Vertex AI has been Google Cloud's AI development platform since 2021. On April 22, 2026, at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, Google retired it — not with a deprecation notice, but with a full rebrand and architectural overhaul. Going forward, all Vertex AI services and roadmap evolutions will be delivered exclusively through Agent Platform. If you're building on Google Cloud's AI stack, the ground just shifted. The Problem It's Solving Vertex AI was built for a different era. In the early days of generative AI, building safe and reliable business tools took massive engineering effort and a high tolerance for trial and error. Vertex handled that well — model selection, fine-tuning, deployment. But it was never designed for what enterprise AI has actually become: fleets of autonomous agents operating across dozens of systems simultaneously, often without proper security or governance guardrails. The gap is real. You can build a capable agent today without much trouble.…