New Enhanced Tool Governance in Vertex AI Agent Builder

You can start building today with adk-samples on GitHub or on Vertex AI Agent Garden, a growing repository of curated agent samples, solutions, and tools designed to accelerate your development and support one-click deployment of your agents built with ADK. Access our Agent Starter Pack, a template collection that provides a production-ready foundation for building, testing, and deploying AI agents. 

3. Scale your AI agents effectively

Once you’ve built your agent, the next challenge is going into a production environment. That’s why we continue to expand the managed services available in Agent Engine to provide the core capabilities needed to scale your agents.

• Manage context with confidence: We are moving Agent Engine sessions and memory bank to General Availability (GA). You can now use Agent Engine to manage both short-term and long-term memory for your production workloads. This allows your agents to maintain context across different interactions, which is critical for delivering helpful, personalized responses at scale. This product is powered by Google Cloud AI Research’s novel research method (accepted by ACL 2025), using a topic-based approach that sets a new standard for how agents learn and recall information.

• Expanded regional support for Agent Engine services: All Agent Engine services are now available in seven additional regions worldwide. To learn more, refer to the documentation.

• Pricing updates for Agent Engine: We lowered pricing for the Agent Engine runtime and will begin billing for additional Agent Engine services starting on January 28, 2026. You can review the Agent Engine pricing documentation for additional detail and hypothetical agent cost scenarios.

The table above shows updated pricing for Agent Engine services and when the changes take place. 

How customers are achieving more with Agent Builder

“Burns & McDonnell uses Vertex AI Agent Builder to transform how organizational knowledge is applied across the enterprise. With Experience IQ, we are building an AI agent using ADK that turns decades of project data and employee experience into real-time, actionable intelligence. Vertex AI enables this innovation to scale responsibly by combining deterministic business rules with probabilistic reasoning, making AI a trusted operational capability — not just a productivity tool. This agent helps teams quickly identify the right experience, reduce manual effort in staffing and planning, and make higher-confidence decisions grounded in verified data. With Vertex AI, Burns & McDonnell isn’t just managing knowledge — we are activating experience to drive faster, more confident decisions.” – Matt Olson, Chief Innovation Officer, Burns & McDonnell

“Payhawk uses Vertex AI Agent Builder to transform agents into financial assistants that truly ‘know’ our customers. Leveraging Memory Bank, we moved from stateless interactions to long-term context retention, allowing agents to recall user constraints and historical patterns with continuity. For example, our Financial Controller Agent now remembers habits like expensing small meals and auto-submits them, reducing submission time by over 50%. Similarly, our Travel Agent proactively applies preferences like aisle seats. This significantly drops cognitive load, allowing agents to anticipate needs based on past behavior rather than just reacting to prompts.” – Diyan Bogdanov, Principal Applied AI Engineer, Payhawk

“Gurunavi uses Vertex AI Agent Builder to power ‘UMAME!’, an AI restaurant discovery app that leverages Agent Engine’s Memory Bank to overcome a significant challenge: achieving a deep understanding of user context. Unlike conventional prompt-based systems, our agent leverages memory bank to remember a user’s past actions, preferences, and temporal patterns to proactively present the best options. This eliminates the need for manual searches, creating a seamless experience. We project this context-aware capability will improve user experience by 30% or more. We view this memory function as a non-negotiable feature for helping everyone forge new culinary experiences together with AI.” – Toshiaki Iwamoto, CTO, Gurunavi

“SeaArt Entertainment uses Vertex AI Agent Builder to personalize the creative experience for digital artists. Before Memory Bank, our AI agents could not reliably remember users’ preferences. For example, when users worked on complex multimodal art projects, they had to repeatedly explain the same details — like their favorite character styles or model choices — across sessions. After integrating Memory Bank, our agents are now able to recall past conversations, actions, and user preferences. We especially like that the agent can seamlessly remember context across sessions, making interactions feel more natural and personal.” – Aleksei Savin, Lead of Multimodal AI Platform, SeaArt Entertainment

Get started

Vertex AI Agent Builder provides the unified platform to manage the entire agent lifecycle, helping you close the gap from prototype to a production-ready agent. To explore these new features, visit the updated Agent Builder documentation and release notes.

If you’re a startup and you’re interested in learning more about building and deploying agents, download the Startup Technical Guide: AI Agents. This guide provides the knowledge needed to go from an idea to prototype to scale, whether your goals are to automate tasks, enhance creativity, or launch entirely new user experiences for your startup.