Thoughts on #GoogleCloudNext in Tokyo 2026

Every few years there’s something that catches everyone’s attention. Since I live in the digital marketing and analytics world, I usually notice these developments on a particular vertical first - Analytics, Ads, BigQuery… a while back was server-side GTM, GA4, Google Tag Gateway for Advertisers. Remember?

This time it’s agentic AI. But it’s not one vertical - it seems to be permeating *absolutely everything*. Unlike previous changes, this one feels different. It feels like the fabric of digital is being rewoven with agentic in mind, and the way we approach everything is changing along with it.

Google Cloud is treating agents as first-class citizens, governed under the same IAM model as everything else — identities, permissions, roles, just like any user or service account. I think that signals agents becoming part of the architecture itself, not a feature layered on top.

On the #digitalmarketing side, there was one demo that caught my attention: a flurry of campaign documents and requirements were fed into an agentic workflow running through Gemini, with a Conversational Analytics layer where you just ask your data questions in plain language and get a full performance read back.

Demos at events need to be taken with a spoonful of interpretation sauce, but still, I can see the digital marketer moving in that direction. Not that digital marketing is going to robot based - especially when needing to balance budgets and strategies across the different ad platforms - but needing to learn how to harness agents is going to be an edge.

I think it’s worth taking the time to understand the basics of AI agents, how they can be positioned, and the basic security concepts and tools that protect user and customer privacy while dispelling the misinformation floating around all this.

I was going to let my data engineering certification lapse, since I’m not an engineer, per se. But after seeing where things are headed, I think dusting off those skills might be worthwhile. I’ve got a lot of priorities to juggle, but we’ll see.