Horizon Media accelerated its cloud strategy by deploying Gemini Enterprise. This began with Agent Q—its internal workforce transformation ecosystem powered by Gemini Enterprise and connected to Horizon’s collective knowledge, which is one of the first such systems in its industry. Agent Q, along with Horizon’s AI-native marketing platform Blu, and expert teams providing the human intelligence layer, came together to form Horizon’s open operating system, HorizonOS.

Internal users are now able to create agents to tackle use cases at scale.

“Transformation isn't about a single app or a technology group dictating change from the top down; it’s about shifting your entire culture,” says Arenaro. “By deploying Gemini Enterprise, we have empowered our workforce to securely build nearly 500 custom, no-code agents. Turning AI into a platform where our employees can creatively solve their own workflow challenges has completely transformed what we can achieve."

Notably, Horizon Media is also tracking roughly 10 high-impact enterprise coded agents and another 20-25 departmental coded agents. This illustrates the combined power of democratized AI for all employees alongside a core IT team using AI to build highly sophisticated, enterprise-grade tools. Thanks to Gemini Enterprise capabilities, all agents are mapped to Horizon Media’s rules-based access controls.

Instead of following slow, traditional IT build processes that often stall momentum, Horizon Media focused on a democratized, bottom-up approach. The company orchestrates a seamless foundation by connecting Gemini to everyday data sources like Office 365, SharePoint, and Monday.com. This allowed employees to build their own low-code and no-code tools through Gemini Enterprise.

The democratization strategy paid off immediately, resulting in nearly 500 custom agents across various business units. These include a nomenclature agent that unifies naming conventions across the enterprise to eliminate tedious data translation; a pacing agent that standardizes media budget pacing to ensure teams manage client spend smoothly; and a timesheet agent that scours data sources to draft ready-to-import files, eliminating a frequent administrative bottleneck.

Remarkably, 99% of no-code agents were developed by employees outside the technology department, spanning finance, strategy, and business development. By providing hands-on workshops and gamified hackathons, Horizon Media turned software development into an agency-wide showcase of employee curiosity and ingenuity.

“We don't measure the success of our AI practice by canned responses, but by the tangible hours we give back to our teams,” says Arenaro. “We are on track with Google Cloud to increase our existing workforce capacity by 15% to 20% by the end of the year. This collaboration allows us to effectively separate business growth from simply adding headcount. We can do significantly more for our clients with the same brilliant team.”

Horizon Media underwent a rapid, lightweight lift from proof of concept to full production. Instead of attempting to build massive, slow-moving end-to-end applications, the agency focused on chipping away at individual workflows—a method that has driven massive cumulative success.

The impacts of this Google Cloud partnership include an increase in overall workforce capacity by 15-20% and decoupled growth from headcount. The agency has already rolled out 1,200 active seats and is deploying another 1,000 in short order.