At Google Next 2025, Steve O’Grady shares key insights on the evolving role of AI in enterprise tech. From decades of AI innovation to a future of integrated, standardized services, Google is moving from isolated tools to powerful, connected systems. One standout: the growing adoption of MCP — the “USB-C for AI” — signaling a shift toward interoperability across data sources. What’s next? Smarter, more unified AI across the enterprise.
Transcript
Hi, this is Steve O’Grady. I am here at Google Next 2025. And my quick takeaway involves the evolution of Google and AI from an industry perspective. So we all know Google has done AI for a long time, dating back decades at this point. And it has only been really in the past couple of years that it has applied this in earnest to enterprise-style workloads. And what What we’ve seen is the evolution of the past couple of years of discrete primitives from an AI standpoint that tackle individual problems and services. What we’re getting to now is a world in which we can take these primitives, we can take these services and begin to combine them in meaningful ways and begin to extend them into other services. And so I think this is as I walk away from Next 2025, that’s what I’m looking for from Google moving forward is how do we begin to extend these pieces into other areas of other businesses and begin to bring them together in meaningful ways. And to that point, maybe one of the unsurprising, but certainly significant takeaways from here is the essentially standardization, continued standardization, I should say, of MCP.
MCP, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is a project which has exploded in popularity over the past couple of months to the point where it is… Well, it’s regarded as this USB-C for AI workloads. So you can plug it into different databases and different data sources and bring them to your model. And so Google’s decision, along with the rest of the industry at this point, to incorporate that and to adopt it is only going to continue that trend of taking these individual AI services and bringing them together. So that’s what I’m looking for for Google moving forward. And yeah, it’s been a really interesting show.
