partners can publish a shopping agent or a customer service agent built on top of Vertex and Agentspace on the marketplace so a customer can discover it and procure it.”
Google Cloud’s AI marketplace strategy is to connect partners’ AI agents, services and offerings directly to Google’s vast customer base.
“We’re doubling down on providing distribution to the Google Cloud Marketplace for companies that are building agents,” Google Cloud’s Ichhpurani said. “We’ll even compensate our reps to take those solutions to market.”
Accenture, 66Degrees and Pythian all have their own AI agents and AI-related offerings on the marketplace or plan to by the first half of 2025.
“We have our AI Jedi services right now on the marketplace with the appropriate discount based on you consuming it,” said Pythian’s Borcherding. “Plus, it comes off the consumption number of the actual customers themselves. So it’s contributing to their consumption requirements on an annual basis, which is exactly what they’re looking for.”
Kurian’s $48 Billion Rise
Google Cloud reported a record $12 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2024, representing a 30 percent increase year over year—outpacing both AWS and Microsoft in the quarter in terms of sales growth rates. Google Cloud is now running at a $48 billion run rate, up from total revenue of $5.8 billion in 2018.
Kurian has also been a profitability game-changer for Google. Before he joined, Google’s cloud business had always been in the red in terms of operating income. However, that all changed under Kurian’s leadership when Google Cloud reported operating income of $191 million for the first quarter of 2023. Operating income reached a record high of $2.1 billion during the fourth quarter of 2024, up 142 percent, compared with $864 million during the fourth quarter of 2023.
“Each cloud hyperscaler has their own advantages for the unique needs of a customer’s application. We used to pitch customers with, ‘If you’re looking at specific needs around data, go with Google for that part.’ But now, Thomas took it from that $6 billion view of, ‘Yes, it’s a data stack’ to now a $48 billion view as the cloud provider for scale. Their whole end-to-end AI stack is very impressive,” said Borcherding. “Thomas created the strongest AI platform in the market right now.”
Kurian said his success in increasing Google Cloud’s revenue by over 700 percent over the past seven years was mostly due to enabling and growing a successful partner ecosystem.
“If you go back to 2019, we had no enterprise customer base,” said Kurian. “The fact that partners choose us is because of our commitment to offer really differentiated products, work with customers to help them achieve their business vision and commit to and help partners grow with us.”
With a revamped channel go-to-market strategy and program, an ever-growing AI stack of innovation, Kurian is determined to not only take AI to never-before-seen heights but to have his partners come out on top.
“Very few companies have grown at our rate. It’s a reflection of the partners who helped us build it,” Kurian said. “The opportunity we have together with our partners for the future is much larger than what we’ve already accomplished. That’s really exciting to me. … For us, it’s not about taking a fixed-size pie and cutting it up for everyone to split. Our goal has always been to grow the total pie together with our partners.”
