The president and principal analyst at J Gold Associates noted on LinkedIn he expects Google Cloud to emerge as the leader across cloud and AI over the next few years, compared with a typical current ranking as the third-largest provider in the sector.

He noted rivals Microsoft and AWS primarily rely on partnerships for AI, but “Google controls its own destiny by creating and modifying its internal Gemini AI products to best serve its own needs”.

Gold explained Google Cloud gains a competitive edge by being able to quickly shift to changing needs and customer requirements because it trains and builds its own large language models (LLMs).

Internally developed LLMs also enable better control of the data sets they are trained on, in turn allowing Google Cloud to offer specialised versions or smaller models when needed, Gold wrote.

“And it provides a more efficient way for Google to monetise AI as part of its services without the need for revenue sharing and/or licensing.”

“Finally, it gives Google full control over how to best integrate with its other products and services geared to enterprise users, which is a key market to continue its expansion of its market share against its cloud-based services rivals.”

Agentic Gold also highlighted the launch of Agentspace late in 2024, which allows businesses to build and deploy AI agents for various tasks.

In April, Google Cloud announced an Agent Development Kit, an open-source framework that simplifies the process of building agents.

“The next major phase of AI adoption will revolve around the ability for agents to do useful tasks. With Agentspace, Google is establishing itself as a repository and enabler of task-specific agents that will become a core component of future corporate workloads.”

Gold believes Google is probably in “the best overall position to excel in the emerging AI/cloud market space”, though noted the market for AI and peripheral capabilities is still expanding and changing.