Vertex AI

Vertex AI is Google Cloud's fully managed, end-to-end machine learning platform that unifies data engineering, data science, and ML engineering workflows under a single unified API and UI. It enables teams to build, train, tune, and deploy ML models and AI applications at scale, with native access to Google's most advanced foundation models including Gemini.

Vertex AI stands apart from competing platforms like AWS SageMaker and Azure ML through its deep integration with the Google Cloud ecosystem. Users get native access to Gemini foundation models (including Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash) via the Gemini API on Vertex, seamless interoperability with BigQuery ML for running ML models directly on data warehouse tables, and the ability to train on Google's custom TPU v5e accelerators — hardware unavailable on any other cloud provider. The Model Garden provides access to over 150 open-source and Google-proprietary models, including PaLM, Imagen, Codey, and Chirp, all deployable with a few clicks.

Core platform capabilities include AutoML for code-free model training across tabular, image, text, and video data types; custom training pipelines with support for TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, and scikit-learn; Vertex AI Pipelines for orchestrating reproducible ML workflows built on Kubeflow and TFX; Feature Store for centralized feature management and serving; Model Registry for versioning and governance; and Vertex AI Endpoints for low-latency online prediction with autoscaling. Vertex AI Search and Conversation (formerly Gen App Builder) enables developers to build grounded generative AI applications with enterprise search and conversational interfaces backed by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

For generative AI workflows specifically, Vertex AI Studio provides a prompt design and tuning interface where teams can prototype, test, and refine prompts against Gemini and other foundation models. Supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) are supported for customizing foundation models on proprietary data. Grounding capabilities connect model outputs to Google Search or enterprise data sources to reduce hallucination.

Vertex AI also includes Document AI for intelligent document processing — extracting structured data from invoices, receipts, contracts, and lending documents using pre-trained parsers — and integrates with Dialogflow CX for building advanced conversational AI agents with visual flow builders. The platform supports responsible AI tooling including model evaluation, explainability with feature attributions, bias detection, and model monitoring for detecting training-serving skew and data drift in production.

As of early 2026, Vertex AI processes billions of predictions daily across Google Cloud customers and serves as the backbone for AI features across Google's own products. The platform supports deployment across 40+ Google Cloud regions with enterprise-grade security including VPC Service Controls, Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK), and compliance certifications for HIPAA, SOC 1/2/3, and ISO 27001.