Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s Crowning Achievement

Thomas Kurian begins his eighth year as CEO of Google Cloud this week and over that time has led his high-flying company from its original position at #9 on the Cloud Wars Top 10 to its current spot at #2 while making a very serious case for displacing Microsoft as the world’s most innovative and influential cloud vendor.

Over those seven years, Kurian and his company have racked up an impressive list of accomplishments, and today I want to talk about what I feel is the crowning achievement of Kurian’s tenure. But, before I get to that, let me first list some of the Google Cloud breakthroughs and successes that did not make the cut for his #1 achievement:

• was the fastest-growing Cloud Wars Top 10 company during the six straight quarters that saw the full breakout of the AI Revolution, from early 2024 through mid-2025, reflecting huge customer demand;
• forged a leadership position in cloud security with its acquisition of Mandiant a few years back and more recently with the addition of Wiz to help lessen the huge cybersecurity burdens formerly shouldered entirely by customers;
• claimed a powerful and rapidly growing position in the data and analytics space with BigQuery;
• designed and created arguably the leading ecosystem program among the Cloud Wars Top 10, driving significant new levels of value for its customers via the addition of those force-multipliers;
• built a series of partnerships with other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies that give customers more choice and flexibility;
• saw Kurian named Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2024;
• committed early and unconditionally to open architecture and standards across its expansive portfolio of products and services; and
• most recently saw its backlog grow 82% year-over-year to $155 billion, which also represents sequential-quarter growth of 46% and reflects massive forward-looking customer demand.

Now, that’s a pretty impressive list — so what the heck is left to top all that?

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The Gemini Enterprise Phenomenon

While all of the hyperscalers have raced into the AI Revolution and become major drivers and shapers of it, Kurian’s crowning achievement is how he has created a seamless and fast-time-to-value path for customers into the AI Economy, which has become the #1 business priority for CEOs and boards of directors worldwide.

By giving customers an end-to-end enterprise AI platform — a construct that is vastly different from what’s needed in the consumer world — Google Cloud has made it much easier for customers to fuse their business-transformation plans with a proven and complete end-to-end AI foundation and strategy.

In turn, that reshapes the customer approach from one riddled with questions about “where do I start, how do I integrate all the different technologies, how do I pull all the mismatched data together, how in the world can I secure all of that, and which vendor do I call in the middle of the night when there’s a crisis?”

And while Gemini Enterprise is purpose-built to work seamlessly and elegantly with Google Cloud’s entire tech stack, it was also very purposefully designed to be as open as possible to allow customers to choose the models and other components they feel are best for their needs.

Here’s an excerpt from my Oct. 13 analysis, “Google Cloud Rockets to #1 in AI for Business with Gemini Enterprise,” of how Gemini Enterprise dovetails with what customers want and need in these crazy times:

Here’s what sets Gemini Enterprise apart:

1. End-to-end capabilities: From AI infrastructure to models to seamless integration to world-class security and governance, Gemini Enterprise has been designed to simplify and accelerate AI transformations.
2. Customer choice is paramount: Just as Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has made this an indispensable part of his company’s rise to pre-eminence in the Cloud Wars, so too does Gemini Enterprise offer customers massive flexibility in choosing which vendors to deploy within and across the Gemini Enterprise platform.
3. Accelerating time to value: While Gemini Enterprise is built upon the highly advanced and complex Google Cloud infrastructure and foundational software, all of that complexity has been hidden from users so that they can quickly and effectively leverage the consumer-grade UI to generate business outcomes that matter. One example: in the launch event, Virgin Voyages CEO Nirmal Saverimuttu said that an agent created by a marketing team member with no technology background immediately helped trigger record sales for the month of July.
4. Flexible pricing: Options include Gemini Enterprise at $30 per user per month, and Gemini Business at $21 per user per month.
5. Access to key enterprise data stores: From the Gemini Enterprise announcement: “An agent is only as good as its context, so Gemini Enterprise securely connects to a company’s data wherever it lives — from Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to business applications like Salesforce and SAP. This enables agents to operate with a complete, proprietary understanding of the business, maximizing the accuracy and relevance of all AI interactions.”
6. Governance is built in — not a chore for customers: From the announcement: Gemini Enterprise offers a “central governance framework, so companies can visualize, secure, and audit all their agents from one place. IT and security teams have the control and visibility needed to ensure compliance across the entire agent fleet.”

And Now the Latest Model: Gemini 3

While the new Gemini 3 model will certainly be used by tens of millions of consumers, its business capabilities are significant in combination with Gemini Enterprise. In a blog post, Google Cloud VP and GM for Cloud AI Saurabh Tiwary said Gemini 3 has been built “from the ground up to synthesize information about any topic across multiple modalities, including text, images, video, audio, and code.”

In highlighting the huge distinction between consumer AI and enterprise AI, Tiwary emphasized that Gemini 3 is “our most factually accurate model” and employs multimodal understanding so it can “make sense of your data, no matter where it comes from.”

Final Thought

With the pace of business accelerating dramatically in preparation for the AI Economy, business leaders have less and less tolerance for time-consuming and expensive integration projects that drive little or no business value. So, the addition of Gemini Enterprise to the complete and technologically sophisticated Google Cloud portfolio dovetails perfectly with the top priorities customers have today as they commit fully to AI-centered business transformation.

And as Thomas Kurian enters his eighth year at the top of Google Cloud, it will be interesting to see if he can find a way to transcend that crowning achievement.