Google named Forrester AI Platforms leader on strategy

Google has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Platforms, Q3 2026, and received the highest score in the Strategy category.

Google linked the ranking to Gemini Enterprise, its unified AI platform for businesses, designed to bring business users, developers and IT teams onto the same system. The product is being positioned as a single entry point for organisations building and deploying AI agents across internal operations.

The assessment comes as large technology suppliers compete for corporate spending on AI platforms that support both software development teams and non-technical users. Businesses are increasingly seeking systems that connect internal data, AI models and governance controls in one place as they expand their use of automated agents.

At the centre of Google's approach is Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which provides tools for technical teams and IT departments to build and deploy AI agents while maintaining oversight of their use. Agents created on the platform can then be distributed through the Gemini Enterprise app for employees across an organisation.

The platform is designed to support different ways of building AI systems, from coding environments used by software engineers to low-code and no-code tools for business and operations teams. Customers can also access more than 200 native and third-party models, alongside pre-built agent templates.

Platform focus

Google is also emphasising multimodal AI as part of its enterprise offering. Gemini Enterprise is built to work with text, code, audio, images and video in a single workflow, with connections to corporate data sources intended to give agents more context.

That reflects a broader market shift as vendors try to move beyond chat-based interfaces into more complex business processes. For companies buying these platforms, the challenge is often less about testing a model and more about linking it to internal systems while maintaining control over cost, performance and access.

Governance and observability are central to the product. Agent Platform includes guardrails, continuous evaluation and real-time tracking for costs, latency and token usage, features intended to help organisations monitor AI systems as they expand deployments.

Google also highlighted Knowledge Catalog, which can be used to create a shared context layer across enterprise data through zero-copy federation. In practice, that would allow organisations to draw on metadata across separate systems without moving all the underlying information into a single repository.

Customer examples

To illustrate Gemini Enterprise in use, Google pointed to examples including Mars, Kohl's and TELUS. Mars used the system to cut marketing campaign timelines from months to weeks, while Kohl's used it to support conversational data analysis and TELUS applied it to customer intelligence work.

Those examples underline the range of business functions now targeted by AI platform providers, from marketing and analytics to customer service and internal data management. They also show how large suppliers are trying to demonstrate practical returns from AI investments at a time when many corporate buyers remain cautious about moving from pilot projects to broader rollouts.

Forrester's Wave reports are closely watched in the enterprise software industry because they influence technology procurement discussions, especially among large organisations comparing long-term platform suppliers. A Leader ranking can strengthen a vendor's position in sales cycles, though buyers typically weigh such reports alongside internal requirements, pricing, technical fit and data governance needs.

Google said the recognition reflected its strategy of offering an open and integrated AI platform for the so-called agentic enterprise. "We believe this integrated approach is why Google has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Platforms, Q3 2026 report, and received the highest score in the Strategy category," it said.