Google Cloud Next 2026: The Agentic Enterprise Takes Shape
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Jason Andersen and Mike Leone, Moor Insights & Strategy, and Brad Shimmin, Futurum, deliver their analyst recap of Google Cloud Next 2026, covering the shift to agentic enterprise workflows, Google's TPU-8 infrastructure strategy, the data platform's evolution into an agent runtime, Agent Gateway and Wiz security governance, and Google Cloud's competitive positioning relative to AWS and Microsoft heading into the second half of 2026.
"Google's plumbing finally caught up with its brain." That was Brad Shimmin's read leaving Google Cloud Next 2026. The models have been strong for years. What changed in Las Vegas was that the underlying infrastructure, data, security, and orchestration layers finally arrived at the same address.
Brad Shimmin, Vice President and Practice Lead at Futurum, Jason Andersen, and Mike Leone, both Vice Presidents and Principal Analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, share their honest analyst read on the five signals from the flagship event that enterprise and technology leaders shouldn’t ignore.
Key Takeaways Include:
🔹 The copilot era is over. Agents inside workflows change the buying decision, the ROI model, and the risk profile. Orchestration is what matters now. The model is almost background noise. — Mike Leone, Moor Insights & Strategy
🔹 Inference economics finally arrived. TPU-8I targets cost per token at production scale. Google owns the full stack. Competitors reselling GPUs cannot match that cost curve. — Mike Leone, Moor Insights & Strategy
🔹 Knowledge Catalog is a context layer for agents, not a data dictionary. Agents fail because they lack context. Cross-Cloud Lakehouse extends that argument beyond Google's own infrastructure. — Brad Shimmin, Futurum
🔹 Two questions gate every production deployment: who is the agent acting on behalf of, and what is the audit trail? Agent Gateway and Wiz answer both. — Jason Andersen, Moor Insights & Strategy
🔹 For the first time, Google has a credible argument on both flanks. Prescriptive enough to challenge Microsoft. Modular enough to challenge AWS. This week the enterprise narrative finally caught up with the technology. — Jason Andersen, Moor Insights & Strategy
Watch the full conversation for the complete breakdown of what Google Cloud Next 2026 signals for enterprise strategy and the competitive cycle ahead.
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