Google expects AI agents to automate data preparation tasks while hiring hundreds of engineers

Google Cloud is rolling out an AI agent designed to let data teams build and manage pipelines using plain English instead of code, targeting the tedious preparation work that eats up the majority of their productive hours. At the same time, the company plans to hire hundreds of engineers to help enterprise customers actually use the thing. What the Data Engineering Agent actually does The new tool lives inside BigQuery, Google’s cloud data warehouse, and functions as an autonomous agent that can construct, modify, and manage data pipelines based on natural language commands. Instead of writing complex ETL (extract, transform, load) scripts manually, a data engineer could theoretically describe what they need in conversational terms and let the agent handle the plumbing. The preview launched on April 22, 2025, with general availability targeted for April 22, 2026. Google Cloud has been expanding BigQuery’s AI capabilities across multiple domains, including data science workflows, conversational analytics, and observability tasks. Data preparation—the cleaning, formatting, and pipeline management that precedes any actual analysis—reportedly consumes 60-80% of data teams’ productive h...