Conversational AI has been the most successful use case for AI implementation across verticals and industries for a long time – even pre-ChatGPT, according to our research at Info-Tech Research Group. Conversational intelligence is now more integrated into many CCaaS platforms and has been very successful for both improving the customer experience and making the support process frictionless. With these improvements, companies can now ignore the “chatbot gone wild” stories and use many of the tested conversational intelligence technologies with confidence.
In a pre-briefing before the Enterprise Connect Conference that took place on March 17-20, 2025, Google displayed this capability that connects its foundation models with AI agents to offer a platform that is AI optimized and scalable with the infrastructure of Google Cloud.
Duncan Lennox – VP/GM, Applied AI, Google Cloud – said, “We have rapidly moved from where we had AI helping to answer questions, to AI making predictions, and now on to generative agents.” At Info-Tech, we advocated this approach in our blueprint The AI Advantage for Smarter Marketing – A Primer. (See image below.)
Image Source: Info-Tech Research Group
Google has invested heavily in AI since 2016, when shortly after being named Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai declared that Google was an “AI-first” company. Now the Google Cloud AI system's “grounding” (the ability to connect its understanding, reasoning, or outputs to real-world knowledge, experiences, or data in a meaningful way) is a differentiator with customers, providing the ability to leverage the learning of Google Search data and enterprise data to reduce hallucinations through this time-tested advanced learning.
Google Cloud positions their Agent infrastructure as a top layer that is accessible to Cloud customers. Google characterizes the agents as performing the various functions on top on the platform you have within the Google Cloud ecosystem.
Image Source: Google Cloud analyst briefing
Background on the Google Customer Engagement Suite
In September 2024 Google launched the Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI, an end-to-end application that combines their most advanced conversational AI products with omnichannel contact center as a service (CCaaS) functionality, and the speed and multimodality of their Gemini AI models.
Image Source: Google Cloud AI Briefing
Focus on making customer engagement frictionless and convenient
Google is pushing to use AI to transform the experience at every aspect of the customer workflow. For example, Google Customer Engagement Studio advertises the ability to analyze all interactions instead of only a sample size because of their experience with managing large amounts of data. Google reported that one of their customers saved 173 years of customer time spent on IVRs, improving customer experience and reducing company expenses, leading to higher revenue opportunities.
Extracting content and sentiment analysis from this unstructured data at this scale gives organizations the ability to create highly personalized and optimized experiences.
In another example, the restaurant chain Wendy's used an advanced AI agent provided by Google Cloud to take and translate orders in any language at their drive-throughs, catering to multilingual customer needs. This innovative project is part of a larger collaboration between Google Cloud and Wendy's, aimed at enhancing customer experience and operational efficiency. Google uses their machine learning algorithms to process and respond to diverse languages, ensuring seamless communication and satisfaction for all customers.
Making customer service humans more productive and happier
Google’s Customer Engagement system has two core processes to help improve the customer experience:
- Virtual Agents that engage with customers directly in multiple channels and bring these engagements together to customer support reps as needed, and
- Agent Assist that brings all the details of the customer engagements from all channels together and helps make customer service jobs easier.
Lisa O'Malley – Senior Director, Product Management, Applied AI, Google Cloud –mentioned that the Agent Assist AI tools of the Google Customer Engagement Suite can be added on to existing telephony or other CCaaS solutions. Having a Google CCaaS is not needed.
New Agents to enhance real-time Agent performance
Google Cloud introduced new agents to help customer support/success teams that can assist the customer support person with alerts and tips in real-time to make the call better and contextually prompt the agent for upsells. All of this can be done at scale. In the briefing Google mentioned that instead of restricting call assistance to a sample size, these agents can process almost 100 percent of the calls no matter what the scale is.
- AI Coach: Gen AI contextual step-by-step agent coaching to guide customer service representatives through complex interactions and upsell opportunities.
- AI Trainer: LLM-powered Agent Trainer enables AI-powered simulation, personalized training, and real-time coaching.
- Quality AI: Automatically evaluates every customer interaction against business-critical, customer-critical, and compliance criteria.
Google Cloud also announced new features that customers can use to build hybrid agents:
- Unified Console: Integrates generative AI with rules-based controls to support multi-modal interactions, including co-browsing and voice. Scheduled for release in Q3 2025.
- Prebuilt Agents: Four specialized agents designed for tasks such as flight booking and shopping assistance, featuring seamless integration with Google products for efficient data retrieval and scheduling. Expected availability in Q3 2025.
- OOTB (Out of the Box) Connectors: Over 30 data retrieval connectors and more than 70 action connectors for enhanced integration with major platforms like Salesforce and ServiceNow. Planned release in Q3 2025.
Our Take
Conversational intelligence and Agent Assist technologies are more mature capabilities than many other customer-facing AI technologies and tools. Large enterprises not thinking about implementing these tools are going to lose in providing the level of customer experience that is expected today.
The cases that we have seen from different companies have been about reducing customer hold time, automating tasks like password resets, and aiding customer service representatives to have better context when they are speaking to customers. There should be no hesitation as AI tech has advanced with sufficient guardrails cutting hallucinations and is intelligent enough to know when to transfer to a human agent.
One thing we did not see in this briefing was the capability of one conversational agent transferring to another conversational agent. We have seen this capability with a few other vendors. Even if they are not at the scale of Google, they are still catering to the enterprise market.
The capabilities of this suite like topic modeling, LLM summarization, keyword spotting, custom highlighters, and automated quality assurance, will compete with solutions like Clari and Gong, which are in the revenue intelligence space that have similar functionality. This may represent a strategic move by technology leaders to consolidate various tools into a unified suite.
With the training data available to Google, we have no doubt that the quality of the learning and capabilities of this Google Cloud customer engagement center will be high thanks to Google's unique AI features, such as the grounding capability that connects its understanding to real-world knowledge and data, reducing hallucinations.
We were impressed by the ROI from many of the customers of this technology and recommend adding the Google Cloud engagement center into the mix of companies being considered when you want to upgrade your customer experience and do more with happier customer service employees.