Google Cloud Summit London 2026 brought a series of major partnership announcements, with HSBC, THG Ingenuity, and Deloitte each deploying agentic AI to transform how they serve customers at scale.
From hyper-personalized banking to AI-powered shopping assistants, this year signaled a clear shift from AI experimentation to production-ready deployment.
As autonomous systems take on greater roles in customer-facing decisions, governance and customer trust are emerging as the defining challenges for CX leaders.
THG Ingenuity Launches AI Shopping Assistant
Developed with Google Cloud, the assistant uses Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to provide conversational, personalized shopping experiences across ecommerce sites by understanding customer intent, brand-specific rules, and tone of voice, guiding shoppers through product discovery and recommend relevant products.
In fact, the assistant achieved conversion rates up to eight times higher than Myprotein’s site average, increasing first-time buyer conversion by 5.5x, and drove average basket size to 22%.
Jo Drake, CTO of Platform at THG Ingenuity, said the technology gives brands a new way to engage consumers through tailored interactions, helping deepen customer relationships beyond the point of purchase.
“By providing an intelligent, bespoke shopping companion, we are not only streamlining the customer journey, but also empowering brands to cultivate deeper relationships with their consumers.”
HSBC and Google Cloud announce Partnership for AI Banking
This collaboration will give HSBC access to Google Cloud’s AI technologies to accelerate the use of AI across the bank’s global operations, aiming to deploy more than 200 new AI use cases over the next two years.
The partnership will focus on hyper-personalized wealth management, financial crime detection, and AI-powered tools for frontline teams.
This will enable customers to receive relevant financial advice based on individual circumstances, while bank employees can spend less time on administration and more time engaging with clients.
Georges Elhedery, Group CEO at HSBC, said the partnership supports the bank’s broader efforts to modernize operations and equip employees with the needed capabilities for the future.
“A partnership like this one with Google Cloud helps us empower our colleagues with the tools they need to be future-ready, and supports our work in building a simple, agile, faster, and more personal HSBC.”
Deloitte and Google Cloud Launch AI Studio
The London-based studio is designed to help UK organizations adopt and scale agentic AI, bringing Deloitte’s industry expertise and Google Cloud’s AI technologies to help businesses move beyond experimentation and deploy autonomous AI solutions.
Clients can develop, test, and implement agentic AI applications across departments and experience training and upskilling its workforce to support broader adoption of these technologies.
Hayley McKelvey, Chief AI Officer for Deloitte UK, explained that organizations are increasingly focused on using AI to create tangible value for customers and businesses, over improving internal efficiency.
“Our clients are looking for more than just productivity gains,” she explained.
“They want AI that can take action and drive real-world business outcomes.”
This announcement signals a move toward practical deployment of autonomous AI systems, helping organizations translate AI investment into measurable operational and customer-facing outcomes.
Google Cloud Launches the Model Garden at Platform 37
The invitation-only innovation hub is designed to help strategic customers and partners accelerate AI adoption, providing organizations with access to expertise, infrastructure, and resources to support experimentation and scaling.
Maureen Costello, Vice President for UK, Ireland and Sub-Saharan Africa at Google Cloud, explained that the initiative is designed to give strategic partners a dedicated environment where they can accelerate their long-term AI ambitions.
“This is a dedicated, private workspace for our most critical partners to help them build the future of their organizations.”
From a CX perspective, the hub aims to help organizations develop more sophisticated AI-powered services, reduce implementation barriers, and deliver new customer-facing innovations quickly.
The Customer Stakes Are Higher Now
Google Cloud is now positioning agentic AI as the foundation of future CX, where systems actively perform tasks, make decisions, and execute business processes on behalf of organizations.
CX is becoming increasingly operational as Agentic AI becomes part of the process itself, creating significant opportunities for customers to benefit from more personalized experiences, reduced friction, and 24/7 support.
Organizations could scale high-quality service without proportionally increasing headcount. In theory, customers receive outcomes rather than simply interactions.
However, as AI agents become responsible for customer-facing decisions and actions, the question of who controls the customer relationship becomes more complex, where AI increasingly becomes the intermediary between customer and brand.
When autonomous systems introduce new forms of risk, this makes governance, transparency, and trust controls central to the future of CX, with Google Cloud emphasizing responsible deployment practices in its announcements.
Speaking with CX Today, Miguel Fornes, Information Security Manager at Surfshark, highlights how AI agents introduce a higher level of risk because they can take real actions that may directly impact systems, money, or data if something goes wrong.
“The main difference is that this critical leap comes from content to consequence. The chatbot makes a mistake and hallucinates,” he explained.
“But the agentic AI, if it hallucinates, it can send the money to the wrong person, or it can simply just wipe everything on your computer.”
The future of CX may be increasingly automated, but customer trust will remain a fundamentally human concern, and the value of agentic AI will come from its ability to act, but that same capability introduces operational, security, and reputational risks.
For organizations adopting these technologies, success will depend on ensuring that autonomous agents remain accountable, trustworthy, and aligned with customer interests.
