Google announces ‘era of agents is here’ as company concludes 3-city Leaders Connect India 2026

Google Cloud has officially declared an end to the pilot era and begining of "era of agents" at the recently-held Leaders Connect India 2026 series. The three-city corporate tour, which rolled through Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru over the past week, brought together top corporate executives from banking, aviation, digital commerce and travel. According to Google Cloud, leaders are no longer interested in hearing what an AI model can do on paper. Instead, they are demanding a clear, measurable path toward cost optimisation and new revenue."We are already in the agentic era, and what is non-negotiable now is clear business outcomes and economic value attached to every AI deployment," said Sashikumar Sreedharan, Managing Director of Google Cloud India. He emphasised that companies need to start handing less complex tasks over to autonomous AI agents so that human employees can focus on the strategic, high-value elements of the business.Each leg of the tour addressed unique challenges and massive opportunities for the Indian economy:Mumbai (May 25): In India's diverse market, language, tastes and spending power can shift every 100 kilometers. Executives explored how autonomous AI agents allow companies to ditch broad marketing strategies and instead serve hundreds of thousands of hyper-local "micro-clusters" with customised products and responsive supply chains.Delhi (May 27): The conversation shifted heavily toward value creation. Aviation experts from airlines like Akasa Air highlighted how the global airline industry loses billions of dollars a year to flight disruptions. They detailed how an AI agent, capable of instantly analysing weather, crew schedules, maintenance, and passenger connections all at once, can resolve delays and maximize flight capacity without needing to buy a single new airplane.Bengaluru (May 29): The series closed in India's tech hub by tackling the reality of building AI at a population scale. Since only 15% to 20% of India's population is fully comfortable using English, panellists from companies like MakeMyTrip emphasised that voice commands in local languages are no longer a luxury feature—they are the primary way the country interacts with technology.Throughout the series, business leaders repeatedly tied the rollout of autonomous AI agents to India's grand national ambitions, specifically the "Viksit Bharat" goal of becoming a $30 trillion economy by 2047."Across all three cities, enterprise conversations were anchored in national ambition, India's trillion-dollar digital economy target and the Viksit Bharat aspiration of a 30 trillion dollar economy by 2047. Agentic AI, leaders agreed, is not an IT infrastructure upgrade. It is a strategic investment that accelerates innovation, creates unprecedented structural efficiency, and positions India to lead where it has natural, decisive advantage," Google Cloud said.