Google Showers Cash on Consultants: The “Useless” Professionals Are Important Now
June 2, 2026
While Google is cutting costs by firing employees, it is also spending $750 million to fund a Cloud Next 2026 endeavor. This is meant to advance its partners’ development of agentic AI applications, making this the largest single partner investment in history. According to The Next Web’s story: “Google Puts $750 Million Behind The Consultants It Needs To Close The Cloud Gap.” the firing of the money canon signals the start of another AI race.
The AI death match will shift from selling cloud infrastructure to financing systems integrators and consultancies that deploy Google AI. Agentic AI will create a $1 trillion global market and Google wants to own a large portion of it by making its partners the main delivery channels.
Here are more details about the fund:
“The fund is not a venture capital vehicle. It is a mix of credits, co-investment capital, training subsidies, and go-to-market funding designed to get the world’s largest consulting firms building agents on Google’s platform rather than on Microsoft Azure or AWS. The economics explain the urgency: for every dollar a customer spends on Google Cloud, partners capture up to $7.05 in services revenue, meaning the consultancies are not just a distribution channel but a multiplier of Google’s own cloud consumption. Google now counts more than 2,900 services partners, with a 400% increase in new partner entries over the past year and a 250% increase in partner-influenced revenue. The fund is a bet that accelerating the partner ecosystem is the fastest route to closing the market share gap with AWS and Azure.”
Google’s individual partners have added their own money to the fund. Accenture is expanding its Gemini practice and has already built more than 450 agents on Google Cloud. Deloitte has more than one hundred agents on and said the company made the largest investment in Google. KPMG said they’ll allot $100 million to the project, while PwC has $400 earmarked for Google Cloud. NTT Data and Cognizant have 5000 engineers working on agents specifically for healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing.
Google is investing this money with their partners in order to beat Microsoft in the enterprise. Microsoft has a structural advantage with Office 365 and it also happens to be distributed to Fortune 500 companies that Google wants to make their own. Sure, AWS is also a rival to Google, but Microsoft is the outfit the Googlers want to supplant.
Google knows it can run the world. Will the world go along with this McKinsey-inspired big idea? Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, tried to talk about AI in a recent graduation address. He probably said Googley things amidst the boos. Is that a harbinger of Google’s AI vision?
Whitney Grace, June 2, 2026
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
