Welcome to the agentic era: Public sector highlights and reflections from Next ‘26

Welcome to the agentic era! Last week, leaders from our public sector customer and partner ecosystem took the stage at Google Cloud Next to share how they are leveraging AI and agents to scale their impact and advance their missions, right now.

I was honored to lead a spotlight session on “Agentic transformation in the public sector” featuring Ted Ross, Chief Information Officer at the City of Los Angeles, Jeremy Walsh, Chief AI Officer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and Pavan Pidugu, Chief Digital and Information Officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation. These leaders shared how they are leveraging AI and agents to empower their workforce, unlock new levels of productivity, and transform how services are delivered.

The kind of innovation and transformation we talked about at Google Cloud Next is only possible with a fully integrated AI stack. Google uniquely offers a secure and AI optimized stack spanning our AI infrastructure, leading models including Gemini, data management capabilities, agents and agentic platforms. This stack is the foundation for transformation and lasting mission impact.

Delivering on the mission: Key announcements and innovations across our integrated stack

Let’s take a closer look at the latest announcements and innovations across our integrated stack, and what they mean for the public sector.

Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform: We are empowering individuals and teams to achieve peak productivity with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, our platform to help you build, scale, govern, and optimize agents built on our commercial cloud infrastructure, and integrated with our data,security and compliance capabilities. This offering is the evolution of Vertex AI, and brings together model selection, model building, and agent building capabilities with new features like Agent Identity, which improves the security posture by ensuring every agent receives a unique cryptographic ID and well defined authorization policies that are traceable and auditable.

Innovation in action: NASA used Gemini Enterprise agents to power flight readiness and help ensure astronaut safety for Artemis II, which set the human spaceflight record for farthest distance from Earth.

Gemini Enterprise App: As a critical feature of our Gemini for Government offering, we’re excited to announce new features and capabilities in the Gemini Enterprise App. At Next, we shared that Gemini 3.1 Pro–our most advanced reasoning model yet—is now available for the public sector through Gemini for Government. Additionally, we introduced Agent Designer, which enables employees to build sophisticated schedule- or trigger-based agents. Agent Designer allows you to inspect, test, and approve workflows, ensuring total transparency for executing critical processes.

Innovation in action: Now with Agent Designer, DoW civilian and military personnel can build their own agents to support unclassified work tasks within Gemini for Government on GenAI.mil.

AI Infrastructure: We shared new developments including our eighth-generation TPUs, with TPU 8t for accelerated training and TPU 8i for cost-effective, near-zero latency inference, along with networking advancements like Virgo Networking for high-performance at massive scale. We believe these advancements will serve as the engine for scientific discovery, helping to accelerate research and lead to new discoveries and scientific breakthroughs across the public sector.

Innovation in action: In support of the Genesis Mission, all seventeen U.S. Department of Energy National Labs are using an “AI co-scientist” built on TPUs as a research partner to generate and validate new hypotheses and accelerate scientific discovery.

Agentic Data Cloud: We introduced a new, AI-native architecture that allows data to be utilized at the speed and scale required by agentic AI. Key innovations include Knowledge Catalog to ground agents in trusted organizational context, as well as a cross-cloud, AI-native Lakehouse that provides seamless access to your data – regardless of where it’s located.

Innovation in action: The City of Austin is protecting residents from extreme heat and bridging the gap between high-level climate goals and neighborhood-level results using data sources like Google’s Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE).

Agentic Defense: The agentic era demands a new security era and we announced several advancements that will help public sector organizations accelerate their security transformation. Our cybersecurity platform combines Google’s Threat Intelligence and Security Operations with Wiz’s Cloud and AI Security Platform to detect, prevent, and respond to threats. We introduced a number of new agents for threat detection, detection engineering, remediation, and shared more about Wiz’s AI Application Protection Platform (AI-APP) to provide autonomous protection from code, to cloud, to runtime, across multicloud, hybrid, and AI environments.

Innovation in action: The University of California Riverside is leveraging Google SecOps to cut incident response times by 90% and shorten the time from detection to resolution from 20 minutes to under two minutes.

Agentic Taskforce: We shared new innovations across our Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience solution which revolutionizes how we will engage with our stakeholders and communities, as well as new capabilities in Google Workspace like Workspace Intelligence, which streamlines productivity by providing a unified context layer across Workspace apps.

Innovation in action: The U.S. Department of Transportation became the first cabinet-level agency to fully transition its workforce to Google Workspace, helping ensure the United States has the safest, most efficient, and modern transportation system in the world.

Scaling mission impact through partners and AI skilling programs

All of this incredible innovation is amplified through our ecosystem of partners. At Google Cloud Next, we announced several new initiatives to bridge the gap between commercial AI innovation and public sector mission requirements, including a new federal AI startup accelerator with NVIDIA and an expanded ISV ATO Accelerator program.

We showcased the real-world impact of this ecosystem with Covered California through the announcement of an expanded partnership with Google Public Sector and Deloitte to transform CalHEERS, the integrated health insurance eligibility and enrollment platform serving millions of Californians, ushering in a new era of AI-driven efficiency.

We are focused and invested in upskilling talent as the ultimate driver of mission impact in this agentic era. At Google Cloud Next, we launched the Gemini Enterprise Agent Ready program – or GEAR. GEAR is the premier destination to learn, build, deploy, and scale AI agents, powered by our new Google Skills platform.

Build the future with us

Hundreds of agents across a wide range of use cases were built at our Google Public Sector Hub on the event showfloor, underscoring the interest and excitement about this powerful technology. We invite you to register for our Best of Next webinar curated for the public sector, and tune into the Google Cloud Next keynote and select sessions and on-demand recordings here. Subscribe to our Google Public Sector Newsletter to stay informed and stay ahead with the latest updates, announcements, events and more.