Google is doubling its efforts to build out its AI business within the U.K. Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind appeared in London on Monday morning with customers BT and WPP. They explained some of the plans.
Google said it would expand UK Data Residency to include Agentspace, so that AI Agents for enterprises built on Google Infrastructure can be hosted locally. This is a crucial detail for organizations who are wary about hosting data outside their own purview.
Google is also introducing new financial incentives to encourage AI startups to join its UK accelerator. Participants will receive up to PS280,000 worth of Google Cloud credits, plus enhanced AI skills training.
Google also announced at the event held at its DeepMind offices that Chirp 3 – the audio generation model developed by the company – would be added to the Vertex AI developer platform. More information can be found here.
The code word “Agenttic” is how enterprises will start to adopt AI. The pitch is that AI agents can both help people do their jobs faster and better interface with customers. Agentspace, Google’s platform to build these assistants for the workplace, is available
. NotebookLM for Enterprises is one of its most notable features. It’s a service which can ingest a large amount of information, summarise and then be used in large business environments. Agentspace also includes multimodal search and the ability to build AI agents with generative AI.
Google released Agentspace in December 2024 as a beta, while Google Agentspace is now included in the UK data residency region.
This is a move to encourage more businesses to work with Google to build their future AI-based services (rather than its competitors). It is also a way to address some of the trust issues among organizations about how their proprietary data will be handled when building AI and other cloud services. Data is the new oil, and it’s a valuable commodity.
According to Mick Heys, IDC analyst, “We know that a significant number of organizations in Europe are still very hesitant about using AI on the public cloud.” “They want AI and they are happy to experiment in the cloud. But when it comes to deployment at scale, then they want to do this in dedicated infrastructure or a co-location environment. Something that is managed much closer by them. This is partly because they are worried about data security, privacy, and sovereignty issues. Kurian, who spoke at the event today, said: “They will be able to keep all the data wherever they need it.”
Hassabis, Kurian and the two companies who joined them on stage today have been long-time partners in AI. Both BT and WPP signed development and data partnerships, and are early adopters, of pilot programs such as the newer releases of Imagen Veo and Gemini.
BT CEO Allison Kirby said, “We are quietly re-inventing all our operations” in regards to how it uses AI. “There is a lot of potential in terms of operations,” said Allison Kirby, BT CEO. Back in It said that by 2023 it would eliminate up to 55,000 positions, with a third of them being replaced by AI.
Google’s AI business is on a tear right now. Last week, a number of new Gemini developments were launched, including Gemini 2.0. This version starts to work on multimodal generation and understand in real-time. It also uses word prompts to create images, and has a new robotics system.
Separately the U.K. Government is making a big push to promote AI development both within its ranks as well as more widely in the industry. European businesses are also pushing for a less reliance on Big Tech in favor of locally-based businesses and services.
U.K. Government has laid out plans and is pressuring individual divisions to demonstrate how they could adopt more generative AI Services aimed at accelerating paperwork and building services that were previously siloed according to function and department.
This is part of the government’s larger strategy. It hopes that AI will be a major economic wave and wants to ensure that the U.K. is ready to catch it. To demonstrate that the U.K. was “open for AI business,” it has made commitments for regional AI zones, which will include data center capacities and regulatory changes that will make it easier to work with more data.
Hassabis responded to a question about how the U.K. wants to change the rules for how AI companies use intellectual property in AI environments. This is one of the most controversial topics surrounding how AI is being introduced in the U.K. Google’s announcements may be late, but they could pave the path for future collaborations on the government front. Ingrid joined TechCrunch in February 2012 and is based in London.
Ingrid was a writer and editor for TechCrunch before joining the site in February 2012. She is based out of London. Ingrid covers mobile media, digital advertising, and the intersections between these.
She is most comfortable in English when it comes to her work but also speaks Russian, Spanish, and French (in order of proficiency).
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