RedMonk’s James Governor and Kate Holterhoff share their takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2026 in Las Vegas. The conversation covers the shift from single copilots to multi-agent orchestration, highlighted by Google’s Gemini enterprise agent platform announcement. They dig into the security implications of agentic infrastructure, including cryptographic agent identities, and praise the developer keynote’s creative demo storyline (port-a-potties and all). James spotlights the data platform story, from “dark data” locked in PDFs to AI-built knowledge catalogs and cross-cloud connectivity via Iceberg. The pair also explores the ephemeral infrastructure challenges agents create and why context remains queen in 2026.
This RedMonk Quick Take video is sponsored by Google.
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Transcript
James Governor (00:02)
So I’m James Governor, co-founder of Redmonk. I am here at the Google Cloud Next 2026. I’m with my colleague, Kate Holterhoff. And we’re going to talk a little bit in a quick take about what we’ve learned this week at the event. So Kate, why don’t you kick us off with some of your reckons?
Kate Holterhoff (00:20)
All right, well, having a great time here in sunny Las Vegas.
I think, you the thing that I’ve been most interested in is the way that multiple agents are being used at one time. So one of the big announcements had to do with a Gemini enterprise agent platform. And I think what’s so interesting about that is that we’re seeing this move away from just, you know, using one agent at a time to trying to think about how we’re going to be leveraging multiple agents asynchronously So we’re moving away from,
James Governor (00:55)
Top it
Kate Holterhoff (01:01)
The copilot era is absolutely dead and gone. We are no longer augmenting ourselves with these AI code assistants. have fully moved on to our agentic present and even beyond now. So we are orchestrating these agents and trying to think about how they’re all communicating together and bringing in these tool in the developer keynote today, of course, there was a lot of talk about MCP, RAG even, and how we’re going to be ensuring that our agents have the context that they need to be successful.
James Governor (01:31)
Yeah.
So that was the, I think that’s exactly right. Yeah. I think there are all sorts of interesting scaling challenges that are going to happen with all of these agents doing the work. Okay. Because they’re working 24 seven, they keep working, you’ve got a whole bunch of them. We’re seeing that certainly in the world of writing code. Right.
For me, think one of the key questions there is about security. We’ve had big breaches recently, companies like Vercel, Lovable, Anthropic, AI, breaches, they go together like peanut butter and jelly. And so one of the things I thought was interesting was this idea of agent identities, cryptographic identities for every agent you spin up so that you can begin to have some security in your agent infrastructures.
so agents, any other thoughts about the keynote?
Kate Holterhoff (02:16)
Well, yeah, I mean, let me just say, I thought Richard did an incredible job. Richard Seroter You know. Lovely man. Absolutely. I mean, the DevRel team that they’ve assembled at Google, fantastic. I love the demo. It was so much fun. I know. It’s about time someone invited us here, you know, the real talent to the RedMonk folks
James Governor (02:21)
They invited us backstage. We saw how the sausage is made.
Well, you’re going to meet Weezer later, so you are, you’re the backstage woman of the moment.
Kate Holterhoff (02:43)
If everything goes according to plan, I will indeed be shaking hands with the yeah, but it is, again, not only are we having a lot of fun here at Google Next, but we are a ton. And I think that the fact that they’ve made developers central to that story that they’re is contributing to their success.
James Governor (03:05)
So it was a great demo. I mean, it was basically a set of demos. It was a storyline that ran through the entire keynote. It was about doing a marathon throughout the city of Las Vegas. They to cover everything from, they kept talking about toilets, port-a-potties. Yep, that was a big thing. Where were you going to place those around your digital twin of Vegas? yeah, so agents doing the work, debugging agents. That was one bit I liked in the debugging agents.
token scale because the reason that the agent crashed because it ran out of tokens. It’s just like us.
Kate Holterhoff (03:43)
Absolutely. I mean, that’s my number one reason for jumping from, you know, agentic IDE from one to another is because token maxing and run out. You know, need to fill up the coffers, you go. I mean, it seems to. Okay.
James Governor (03:55)
It’ll happen every time.
So agents, you think we we said agents enough? No, we can’t. We can’t say more about
Kate Holterhoff (04:06)
and agentic and AI, the whole thing. Yes, lot of that. Hashtag.
James Governor (04:08)
Yeah.
Hashtag. So for me, I developer keynote was great. Yes. I have quietly been interested in the agentic data platform and the data. There you go. So Yasmeen Ahmad is an amazing communicator. Love her. her so much. Amazing. So good. So she, in her part of the keynote, I thought did a really good job of articulating a through line that
Kate Holterhoff (04:21)
Tell me all about it.
James Governor (04:34)
So Google has been working on this for a while. But one of the things that came through in terms of the platform description, think, really well in her storytelling, and she did a, let’s think about if you wanted to launch a Froyo product that concerned people’s allergies. Now the allergy information, that might all be in a bunch of PDFs.
what Yasmin calls dark data. As opposed to then you want to correlate that with a bunch of customer information about those allergies. And that might be in your system of record. That could even be in a different cloud. And I thought that articulation is really interesting. you build a knowledge catalog. You don’t even build it. The AI builds that. Because like humans, there’s just going to be too many events, too much data. So we are no good. So the knowledge catalog
Kate Holterhoff (05:27)
Yeah.
James Governor (05:29)
And then it cross correlated with the cloud connect to data in Amazon. Yes. Using a standard called iceberg. So that’s becoming real. I thought that was really good. Right. And then you’ve got the question of, okay, we need the agent data kit so that people that to meet basically developers and data scientists and people doing that data where they are. And I think the articulation of those three things in terms of the platform is important.
key here, agents, let’s talk about agents some more, they’re going to generate a lot of data. And also they’re going to generate a lot of databases because a lot of agent activity is quite ephemeral. So it’s like, want to spin up, you’ll have the need to spin up like hundred thousand databases in an hour and tear them all down again. So what does that look like? And who knows how to do that? And then Google is saying, we know how to do that. So I think that was interesting. We had a story about humans, what our needs are.
know, allergy free froyo, but it was also couched in this, what does this world look like and who’s going to build it? And I think that is what Google was positioning for the last couple of days.
Kate Holterhoff (06:38)
Right, 2026 and context is still queen.
James Governor (06:41)
Always.
Kate Holterhoff (06:42)
Yeah. So we loved the idea of multi-agent orchestration. We’re interested in the data story only becoming more and more important. Having a great time here. Lots of exciting developer content running into a lot of our friends here.
James Governor (06:59)
I saw Casey West today. Lovely Casey West. Before he went on stage and did the demo. Went backstage and was like, I have to give the man a hug.
Kate Holterhoff (07:07)
God. Yes, I know. It’s been shoulder to shoulder through a lot of the corridors here. We ran into Mark Thompson earlier today. And of course, Nick Eberts all of our friends are here. Yeah.
James Governor (07:18)
There you go. Yes. Our friends here went backstage, saw them. Google Next. mean, know, Vegas kind of sucks. but, you know, at least you get to see some nice people. Yes.
Kate Holterhoff (07:30)
So again, I’m Kate Holterhoff with me. James Governor.
James Governor (07:33)
Google Cloud Next 2026.
