2026 Google Cloud Next Recap: The Agentic Era Emerges (plus 28,000 Steps Per Day, Benson Boone & a Lotta Llamas)

Google Cloud Next 2026 was, in a word, enormous. More than 32,000 attendees. Over 260 product announcements. Booths stretching as far as the eye could see. Our team was collectively logging somewhere north of 28,000 a day just getting from session to session.

Oh, and Benson Boone headlined the conference party. You know, the guy whose fanbase is primarily teenage girls. Watching a crowd of enterprise developers, IT admins, and cloud architects absolutely lose their minds for "Beautiful Things" was... something I will carry with me. He was awesome, so was opening act Weezer, of course.

But enough about tired feet and hearththrobs of all ages. You're here because you want to know what actually matters. Let's get into it.

One Theme to Rule Them All: Agentic AI

Google's five big themes of the conference all pointed in the same direction:

Wait, Which "Gemini" Are We Talking About?

Google is leaning into Gemini as their overarching brand for most AI efforts. They even announced Vertex AI will now be known as the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. It's important to understand which variation of Gemini is being referred to across the ecosystem:

Colin McCarthy, our principal architect, put it well: think of Gemini as a plot of land with several distinct buildings on it, each serving a different purpose, but increasingly connected by bridges that didn't exist a year ago.

Workspace Is Now Natively AI-Powered

Gemini is no longer a bolt-on to Google Workspace. It's woven into the fabric of every app, and the 2026 updates reflect that maturity. A few highlights worth calling out:

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  Gemini in Google Chat A unified assistant box inside Chat that can interact with your Docs, Slides, and Sheets, schedule meetings, and generate documents — without leaving the conversation.
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  Skills in Workspace Studio Build custom workflow automations (Skills) that do things like automatically surface key emails or enrich CRM data while you draft materials. Agents that actually help, not just chat.
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  New Admin Security Controls IT admins can now control exactly which data sources AI can access. This is one of the most requested features Google Workspace admins have been asking for over the past year.
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  O365 Migration Is Now 5× Faster Built directly into the Google Admin Console, no third-party tools needed. Supports complex org structures, batch imports, and hybrid setups. That being said, we definitely recommend partnering with Promevo for complex migrations.

Gemini Enterprise: AI That Can Actually Do Stuff

If Workspace intelligence is the everyday AI experience, Gemini Enterprise is where organizations actually build and deploy autonomous workflows. The big updates here:

Bring Your Own MCP Server. This is a big one. You no longer have to wait for Google to build a connector to your system. If your vendor has an MCP server (and increasingly, they all do) you can plug it directly into Gemini Enterprise. This eliminates one of the biggest friction points in enterprise AI pilots.

Federated Search vs. Data Ingestion. We got a great question in the webinar about whether federated search gives worse RAG results than ingesting data. The short answer from our team: the gap has closed significantly. For live systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, and Asana, federated is now excellent and far more practical.

The Agent Inbox. This is the human-in-the-loop feature that will keep your AI agents from going rogue. Agents run tasks, but they pause and surface results to you for review before taking consequential actions. It's the difference between a trusted autonomous colleague and an unsupervised intern with admin access.

Google Buys Wiz for $32 Billion (Yes, Billion)

This was the largest security acquisition in Google's history, and it finally closed on March 11, 2026. Wiz is a cloud and AI security platform that now sits alongside Google's existing SecOps and Mandiant capabilities.

What does it mean practically? A few things worth noting:

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  AI Bill of Materials (AI BOM) Wiz now tracks every AI framework your company uses and flags whether each agent is sanctioned or not. Shadow AI just got a lot harder to hide.
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  Lovable Integration Yes, really. Wiz can now scan vulnerabilities in vibe-coded apps built on Lovable. For teams experimenting with AI-generated applications, this matters.
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  Wiz Skills (Agentic Remediation) AI agents that don't just identify vulnerabilities . They fix them, with full context of your environment.

For Google Cloud clients: Wiz purchases count toward your GCP commit spend, same as gPanel. Promevo is  a Wiz partner, so if you have a renewal coming up or want to explore, let's talk!

What We Announced (gPanel Roadmap + Building Your Own Agents Talk with John Pettit)

We had a lot going on at our two booths: 3,000 llamas and totes distributed in what felt like 30 minutes is a genuinely chaotic experience. But we also had some real product news to share.

gPanel Roadmap Highlights

John Pettit's Lightning Talk: Building Gemini AI Agents on Google Cloud Marketplace

Our CTO gave a well-received talk on Friday about the AI agent marketplace — a dedicated "AI Agents" hub sitting right next to the standard GCP Marketplace, designed specifically for software companies who want to build, distribute, and monetize Gemini Enterprise agents.

The gist: there are 8M+ paid Gemini seats and $74B+ in committed cloud spend. Building an agent for the marketplace puts your product in front of enterprise buyers with pre-committed budgets who are actively looking for solutions. Promevo's ISV Agent Development service guides companies through the entire process — from wrapping your API using the Agent Development Kit, to security vetting, to go-to-market.

Grab the slide deck here →

Google's $750M Partner Fund — and What It Means for You

Google is not subtly investing in AI adoption. They announced a $750 million partner fund aimed at co-marketing, solution development, and subsidizing workshops and POCs. As a Premier Partner, Promevo has direct access to this — meaning that for qualifying organizations, we can run a structured Gemini Enterprise engagement at significantly reduced or no cost to you.

We conducted over 200 of these workshops last year. The model works: instead of three engineers running an unsanctioned pilot, you get a meticulous four-week engagement that identifies real use cases, proves ROI, and sets you up for a confident, full-scale rollout.