As a product VP at Google Cloud, Michael Gerstenhaber works mostly on Vertex, the company’s unified platform for deploying enterprise AI. It gives him a high-level view of how companies are actually using AI models, and what still needs to be done to unleash the potential of agentic AI.
When I spoke with Michael, I was particularly struck by one idea I hadn’t heard before. As he put it, AI models are pushing against three frontiers at once: raw intelligence, response time, and a third quality that has less to do with raw capability than with cost — whether a model can be deployed cheaply enough to run at massive, unpredictable scale. It’s a new way of thinking about model capabilities, and a particularly valuable one for anyone trying to push frontier models in a new direction.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why don’t you start by walking us through your experience in AI so far, and what you do at Google?
I’ve been in AI for about two years now. I was at Anthropic for a year and a half, I’ve been at Google almost half a year now. I run Vertex, Google’s developer platform. Most of our customers are engineers building their own applications. They want access to agentic patterns. They want access to an agentic platform. They want access to the inference of the smartest models in the world. I provide them that, but I don’t provide the applications themselves. That’s for Shopify, Thomson Reuters, and our various customers to provide in their own domains.
What drew you to Google?
Google is I think unique in the world in that we have everything from the interface to the infrastructure layer. We can build data centers. We can buy electricity and build power plants. We have our own chips. We have our own model. We have the inference layer that we control. We have the agentic layer we control. We have APIs for memory, for interleaved code writing. We have agent engine on top of that that ensures compliance and governance. And then we even have the chat interface with Gemini enterprise and Gemini chat for consumers, right? So part of the reason I came here is because I saw Google as uniquely vertically integrated, and that being a strength for us.
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