Forward-thinking enterprises are looking well beyond horizontal and individual productivity use cases that AI software can impact; they’re looking to reinvent processes and functions that are core to their ability to differentiate from competitors within their vertical industries.
Google Cloud this week is taking a significant step toward delivering on customers’ vertical-industry AI requirements with two new Gemini Enterprise AI platforms for the financial services and legal industries, and it indicated there are more to come.
The Cloud Wars #1 leader has co-created Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services and Gemini Enterprise for Legal with customers to ensure the requisite level of industry alignment. It’s providing reusable skills and workflows, first- and third-party agents tuned to the respective industries, as well as partnerships and connectors to ensure smooth integration with the critical industry software platforms used by customers.
“Making AI genuinely useful inside an industry requires four things, together: domain expertise encoded into reusable skills, secure connections to the systems and data the work depends on, agents that can act inside real workflows, and an open ecosystem that extends and scales all of it,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a LinkedIn post announcing Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services.
Customer organizations are increasingly looking to deploy AI toward vertical-industry functions. Last week we analyzed AI in retail, and specifically how the grocer Albertsons is using AI to enhance customer experience and realize larger online food orders, while one of the latest AI initiatives at WalMart is promoting use of AI among virtually all its store associates to improve their productivity.
In the pharmaceutical industry, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla wrote on LinkedIn recently that the company is promoting AI fluency among every employee and that it’s focused on capitalizing on the technology in research and drug discovery, with a goal of becoming “an AI-native organization where every molecule designed and every trial informs the next decision,” Bourla said. “That is the transformation underway at Pfizer, function by function.”
Below, I’ll share details on Google new financial services AI push targeted at such ambitious customer initiatives, and a follow-up analysis will provide details on its legal industry AI platform.
Gemini for Financial Services
One of the most compelling aspects of the Google strategy is the company’s design collaboration with two financial services partners — Deutsche Bank and CME Group — with the goal of ensuring Gemini for Financial Services reflects the industry’s “operational realities.”
Those realities include stiff regulation in areas including data protection and governance, said Marie-Jeanne Deverdun, Chief Technology, Data and Innovation Officer at Deutsche Bank. “This is an important step in applying AI where it can make a practical difference: safely, responsibly and at scale.”
Ensuring deep industry alignment, Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services includes a set of reusable skills, which are instructions and context that teach agents how to run specialized tasks such as pulling a set of data or following a defined research methodology. The skills are available inside the company’s Financial Research Agent — which executes searches with full explainability — as well as agents that customers build internally.
The company is delivering Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors for linking Gemini Enterprise to commonly used financial software and data sources – more details on those are provided in a following section. Application of MCP in this context only adds to the importance of this widely adopted standard while extending its value into industry-specific AI use cases. It can be connected into agent workflows using the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol
Financial Domain Skills
There’s a major push among AI software firms to offer reusable instructions to agents, known broadly as skills, and Google is adding to that momentum with a set of more than 50 foundational skills for workflows such as credit risk assessment, portfolio monitoring, and investigative financial research. Skills available with Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services include:
- Providing advisor insights with personalized recommendations for effective customer engagement
- Enhancing Know Your Customer (KYC) research skills to support ingestion of diverse content types to evaluate risk personas, among other functions
- Increasing portfolio resilience to assist with response to economic shocks
MCP Connectors
Google’s expansive approach to MCP connectors spans five product categories; below are details on those categories and highlights of platform developers with connected systems:
- Productivity/collaboration: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365
- Market data and financial fundamentals: Factset, Fiscal.ai, S&P Global
- Risk, ratings, and private markets: Moody’s, PitchBook
- Regulatory and corporate records: SEC Edgar, Dun&Bradstreet
- Digital assets and indices: CoinDesk Data and Indices
Agent and Implementation Ecosystem
The ability to connect to third-party systems via MCP is critical to productivity and integration of AI platforms into other enterprise systems. Customers also require flexibility to tie in third-party AI agents that they already use. To that end, Google said supported third-party agents include:
- Dun&Bradstreet Business Verification agent to accelerate commercial onboarding
- FlowX agents that automate evaluation of loan package completeness and document reconciliation
- Obin Financial agent that accelerates complex financial analysis
- S&P Global agents including the Data Retrieval Agent for analysis and report generation, as well as the Horizons Agent that turns energy and sustainability data into insights
In order to facilitate deployment and integrations across systems, agents, and corporate data estates, Google has established partnerships around Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services with prominent partners including Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, and many others.
Concluding Thoughts
With its Gemini Enterprise for vertical industries push, Google is setting a high bar. With technology, connectors, partnerships, and strong customer leadership in the strategy’s development, Google is addressing an expansive set of requirements that should give financial services industries customers industry context, connectivity, and rapid usability to deliver strong impact in their most vital use cases. I expect other leading AI model, software, and consulting firms will jump into the vertical industry AI fray so customers can capitalilze on a wide range of new tech that is highly tuned to their businesses.
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Tom Smith
Analyst
Cloud Wars, Agent and Copilot
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