Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform: A Developer's First Look (And Honest Critique)

This is a submission for the Google Cloud NEXT Writing Challenge Google just redrew the map for how developers build AI-powered systems — and at Cloud NEXT '26, the centrepiece of that shift has a new name: Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform . As a backend-focused developer who's been building with AI tools for a while, I went into NEXT '26 expecting incremental updates. What I got instead forced me to rethink how production AI systems are actually built. "If Vertex AI was about models, Gemini Ent