Google Cloud Launches AI Agent Partner Program To Drive GenAI Sales, Customer Growth

‘Through this program, we’re enhancing the incentives, product support and co-selling opportunities to help our services and ISV partners bring these solutions to market faster, reach more customers and grow their AI agent businesses,’ says Google Cloud’s global channel chief, Kevin Ichhpurani.

Google Cloud is looking to scale AI agent sales and customer adoption to new heights by launching its new Google Cloud AI Agent ecosystem program to help partners build and co-innovate AI agents via new technical and go-to-market resources.

“Through this program, we’re enhancing the incentives, product support and co-selling opportunities to help our services and ISV partners bring these solutions to market faster, reach more customers and grow their AI agent businesses,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, president of Google Cloud’s Global Partner Organization, in a blog post Wednesday.

In addition, the $46 billion Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud giant launched a new AI Agent Space Wednesday on the Google Cloud Marketplace, with the goal of enabling customers to more easily find and deploy partner-built AI agents.

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AI agents, also known as agentic AI technology, is one of the fastest-growing AI market segments in the world. By 2028, IT research firm Gartner estimates that at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from zero percent in 2024.

Ben Kessler, CEO of Chicago-based 66degrees, a Google Cloud Premier Partner and top AI solution provider, said his company is seeing “tremendous momentum” around AI agents as customers are leveraging the new technology to drive productivity and revenue.

“We’ve built AI agents for large theme parks that are sitting on Google, which is enhancing the guest experience,” said Kessler. “For travel and tourism, we’ve built the customer experience that before you get to the resort or hotel, you’re engaging with a Google AI agent that is extending your experience.

“So we’re able to push our solutions into the market with the back end of an agent that’s built initially with Google technology but uses [66degrees] as the final mile for us to help execute and train the Google model on that client’s use case,” Kessler said.

Three Keys To Google’s New AI Agent Partner Program

Google Cloud’s plan for its new AI Agent partner program is to increase the development and adoption of AI agents by supporting partners in three key areas: accelerated agent development, go-to-market success and increased customer visibility.

To drive agent AI development, Google Cloud will provide partners with direct access to products and Google engineering teams for guidance and optimization of their AI agents.

“Partners will also receive early access to our latest AI technologies, technical enablement and best practices, and dedicated support for bringing their solutions to market quickly via Google Cloud Marketplace,” said Ichhpurani.

To help drive go-to-market success, Google Cloud is offering co-selling opportunities and programs specifically designed for AI agent solutions to help partners more effectively promote their offerings and drive adoption across a wider range of customers.

Lastly, the new program will highlight innovative work from Google Cloud partners through targeted marketing resources, blogs and dedicated events, with the goal of increasing visibility of partner-built AI agents.

Google Cloud’s New AI Agent Space

Google Cloud’s AI Agent Space is a new category inside the company’s Google Cloud Marketplace. The goal is for customers to easily find, buy and deploy partners’ AI agents on Google’s online marketplace.

AI Agent Space is available today with solutions from select partners. However, Ichhpurani said Google plans to add “hundreds of additional AI agent” offerings over the coming months.

66degrees CEO: AI Agents Are ‘Improving Human Decisions’

66degrees’ Kessler believes Google Cloud is striking while the AI agentic market is hot.

Agentic AI technology is designed to independently make decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals. Its popularity is gaining due to its ability to take action autonomously to help customers realize their vision for generative AI to increase productivity or create new revenue streams.

“If you can actually fine-tune the agent to understand—and we’re working with even large telecommunications customers on this—if you can train that agent on the customer’s data, it can actually have a more fine-tuned and better customer experience than if you or I were actually serving that customer,” said Kessler. “Essentially, what [AI agents] do is, it’s not taking the human decision out of this—it’s improving human decisions with the correct data.”

Google Cloud, for its part, hopes the new partner program will be a boon for solution providers looking to win new AI deals and revenue.

“We’re dedicated to empowering our partners with the tools, resources and support they need to build and deploy successful AI agents,” said Ichhpurani (pictured). “We’re excited to see the transformative solutions they create and the positive impact they'll have on customers in the coming year.”