AI Agent Essentials on Google Cloud

Overview

This course provides a practical guide to building your own digital workforce, enabling busy managers to shift their focus from being the ’everything person’ stuck in repetitive tasks to becoming an ’Agent Manager’ who oversees a smart digital team on Google Cloud. Participants will learn to lead and manage the full Google Cloud AI toolkit—leveraging Gemini for handling day-to-day assistant work and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform for building specialized, expert agents that know your business rules.

The course bridges the gap between just ’chatting’ with AI and running an automated, high-output department. Learners will master identifying the busywork that steals your time, writing clear ’Playbooks’ that AI can actually follow, and the essential human safety checks required to grow your team’s impact without the burnout. This approach aims to help you reclaim your work week while maintaining total privacy and security for your business data.

Prerequisites

We recommend that attendees of this course have:

• A basic understanding of Generative AI: knowing the difference between a simple ’one-off’ prompt and a continuous conversation with AI.
• Deep knowledge of your own business processes: being able to clearly describe the step-by-step path a task takes through your department.
• Helpful to be familiar with identifying ’Manual Toil’: spotting specific, repetitive tasks that act as bottlenecks in your team's daily schedule.
• The ’Director’ mindset: a willingness to shift from ’doing the work yourself’ to ’defining the rules’ for a digital collaborator.

Target Audience

This course is designed for:

• Department heads who need to grow their team’s impact without increasing headcount.
• Change agents responsible for fixing repetitive tasks and improving workflows.
• Strategic architects who need to turn business rules into reliable AI actions and design secure playbooks.

Objectives

By the end of this course, learners will be able to:

• Distinguish between ’Librarian’ and ’Chief of Staff’ AI agents.
• Direct the construction of functional, grounded agents using the Agentic Build Loop.
• Implement Human-in-the-Loop oversight models to manage business risk.
• Drive responsible agentic transformation and scale departmental capacity.

Outline

Foundations of Agentic AI

• You already know agents
• What is an AI agent, really?
• The models behind the agents

Building & Deploying Agents

• The build spectrum
• Building an enterprise AI agent
• The decision framework

Security, Resilience & Oversight

• When agents go wrong
• Keeping agents in check
• Resilience & security

Governance & the Agentic Future

• Governing AI agents at scale
• Speaking the language
• Your 30-day action plan

Summary and Quiz

• Review of core concepts

Exams and Assessments

There is no certification or exam associated with this course. Scenario-based multiple choice questions are included in the summary and quiz section.

Hands-On Learning

Includes classroom activities such as discussions, a live demo, and scenario-based questions to reinforce practical understanding.