Cloud platforms used to sell storage, compute, and productivity apps. Increasingly they’re selling expertise on top of AI, delivered as a service. A new joint venture backing forward-deployed engineers inside enterprise firms is betting that a small team paired with capable AI models can do work that used to require an army of consultants, a sign that cloud vendors see implementation help, not just software licenses, as the next big revenue line.
Google has been reorganizing its own cloud-adjacent apps around the same idea. Its research tool NotebookLM was recently renamed to fold it more tightly into the Gemini brand, and the company’s AI Mode search feature now lets people link and interact with select third-party apps directly from a search query, blurring the line between a cloud productivity suite and a general AI assistant.
For IT teams, the practical takeaway is that evaluating cloud vendors increasingly means evaluating their AI integration roadmap, not just uptime and pricing. The vendors betting biggest on embedded AI services are trying to make themselves harder to replace, which is worth watching closely before signing the next multi-year contract.
