Brandon Carter: [00:00:00] All right we've got quite a few people in here. I know a lot of people sign up for webinars and then they just want the video on demand. So for those of you that have done that and are watching us in the future thank you. Thanks for tuning in and it's good to see all of you. I am going to shuffle around our layout here, and we're gonna jump into this thing.

We have a boatload of stuff to cover. And we'll get into as much of it as we can. And what we're trying to do is condense things down to 65 and sunny Shelby. That's congrats. That sounds awesome. So I keep getting distracted by the chat. But anyways, I love seeing you guys interacting in there and I will get in there and jump around a little bit with you.

But. To get back on track, there were hundreds of announcements. We'll talk about specific numbers here in a minute. Hundreds of announcements across the entire Google Cloud ecosphere. We are gonna try to [00:01:00] condense down to what really matters and what are the big themes and what do you need to know.

And what matters to you, whether you're a Promevo client, a gPanel client, someone that's just exploring and trying to learn we're gonna talk through a bunch of that. So let's jump into it. Our panel today, if the slide will advance, slide is not advancing. There we go. Thank you to whoever actually got the slide to advance.

So I, my name is Brandon. I'm the director of marketing. Those of you that have been to our webinars are probably used to hearing my rambles and stuttering and all that jazz. We're joined today by panel of experts. All of us were there, all of us, getting thousands of steps in. Joe Henderson, who is the head of our Google Cloud Alliance works very closely with Google.

Good morning, Joe. 

Joe Henderson: Good morning, good afternoon. 

Brandon Carter: We've got Jeremy Sanders, who is one of our solutions architect, and someone that a lot of you, those are who are Promevo clients have probably worked with at some point. If [00:02:00] not, you probably will at some point. He works directly with our clients and very much a Google expert.

Jeremy, good morning. 

Jeremy Sanders: Good morning. Good morning. 

Brandon Carter: And finally we have Colin McCarthy, who again, if you've paid attention to our webinars and our videos and our online content and all, you've definitely become familiar with Colin again, a one of our solutions architect, a principal architect who is really our guru on all things collaboration cloud, which is Google Workspace, all the Google workspace apps, gPanel, all of that stuff.

Colin, good morning. 

Colin McCarthy: Yep. Good afternoon here from Western Maine. It's 50 degrees and cloudy. 

Brandon Carter: Everyone's bragging about how nice the weather is, where they are which, should be, it's spring, right? Again, just to reiterate, we had a few more people that are still coming in over on the right sidebar.

You'll see chat in q and a. We would love to hear from you and we would love to interact with you. We've got a boatload. I'm not gonna go through all of these. It's like a hundred different topics. We are gonna try to, we're not gonna speed through it, but we're gonna try to hit the most important points across all of these.

[00:03:00] You'll notice some recurring themes but first, let's just talk about Google Cloud next. From a broad perspective, it was. Insanely large 32,000 attendees, over 700 breakout sessions, a ton of spotlights. It felt like anywhere you went, you were encountering someone on a stage talking with a crowd gathered around across those as 260 plus announcements from Google itself.

And from a Promevo perspective, this was the big deal. Those of you that were there, hopefully you got one of these. It's a really nice beach tote. It's got a little llama. We handed out probably about 5,000 of these things, and a lot of that felt like it happened in about a 30 minute window on Thursday afternoon.

And then, so tons and tons of llamas and pluses and Promevo gear. And then of course, the happy hour that we had with about 300 people there. Many of whom I see you here in this webinar. So good to see you again virtually. Panel guys what stood out about Google Cloud next to you?

Jeremy Sanders: The [00:04:00] sheer volume of people and the traffic that the whole event got was absolutely insane to me. I've never been to an event that's that large. And then the amount of walking and how sore I was after just day one was the most surprising. Out of it, everyone said my feet would hurt, ended up being my feet, my ankles, my knees, everything.

Everything was sore after walking around. 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, I think I did about 30 miles. Over the four or five days I was there might even might've even been even more. But yeah, certainly a personal best. And it, and not only was it the the sessions and the number of people, but it was, for me, it was the number of people I was able to connect with in, in real life who I either knew or I knew through their reputation and, followed their posts on LinkedIn and was actually able to go up and speak to 'em and connect in real life.

That, that was the real standout for me. 

Joe Henderson: Yeah. I logged about 71,000 steps. You think, 'cause it's all condensed to the one casino that you're not gonna be walking around that [00:05:00] much. That's I've solely mistaken on that. So yeah, it was a great time. And, as a Google Cloud Alliance person, I'm talking to Google reps, leaders, all that.

And so just being able to actually meet everybody in person all day, every day. It was a fantastic event. And then, yeah, brandon said, we had quite a few folks at our booths. We had two booths. So setting folks back and forth. I think we probably had over 1500 conversations and the, yeah, a lot of recurring themes that we'll talk about today.

But yeah, it was just a kind of a whirlwind. Didn't seem like it was a week we were there, but it was good to get back home, get some rest. 

Brandon Carter: Just a final note. Everyone that I talked to a couple of things. One, benson Boone. Interesting choice. Oh yeah. For a conference full of, a lot of like middle aged developer types like myself.

But what a show. Great performance. Also Weezer you gotta love Weezer. They've been around for 30 plus years. And then, yeah, just. Like I mentioned earlier, I brought back just the nastiest respiratory infection, so I apologize for my voice and sniffling and all of that [00:06:00] noise.

All right, so good time. Again, those of you that are here in the chat would love to hear what stood out to you. We are going to jump forward into some meat potatoes here. I think for those of you that were there, and again, there's a delay in advancing the slide. Thank you. So for those of you that are there, you probably noticed there was a couple of big recurring themes.

Really one big recurring theme, aI and Ag agentic ai, and we've taken this and chopped it up into a handful of areas that we're gonna focus on. But before we move on do you guys agree with that? Do you, do you feel like there was a major lean toward the agentic AI area and specifically Gemini enter.

Colin McCarthy: Yeah. It was all agents all the time. This could have been just rebranded as Google agent or agent next. Instead of Google Next every booth had AI in it, in their banner. Every conversation we're starting with it. [00:07:00] Yeah. This is the time for that Agentic Workplace transformation.

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah, I think some of the boosts that stood out to me were the ones that didn't mention Ag agentic ai. I was like, wow, that is funny that you guys don't have that up on the banner, but you're doing some sort of ag agentic solution. That was probably the most interesting part, is everyone had Asian agentic, something along those lines at their booth.

Joe Henderson: Yeah, I even saw some companies even rebranded their entire company to be called something ai, that they were called something completely different. So yeah, even beyond the messaging, some companies names have changed, include ai. So it was pretty wild to see. 

Brandon Carter: I, I do wanna say a lot of what we're gonna focus on today will be that agentic ai.

That was, it was unavoidable. It was the major thrust of not just Google Cloud, but as you mentioned, so many vendors and so many booths. That being said, there were a ton of announcements about other things Google Workspace, a ton of like developer tools. We will touch a little bit on some of the security stuff.

We're gonna try our best to do a full recap of all of that stuff too, the what's [00:08:00] the non-agent AI stuff that matters to a lot of the crowd. We're gonna do a recap on the Promevo blog about all of that stuff. So before we really dig into this, I think we decided as a group here that it was really important to talk about some nomenclature issues and specifically Gemini.

So there's been some name changes. There's a lot of things at Google Cloud that are called Gemini. We want, before we jump into the real meaty stuff we did wanna spend a second to talk about the actual naming and what is Gemini? Colin, do you wanna talk through this one? 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah. We, Jeremy and I, on the workshops we deliver, always get asked this question to try and steer our clients and prospects in, in, in understanding this and over lunch at Google.

Next, I, it struck up a conversation with a couple of attendees and they had some confusion as well about, what is Gemini? What is this? Where does enterprise connect into it? Everything is called Studio as well, [00:09:00] we, when Jeremy and I are doing our workshops we try to use the full naming convention for everything because sort of Gemini is that, that foundational underlying AI model.

Large language model and then, Gemini is, it used to be a separate part of Google Workspace. And now we just need to think of Google Workspace as just natively being AI powered. And there are Gemini features in Google Workspace. Gemini.google.com. There was lots of announcements of features being added to drive docs, sheets and slides.

Even Gmail has got a new AI inbox and now there's Gemini in Google Chat as well. And then you have Gemini Enterprise. This is where it gets confusing 'cause. People who are on the Google Workspace SKU might have Google Workspace, workspace Enterprise, either standard or [00:10:00] pro and think that they're on Gemini Enterprise when they're using Gemini in their enterprise workspace sku.

But there is a separate product. Which is Gini Enterprise, which is a go, basically a Google Cloud, A GCP product. That adds on to what you can do or what you have been used to doing in Gemini for Google Workspace. But it brings in those third party connectors. It has agents, has a no-code agent. There was, we'll talk about some updates that are coming to the agent designer that, that's getting some new features for long running agents ability to have an inbox to see all the messages.

So a lot's happening there. And then you have. All of the APIs that are available under the Gemini banner. There's document ai APIs. There's the nano banana, API, the imaging. There's also the VR API. So all of that sits. Under the Gemini banner for those pro code developers to extend [00:11:00] what you can do as a no code end user in Gemini Enterprise, but actually code in a number of languages using the a DK, the agent development kit, and then expanding and adding new capabilities for your business in Gemini Enterprise.

Hopefully that makes sense. Where you've got, Gemini in three parts of the business really depending on, on, on collaboration third party connectors, and then the pro code developer component of Gemini that is the overarching name for everything. 

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah. Colin, you know me.

I like analogies. One thing that I always like to the way I've been explained this is think of a plot of land. So you have a plot of land, it has roads and whatnot and each building is what Gemini, these separate Geminis are. 'cause they're, and those roads all connect and they all have some sort of context to each other and whatnot.

That's the way I've been explaining it to people. So if you can think of that, a plot of land with a bunch of buildings each. Building is, Gemini for [00:12:00] Google Workspace, Gemini Enterprise, the Gemini APIs, and then there's roads connecting all of those in between it. That's how I think about it in my brain whenever I'm thinking about explaining it.

Colin McCarthy: That, that's a really good analogy. Certainly with Gemini, for Google Workspace and Gemini Enterprise, they were originally separate buildings and there was no great way. For the two of them to connect. Now, almost like a SkyBridge has been developed between the two. And you can call your Gemini a, your Gemini Enterprise agents from inside Google Workspace, you'll be able to add it to workspace studio skills that you set up.

So yeah, everything is becoming a lot more consolidated and collaborative. And we could talk about. Google Workspace Studio and some of the updates that are coming to that as well, GEMS is coming back. It was available in the private preview. Really does, everybody was very excited with all of the announcements, I think.

'cause it was like we were getting all of our Christmas wishlists [00:13:00] in just a few days. 

Brandon Carter: Let's let's dig into a few, one, just one bullet here. Like you mentioned Vertex AI no longer a thing. It's Gemini Enterprise agent platform. We'll touch back on that here in a minute. But yeah, I mean it's, those of you that I worked with Google know that.

They do like to get creative and change names up. This is another one of those, but hopefully this helps you translate some of the stuff that we're gonna be talking about moving forward beginning with some changes in Google Workspace. Jeremy, do you wanna jump in on this one? 

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah. So as Colin stole my thunder here a little bit, talking It's a layup.

Yeah, it's a pass layup. You know the assist. The AlleyOOP, whatever you wanna call it. Yeah. So with Google Workspace Intelligence, if you haven't seen on the Google Workspace update blog, which I'm sure that we'll also send out with this, there's been a ton of new updates for those of you that have worked with Colin and I with, Gemini for Google Workspace workshops and whatnot.

There have been a lot of things that have been asked out of those workshops that Google has heard those ideas and those feature requests, and we brought them over. So the ability to have some workflows [00:14:00] built out instead of having to, if you remember, we would always say, Hey, you need to, now take this, and then at it at, within sheets or print your slides.

We're now able to do that in an automated agentic workflow, which is, or maybe not agentic, but it is a workflow that's going to go through and do all of that for you. What's really fun too, as what Colin also alluded to, is your Gemini Enterprise agents are now gonna be ping A. They're going to be context aware of each other within Google Workspace.

Google Workspace is Gemini, so that will be a big plus for those of us who are using Gemini for Google Workspace plus Gemini Enterprise like we do here internally at Promevo. I know for a fact that Colin and I are very excited about this. But we'll also send out, like I said, that workspace update blogs because there is so many.

I could do a whole webinar on just those updates and then Joe and Colin will never get to talk again. 

Colin McCarthy: Oh, we always will. I want thinking Brendan about the theme of the updates that we saw, what my takeaway from all of the updates that we saw being [00:15:00] announced. It was all about end user enhancements and improving their productivity and improving their collaboration.

There was. I didn't see any messaging, I didn't take away the messaging that this was automating all of our work and removing that human. There was a very big focus of human in the loop. There's actually gonna be a little toggle box for where these agents will stop and wait for, the human input.

Just as if we had a an intern or a graduate or a junior member of our team who was incredibly skilled, but we could assign them a task. I, wait for them to do that task and then they would come and show us what they had done, and we would say, yes, this is really good. Carry on. So I think there's, this is a a very pivotal moment when a lot of us get a very skilled colleague who e even more skilled than we've been used to in the last year, but now has that autonomous ab ability to go off and do some tasks on their own and then check back [00:16:00] in.

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah. And Colin, one thing I diverting from your point a little bit here, one thing that did sneak under the radar a little bit through this with workspace intelligence is there's gonna be additional security controls, which a lot of it admin, I know Colin and I have been begging for these from.

Yeah, A year at least, there will be additional security controls about where your data sources can come from and whatnot. What's what's able to be analyzed by the ai and by Gemini, which will be a very powerful thing. 'cause as some of us know, there are certain things we just don't even wanna put in AI to begin with.

We want that to be completely human, humans only, no ai. So I'm really excited for that feature as well. That'll be coming out. I believe that's slowly rolling out as we speak, but I'm not sure if we're all seeing that on end just yet. 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, it's great that we've got those admin controls straight away.

We all probably know in the past that sometimes a feature comes out and then the admin control doesn't come out for another couple of months. This seems to be being deployed in a very sensible manner. I. 

Brandon Carter: Yeah, so [00:17:00] some really neat stuff on the workspace side. I think just about everyone here that's watching and probably watching on demand is probably a workspace client.

But for those who aren't, Google did make some announcements around Microsoft 365. Jeremy, do you wanna talk through this one? 

Jeremy Sanders: Of course. Yeah. As someone who has been working a lot with our migrations team here at Promevo, we're seeing a massive uptick in people thinking about leaving O 365. Maybe they're just exploring the options.

They're not necessarily ready to move forward with that, but it is, there is a very compelling use case here now for using. Google Workspace instead of O 365, if you would, to ask me this question. And if you would ask Colin and I this question as former it admins, five years ago, we probably have a very different conversation of kind of what your organization's direction is, technical wise and, with policy and control.

But now Google has really caught up and in some places has exceeded probably where O 365 is. Don't get me wrong, if you're still using O [00:18:00] 365. It's still a great product. I'm not telling you need to change today or anything like that, but we will say that with. The migrations that we're seeing and a lot of really good success is basically, the way that I always explain it is that people in their daily life, like who doesn't have a Gmail account, they're used to the, they're very used to that environment.

Why not bring that to the, enter to the enterprise and to the business side of things and make it a lot easier for your users to be productive and get things done. Plus you have the added additions of all of the Gemini features as well, which makes it even more compelling in my opinion, to get those, think about moving away from O 365 and moving the Google Workspace, and we have a lot of really good programs here at Prova to set you up for success on that if you are interested in, 

Brandon Carter: that's the point that I wanna throw out there is yes, like they've made some improvements to migration. A lot of it you might be able to do on your own.

I still, obviously I'm biased being an employee of Promevo, but obviously I still recommend reaching out to a partner like Promevo to help with that because there's always a ton of [00:19:00] complexity. And you're right, like I would guess that a large percentage of Office 365 users probably have discreet Google accounts set up because.

Docs and sheets and, the collaboration and just the ability to use those is so much easier than the traditional Microsoft model. But yeah a pretty, pretty interesting note from Google that they're investing in this, they're looking to capture more of that market share and make it easier for organizations to switch.

And one of the things that it talks about are third party. Third party integrations, maybe gPanel doesn't necessarily help with, or it doesn't have a function for migration. But gPanel, which if you're not familiar, is Promevo's proprietary Google Workspace Management and reporting tool. We did make some announcements of our own here and during our happy hour, talked a little bit about it and did a whole lot of conversations around all three of these.

But Jeremy, can you talk for a minute about what gPanel announced? But before you do, I'm gonna drop in one more [00:20:00] note. I see some questions starting to come in. Just a reminder to those of you that are here, there is a chat tab and a q and a tab. Would love to hear you chime in on either one of those. Yeah, go ahead and talk about gPanel for a second, Jeremy.

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah, so a lot of big updates. With gPanel, if you were at the happy hour, you heard us talking a lot about gPanel and how excited we are. A lot of different rules engines and automation upgrades that we've made. We've heard and looked at a lot of feature requests and have implemented many of those into our environment.

So for example, with, excuse me. With conditional logic and basically automating the way I think about rules engine. Think of an if then statement. If something happens, then I want this action to occur. We've really built that out and made it a much more fleshed out platform. And I know it says, oh one up there, which I th.

I think it might have been Q1 or Q2 of this year that we did that. There are still additional ones that we're looking at right now and we're working to implement. So feel free if you are a current GPN customer and you're like, Hey Jeremy, I really like rules engine, but I think we need this and this.

Let us know. Let's get that feature requested over and over to my development team [00:21:00] and we'll go take a look at that, see what we can do for you. Drive labels that is coming in, I believe next quarter. Drive labels as we've all seen. When it comes to external sharing, whether it be data retention, whatever it may, data security is gonna be really important.

On the way moving forward, there's been a massive trend, Colin and I have been seeing a ton of it. People are much more concerned about where their data is being shared to, who's accessing where it's, who can download it, who can print it, things along those lines. We're working very hard, and I've seen a little bit about what we're doing with drive labels, so I can't spoil it and I can't tell you, Hey, this is exactly what it's gonna look like, but it's a very exciting feature.

For those of you who may be a part of our customer advisory board, they were the ones who helped drive a lot of this. Thank you very much for your time on that and giving us really good ideas and. Pushing us as Promevo to get this pushed out. And of course we also have 210 new API endpoints. If you had talked to us previously about API endpoints, you may have heard, hey, we've got like 10, five or 10 I think is what we're at.

We're now at [00:22:00] 210. We have quite a bit more that we're working with. We've had, we have some integrations now using these APIs. We've seen with Workday, ServiceNow, and Okta, just to name a few that we're currently actively working on. So if you are using those on top of Google Workspace. Let's have a conversation.

Let's see where gPanel can help you out with those APIs and how we can make your life easier as an IT admin. 

Brandon Carter: And we're gonna be publishing a lot of content around those and all of this on gPanel.io. So stay tuned. We'll probably have some webinars around it too. I did want to pop back one slide. We did have a question come in on the Microsoft Google migrations.

The question is, can you run more than one at a time or is it still one at a time? 

Colin McCarthy: So I haven't read all of the the guides that have come out for this, but it looks like you can, I've just had a quick look. You can import five batches at one time. It, it is a wonderful new tool. It does a, that a scan of [00:23:00] your source environment will give you estimates on the time it's gonna take.

And you can add can break it out into the batches, which is really good for a phase cut over. I know before it was very annoying, the the very old service, once it was running, you like, couldn't touch it and couldn't change any users. It's easier if you couldn't batch it out.

Now, yeah. So it's a wonderful improvement. 

Joe Henderson: Yeah. 

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah. And I would highly encourage, if you are interested in the tool, just go look in your admin console. Don't run anything, but just take a look at it. It got a massive facelift. It looks really good. And we've been seeing some use cases out of it that are very compelling as well with it.

And it's, if you, again, five years ago, if you would've looked at the data migration tool to where it is today, it's night and day difference. 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, I'd used the old tool in 2018 to move 500 users, and it was just email and calendar in it, and it worked. It just took a long time. But thankfully I was I had the capability to.

To do a cutover when we wanted. Now I think this is a wonderful [00:24:00] tool for any size organization if they don't want to work with a professional partner like ourselves. But you should if you're a, if you're a large organization, but if you're a smaller organization or you're a very skilled admin and you like doing this stuff and now makes it very easy for you to do it this is great for m and a activity.

Because you're not just bringing emails and calendar over. You can bring, documents as well. 

Brandon Carter: Love it. Hopefully that answers your question, Mike. If not, feel free to chime back in. Let's transition away to talk a little bit about Gemini Enterprise, which felt like the star of the ball, if you will.

Massive emphasis. Colin, do you wanna jump in here? 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah. So the Gemini Enterprise agent platform, previously known as Vertex ai. Some of the messaging I've seen is around this as being a rebrand. Which has been, done before on platforms or as this is a new platform and verte X AI technology is part of [00:25:00] it.

But the Vertex AI studio is renamed. And I think this really does. Solidify and make more sense of the Gemini platform name. And with everything that you can do in for Gemini Enterprise, you've got that the no code agents, you can use the the Gemini studio.

The agent studio to use a prompt to build out your agent. You can use, natural language wire, almost scope it out yourselves, and then export the code and get a pro code developer. Get yourself, drop it into your favorite IDE and then start, expanding on it.

I think this is a wonderful foundation and a very easy way for. AG agentic ideas to go from identifying what you want to achieve, prototyping it out, and then deploying it in a very scalable, secure, reliant fashion. And then being able to make it available. To your workforce [00:26:00] as an agent that you can push out to them inside Gemini Enterprise.

And it's all of the backend magic that your, developers have built in all of the logic, additional APIs, other platforms you, your end users won't see. But you as a developer have all of that amazing power and then your users just have that amazing experience in Gemini Enterprise to access that agent.

And automate whatever their business process was. 

Brandon Carter: I think what's really key here, like it, like the graphic calls out, is that there are layers to this for every element of your organization, from your like super knowledgeable tech savvy developers all the way down to jokers like me, who I just wanna be able to type some words in and have it do something and have, to enable.

Both, all three of those sides, you're, low, medium, high technical savvy, but still keep it secure, still keep your data organized, keep avoid leaks, avoid [00:27:00] agents that might overstep boundaries and things like that. Yeah. 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah. And it's a great way for admins to have, a central, a SA source of confidence for all of their agent workflows. You don't have well-meaning end users spitting something up on another platform that they've seen on LinkedIn or another blog post as being. The AgTech platform of the day some fancy name ending in.ai that they think they have to adopt.

'cause everybody else is adopting. You can provide your end users with that no-code experience. They can build out those simple tools for themselves. You know that everything is secure. You've got visibility into, everything that your end users are doing. You get the logging and the reporting and you know that.

That Gemini and the underlying large language models aren't training on any of your data. They're not training on any of your prompts. Yeah, that's always my fear. When end users start experimenting generally, they're doing it [00:28:00] because they want to learn and they want to succeed, but they might not know the security implications of using those those shadow AI platforms.

Brandon Carter: That kind of naturally brings us to the next spot, which is like the governance layer of this. Do you wanna talk about this part? 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah. The the bit that we've been missing and needing and always been talking about when we have discussions about agentic workplace transformation, is that human in the loop.

We love AI hallucinations. We don't know that we love them, but we do because we love the creative aspect of any AI platform to create images, to create video, and to create text for us. We need those hallucinations 'cause that's how it is creative. We also don't want it hallucinating when we want it to be factual, having these human, human in the loop steps and having that agent inbox. Now in Gemini Enterprise and the enterprise app, you'll have an inbox where you'll get all the results of what your agents have been doing. If they've drafted a message for you, you get the ability to read it and then [00:29:00] send it on if it's created a report or it's waiting for permission to carry on and do something else.

I think this, really does extend on that. Internship or graduate, junior team member that we discussed earlier. And I'm really am looking forward to getting this update in my Gemini enterprise so that, I can really see how we can revolutionize and change how we tackle a lot our daily workflow.

Jeremy Sanders: And I think that human in the loop part, Colin, is really important to even say even more because how many horror stories that we see making the news nowadays, an AI agent went off and went rogue and it deleted, everything, or it sent everything to the wrong place. Having this human in the loop interaction is a really big game changer because it, yes.

Awesome to have agentic actions and things do, and AI do things genetically. It's another thing whenever it goes rogue and next thing you know, we're all scared to use AI because we're afraid something like that's gonna happen. This helps prevent that and [00:30:00] mitigated. 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, and no, the other big update that we all, saw in Gemini Enterprise and even today.

If you look at the G Enterprise release notes, we're getting a lot more connectors. The big exciting thing that we all learned about was bring your own MCP server. You can now add a custom into MCP server into your Gemini enterprise, which is a big win. So you don't have to wait for Google to build or release a custom connector.

You don't have to have a custom connector yourself. You can just connect in to. Any of your providers MCP servers, and a lot of companies are doing that. They are creating an mc MCP server because they know that's gonna, that's the future. 

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah, it really helps accelerate the adoption of Gemini Enterprise for your organization, because, like Colin just said, if you've done a Gemini for enterprise POC with us or things like that, you've seen the delay sometimes where hey, connector comes, it goes, Hey, it's gonna be here.

Oh, Google just delayed it. [00:31:00] Instead, we now get to skip that step. We get to, as long as that third party connector has. An MCP server, we can go and we can have a lot of fun with that and really get you up and running on A POC. 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, and I think all of the connectors have probably been rebuilt. And enhanced a lot of them have federated access now, that's the standard have now got, actions built into 'em.

All the Google Cloud documentation has been updated. It is very easy to deploy this. You just have to sit there and read the instructions and follow them. Exactly. And it's very easy to deploy. 

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah, it's a good point to also point out, Colin, you had mentioned data federation there for a lot of this data Federation is a lot better at being able to keep up to date with your information that the agent AI is running against.

If you've ever used data ingestion, which if you were early at the Gemini Enterprise, you saw a lot of data ingestion and then your data was eight hours behind, four hours behind whatever the minimum would be. So let's just say, Hey, I made an update to a document I want Gemini Enterprise to now query for it.

[00:32:00] Oh, it's not there because it hadn't ingested that data and analyzed it yet. So that's really important to know with Data Federation, that you're getting a much more real time and live results, which makes Gemini Enterprise even more powerful as a platform. 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, totally agree. 

Brandon Carter: Just putting one bullet point on top of this one just this morning, read an article about an ai agent from.

Not Gemini that deleted a company's entire, code base and database and backups in nine minutes and afterward said, I, I violated every principle I was given. So yeah, governance, pretty significant. The AI agent dunks on your company and then. Not great. Yeah. So regulation, super important.

Let's transition into some backend, Google's making some more maybe nerdy stuff, if you will. Google's making some investment in all the stuff that happens behind the scenes here. You guys wanna jump in on this one? 

Colin McCarthy: Yeah, I think talking to Jeremy about this before and our other colleague is to remind people that Google own [00:33:00] the entire stack.

So they've invested an awful lot in their own TPUs. It's running on Geminis, running on their own silicon in their own data centers running on their own fire. On their own, with their own connectivity. It has the reliant the reliability of YouTube. When did YouTube go down?

And we didn't get to watch a funny cat video. It's a very robust network. And, the, these updates are very nerdy. I must admit, I didn't really look too much into the TPU updates. Because as a an end user admin, I'm, I want to, I would just I have confidence that the underlying technology is working and I just have that great front end to to work.

Joe Henderson: Yeah, just a double doubt on the theme here. If you've, talked to any partner leader or Tom Krys talks like, it's all about the ownership here. So yeah, Google, there's, all these races with all the other AI platforms out there, Google is. Solidify, solidifying themselves as this [00:34:00] sturdy, long-term play because of all this, because they do own everything.

I think they're on their eighth generation of TPUs and owns chips. So it is something that if people are planning for the long-term for their business, it is the cloud that is the sturdy long-term play.

Brandon Carter: Yeah. That's a key theme. Like we own our stack. We're not beholden to third parties. We're not taking a bunch of private equity money or whatever to stand this thing up. Super. I think a pretty critical differentiator. And we're gonna talk about another massive investment that they made.

But before we've got a question that came in about connectors, so I'm gonna throw this out there. Federated search versus ingest from what? The question asker has read the ingest option gives a better RAG result when asking for a connected service to be included in detailed generated content. Are you Promevo folks seeing good results with RAG content using federated search for the agent connectors?

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah, seeing, still seeing [00:35:00] really good Colin, I haven't been able to see a discernible difference ever. Between, data ingestion? Yes. Historically, you're a hundred percent correct, Mike, that rag would in theory, do better with data ingestion. That is completely what the numbers tell us, but I think that gap has closed so much that it, you would have to get very nitpicky to see the differences in results between RA with rag between federated search and data ingestion.

Colin, do you have any experience like I, I personally haven't seen any difference in quality. 

Colin McCarthy: I haven't either. I'm just trying to think like all of the connectors that we are using internally Promevo on our Gemini Enterprise instance, all federated, all of our demo environments we initially had them.

As ingested, but then it would make it difficult to do demos. 'cause you could use like the Salesforce connector in Gmail. You could use that to add a contact, but then if you try to reference that contact, it wouldn't be there in [00:36:00] Gemini Enterprise. I haven't, yeah I've been very impressed with Federated, there could still be some.

Calls for using ingested, certainly for very large data. And that doesn't change as well. Company databases knowledge bases, et cetera. Policy documents, which shouldn't be changing every three hours, otherwise that the chaos for everybody to try and manage. But yeah, for HubSpot connectors, Asana, Atlassian, JIRA, et cetera.

Federated is a really great way. 

Brandon Carter: I love it. Hopefully that answers your question, Mike, again for you and for everyone else that's out there. We've, we will talk a little bit about some of Promevo services around Gemini Enterprise, but all your custom connectors if you've got a system out there, we're the ones to talk to help get it connected.

So I mentioned earlier that. We Google made a significant investment here, the slide that you're seeing on the screen and backend stuff. But let's talk about another [00:37:00] investment that was I guess finalized for good over the last little bit and was a. The big talking point at Google next, and that is the acquisition of Wizz.

Joe, do you wanna jump in on this one? 

Joe Henderson: Yeah, absolutely. We learned just how much money Google has. So this was actually the largest security acquisition of all time in the history of acquisition. So pretty wild, especially because Wizz was founded in 2020, so quite a six year run of starting a company, scaling it, and then selling it for $32 million.

Congrats to everyone I shares and wiz. So just from a perspective of Google. So Google's, prize themself known as the secure cloud always focuses on that. So they have the security first sort of legacy. They made another acquisition in 2022 in Mandiant as far as like a frontline threat detection that they embedded in their process.

And so this is that sort of, not fully complete maybe, but that encompasses all things cloud and outer perimeter security and Wiz. So they're basically. What they think of is this [00:38:00] United defense against everything that's out there from their SecOps to threat detection, to now all things cloud security.

One of the cool things Wiz is, was a, they got popular 'cause they were multi-cloud and they sold on cloud marketplaces. That's how they got a lot of the momentum. So it's a huge move on Google. And so now it is available to all Google customers. Pretty easily accessible. So there's a lot more updates on Wiz than we're gonna talk about today.

But just to categorize some of the highlights here. What they categorize there. Basically expanded the perimeter as far as like multi multi-cloud and edge computing. So one of the big highlights is they actually support do security on Databricks. So customers that are using Databricks Wiz can actually secure that as well, which is pretty cool as far as the outer layer, what they consider.

So beyond the compute of the Google services they're, they can now cover things like Google Cloud, Apogee, CloudFare. CloudFlare AI security tools like CEL and everything like that. So they have really expanded what they can what they can cover as far as the multi-cloud and edge. And [00:39:00] then near and dear to a lot of our hearts that like to play around with ai.

It's all about securing that sort of AI native development. Their goal is to eliminate that, shadow it. So they came up with this concept of this AI BOM or bill of materials. So basically what it does is it takes every AR a AI framework that your company's using and you'll know exactly who or what agent is writing that code.

Is it sanctioned? Or is it not? Or is it unapproved and it will alert you there. Another cool one, especially 'cause I play around with this a lot, is they actually have a new integration with Lovable. So if your team is out there vibe coding things on lovable building apps or websites you can actually scan vulnerabilities on lovable that will alert your companies.

So you can wrangle in some of the, the rogue vibe coding that's going on. And then one of the last big ones I said there's a lot more than this, but they have this thing called wiz skills, which it's basically a gentech remediation. So it's basically these ai co coding agents.

They're given the full context so they can actually fix the vulnerabilities themselves. Like I said, there's probably 30 plus other sub [00:40:00] announcements from Wiz. I, implore everybody to talk to us after this or read them yourself. But those are the highlights and it just showcases Google's really focus on security.

So from things like. The Google SecOps tool plus now Mania Plus Wiz this their goal is to basically tell every, customer that they are more than covered with security. And then for partners it's great. So we actually partnered with Wiz from Reselling Wiz on the Google Cloud marketplace.

Are we able to do implementation services? So for us who already worked with Wiz for our customers it's just a great addition as an all on Google partner that we can offer to our customers. Even. Even easily even more easy. It's huge news and it's definitely something we're already seeing a lot of our customers start to talk to us about, or if they have a renewal, they're moving that to the GCP marketplace.

And something I think everyone should at least check out and read more deeply. 

Brandon Carter: Yeah, great. Pairing up with gPanel as well. And again, both of those buying through the marketplace, it counts against your like GCP commits. So huge benefits all around. And for those of you that were at the [00:41:00] conference, you could tell that Wiz had gotten some Google money because what an amazing booth.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, just what is that? Like a spaceship or something? Just incredible. 

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah. They had one of the coolest booths.

Brandon Carter: For sure, one of the coolest booths. They didn't have tote bags with stuffed llamas in them, but like super cool. And nonetheless we are in our last, 

Colin McCarthy: I think everybody liked the robot that was there.

That's what they like the 

Brandon Carter: little, the robots. Yeah. Super cool. Good use of money and definitely attention grabbing. Let's talk about Google's partner investment. So this came out really just like before the first day of the conference and, but I think it has pretty significant meaning for Promevo obviously, but also for those of you that are on the end user side.

Joe, do you wanna talk about this? 

Joe Henderson: Yeah, absolutely. Colin, Jeremy ever talked earlier about, mentioned workshops that are out there. So as Google partners, we have the ability to basically do workshops or POCs or pilots on certain Google technologies. And so Google actually can fund some of these for qualifying customer to that.

So the idea behind all this is if you let you [00:42:00] know a company, maybe three engineers, test out a product or enterprise themselves. Maybe that's not going to make its way through all the levels of approvals and the likelihood of that getting adopted at full scale is probably pretty low. So Google's has been doing for years, and this is just throwing gas on the on, on the fire here, is they're taking partners like us who specialize in these products.

Can do these workshops, POCs pilots, and they'll actually for qualifying customers they can fund that. So there's actually no cost to the customer. And then a partner like us can take them through a meticulous, four week engagement where instead of just connecting some you know, connecting some software, connecting your Google accounts.

We actually get to spend time with the customer. We get to say, what do you want to do with ai? Like, where are some inefficiencies in your organization? So we end up having deeper conversations and actually finding out what we want to test out so that there is some ROI should you wanna deploy that later?

So we're talking with sales and marketing departments who wanna be more efficient with their CRM that's [00:43:00] connected to how they're actually deploying messaging to their customers. We're talking to finance departments where there's a CFO who wants to reduce the time on their quarterly reconciliation.

It's a great way for partners leading their customers and customers to actually get a specific evaluation of the technology before they wanna roll it out. So it's one of those things where it's, if you have a partner or hopefully, working with us definitely talk to us about this and we can work with you to to see if there's possibility of you qualifying for something like this so you can you can do these workshops, but.

We've done I think over 200 workshops last year. Our entire the cloud and AI team that I work on where all of our current, larger customers are going through a lot of these right now. And Google is very supportive in working with that. Any questions on that, Brandon?

I think there was potentially a question that you had on this earlier. 

Brandon Carter: I so yeah, there's a lot of people that have already started their journey with Gemini Enterprise. Maybe it's already in motion. Is it too late? If you've already maybe sunk a little bit into it is it [00:44:00] too late to engage with a partner?

Joe Henderson: No. No, absolutely not. We work very closely, so there's a lot of people as a, Google customer, you're gonna have like your workspace support. If you're on a cloud side, you're gonna have field sales rep, you're gonna have a customer engineer, potentially the type of company may have.

An AI specialist. You're pro potentially already working with them. We work seamlessly with those types of roles and those types of Google roles are very happy to have a partner guide them through that as well, because again, it takes 'em down a path that everyone agrees on. There's timing there, there's responsibilities that are outlined, and the outcome just becomes a lot better because there you're gonna get a true use case of how something like Gemini Enterprise can help you.

That way when you go to actually make your decision on whether you want to roll this out at scale, it has been done in a vetted way. Yeah. Yeah, highly encourage everyone to talk to us and figure out what's possible. We 

Brandon Carter: We'll put a point on this one here in just a second and talk about some of the specific motions that Promevo has.

Before we do that, I did wanna put in a [00:45:00] plug about, we do wanna talk for a second, at least about John Petit, our CTO, who gave a presentation on. Your sorry. Joe, you know what? I'll just let you talk through instead of me trying to summarize. 

Joe Henderson: Yeah, sounds good. So yeah, we had, on Friday we had a lightning talk that John gave.

It was very well received. And so it's all about the AI marketplace. So when you think about the cloud marketplaces, you think about the standard marketplaces where the GCP marketplace, where you can go on, you can do a private software, buy something off of it, of like third party software. Whether it's like MongoDB or all your standard software that's typically listed on there, and people do that because it's available.

It can burn down on any commitments they might have. It's easier for procurement. It's a lot of benefits there. So that's like a standard SaaS. Solution that is normally sold and it's put on the marketplace for these reasons. So it's that same sort of licensed SaaS software that's on the marketplace. Now, what Google has done is they've created an AI agent marketplace.

It's a completely different marketplace. It sits right next to the regular GCP marketplace. But the point of this is [00:46:00] for software companies that wanna develop their own agents and integrate into Gemini Enterprise. There's 9 million subscriptions out there, people already using Gemini Enterprise.

There's. A hundred potentially. I think it's 71 plus. They said in the latest report, a pre-committed Google spend that's out there, but people actually wanna burn down via these marketplaces. So what we're seeing is a lot of co, of a lot of software companies, they wanna start to build their own agent onto this.

So one for distribution and two. They actually get to go through a process and making sure that their agent is secure on there. We have a service where that's what John talked about on his talk, where there's a lot that goes into this. Again, it's not a simple SaaS product that you already have created that you're throwing on the marketplace.

This is an agent that you actually need to do it. So there's a couple building blocks here of using the using Google services. There's a no-code, low-code agent. Basically this Gemini enterprise agent designer. It basically helps you create these these natural languages for rapid deployment, there's this pro code, or they have the A DK, which is the agent development kit.

So [00:47:00] there's two different ways that you can build the agent there, but then it's all about discovering your agent when that's up there, and it's all about making sure that's secure. So they created this concept of this sort of agent card. So it's like your digital business card or like your, I dunno, like your barcode, like you're scanning something.

So it actually is discoverable out there and then it goes through a massive sort of security vetting. So once it is up there and you are able to distribute it to the masses, it, they make sure that is absolutely secure. The concepts of this it's obviously very advantageous for software companies that do this, but it's very hard to get it right.

And so do you want to deploy? Some of your current engineers that are working on other projects into actually building this. So our service is what a lot of the software companies we work with will take you through this entire path and be your guide, do some of the work for you, and make sure that this is all set up and so it is successful when it is launch.

Yeah it's the next generation marketplace and I think as the years go on, I've been in marketplaces for eight years now. This is [00:48:00] where this is going as people are gonna probably, stop, they're still gonna purchase big subscriptions of SaaS software, but the more time, as time goes on, they want to also purchase that agent, they wanna also integrate it into their flow.

So yeah, that was one of our sort of announcements or talks that we gave there about that. 

Brandon Carter: So we're in our last, like four or five minutes here. Those of you that have questions out there, please start throwing 'em in and we'll take a minute here at the end. If we don't get to it here on the live webinar, I promise you we will follow up with you directly and answer whatever questions you have.

So to put a, a. I don't know, a blanket over the top of this thing. I don't know what word I was looking for there, but the thing that like was really clear to me is Google is obviously all in on AI and specifically Agentic ai, Gemini enterprise is a big thing, but I feel like especially after hearing you guys talk, the thing that really stands out to me is they don't want.

Cost to be a factor. So Google is literally throwing money at this thing so that you can [00:49:00] get in and recognize the value down the road. You'll find, you know yourself paying for it, but initially like they're willing to cover this and two. In order to make sure that the implementation goes well, they want you working with partners.

They want you working with companies like Promevo, who, this is what we do and we are like, we have experts at every aspect of this from like data governance, data preparation, the AI bots building API connections, Gemini Enterprise user engagement. We mentioned workshops. Just as a final point here, let's talk about how.

Promevo specifically can help with any of these things, and one of them we already mentioned, like Google funding for your projects. That's like we are your best avenue to that. We have the relationships with Google and we're gonna be your best voucher to go out and secure some of that. Do you, Joe, do you wanna talk about just some of the other motions that we have?

Joe Henderson: Yeah. Yeah. So some of these motions encompass a lot of what we talked about today as far as the Gemini Enterprise portion of that. So our Gemini Enterprise Accelerator is really just [00:50:00] taken you from that conversation about what is. Possible sort of the art of the possible, what can do that to actually find in use cases to hopefully grabbing you some funding, taking you through workshops or POCs and then doing a full scale rollout.

So that's what that accelerator program is. So it's taking from idea to actually full scale rollout and actually getting ROI from Gemini Enterprise, the ISV agent. That's what we just talked about, or I just talked about as far as getting a listing up on the GCP. A AI agent marketplace as opposed to the regular marketplace.

And then obviously any type of custom a custom development that needs to be done within your organization. We have the skills to do that as well. And like Brandon said, like this is, Gemini Enterprise, Google's, one, two, and three initiative it seems by talking to everybody right now.

So now is the time to, if you want to explore it especially the beginning of the year. Where they're encouraging everyone to work with partners, see if there is some funding out there. That's really the key now is to jump in and test things out.[00:51:00] 

Brandon Carter: Awesome. So that's a whole lot of talking. We took up a solid 58 minutes. The crowd's being a little bit quiet, so if you guys do have questions, you can throw them in now. But I know, like I've seen some of the names that are here with us. I know you guys are already you're constantly talking with people at Privo.

So please jump in there and talk with us. Those of you who are whether you're here live or you're watching on Demand, you're gonna get an email that's gonna have a link to this page that's on the, that's on the slide here. You'll get to see our sort of recap video. You'll get to see John Pettit's presentation that Joe talked about a few minutes ago and some other resources.

I think with that. Unless anyone has any final words, I think we'll call this thing a wrap and give you guys approximately 30 seconds back. 

Colin McCarthy: I think if we were gonna do a final word, the final word would have to be agent. 

Jeremy Sanders: Just one word.

Colin McCarthy: Just one word because it was mentioned. If you look at that list of 260 announcements it's everywhere.

See in the agent development kit, agent [00:52:00] studio agent, runtime agent, sandbox agent, memory bank agent, session agent, identity agent, registry agent, gateway agent, anomaly detection, agent security, dashboard agent simulation. Agent evaluation, agent optimizer, and then we scroll down a bit. We've got agent designer, and then there's a whole bunch of other agent stuff as well.

Jeremy Sanders: Yeah, it's pretty crazy to think. That was the main focus. 

Brandon Carter: So yeah, nothing but agents. All right, you guys. Promevo folks, thank you so much for jumping in and digesting a boatload of information Very quickly, Jeremy, Collin looks like Joe, conveniently, his internet dropped out right after he was done talking, which is great.

Thank you guys. Thank you for your work on this. And to all of you that are watching live, thanks for joining us. Love the interaction. It was great to see a bunch of you at the conference. I know some of you even parked out in our booth or what we called the Promevo Break Room. It was awesome hanging out with you guys and getting to see everyone.

For those of you that weren't there yeah, reach out to us. We'd love to talk about it and help you implement. [00:53:00] All the things that we talked about today. So with that, happy Wednesday and good luck recuperating and we'll see you guys soon.