Google unveils new Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar model

Google Cloud is intensifying its expansion into India's business landscape through strategic partnerships that showcase AI's shift from assistance to action. During its inaugural 'Let's Talk AI' media tour in Bengaluru, the company unveiled collaborations with boAt, Cropin, and Pine Labs across various sectors including consumer hardware, agriculture, and commerce. These partnerships illustrate Google Cloud's approach of integrating Gemini AI models with domain-specific data, devices, software, and payment systems.

The primary objective of these collaborations is to offer an integrated AI stack, comprising infrastructure, local processing capabilities for the latest Gemini models, and Gemini Enterprise, a platform designed for deploying AI agents. Amit Kumar, Managing Director of Digital Natives Business at Google Cloud India, emphasized the need for Indian organizations to move beyond pilot projects and rethink their operational workflows, requiring both sovereign flexibility and trusted models, alongside enterprise-grade platforms.

The partnerships are focused on developing AI-driven solutions for specific industries. For instance, boAt's parent company, Imagine Marketing, is working on Crest AI, a platform enabling conversational voice interactions for next-generation audio devices using Gemini Live. Cropin's Sage platform, leveraging Gemini alongside agricultural and geospatial data, addresses agricultural and climate data challenges, facilitating functions like crop and food production inquiries.

Pine Labs is targeting agentic commerce, aiming to assist India's 6 crore small and medium businesses in participating in AI-led transactions. An AI advertising agent will aid in creating campaigns across Search, YouTube, and Pine Labs' point-of-sale devices, while Jarvis, a multi-agent system based on Gemini Enterprise, will assist with merchant operations and customer support.

Pine Labs also plans to incorporate the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard for seamless information exchange between AI agents and commerce systems throughout the shopping journey.

Google Cloud is concurrently building the necessary enterprise infrastructure to support these partnerships. The company is expanding its Forward-Deployed Engineer organization in India, deploying AI specialists within customer environments to facilitate the transition of projects into production. Gemini Enterprise has been enhanced with support for long-running agents and centralized governance.

The company is also focusing on enhancing local AI hardware capacity in India using its AI Hypercomputer architecture and Trillium TPUs, with cloud infrastructure regions in Mumbai and Delhi.

The success of these AI agents in real-world applications and transactions remains a significant challenge. Google Cloud is addressing this by implementing governance mechanisms, cost controls, security measures, and refining its models to ensure reliable AI agent functionality. As India emerges as a crucial deployment market for Google's agentic AI initiatives, the company's efforts to integrate AI across various sectors highlight the growing importance of AI in the nation's business ecosystem.