RedMonk cofounders James Governor and Stephen O’Grady share their top insights from Google Next 2025. From natural language queries in AlloyDB to the broader push toward unified AI services and cross-cloud data integration, Google is laying the groundwork for a more accessible, developer- and data-friendly future. Bonus takeaway? The venue couldn’t scale like the cloud—but interest in Google’s AI momentum is clearly booming.
Transcript
James Governor
Hey, we are the cofounders of RedMonk, James Governor and Stephen O’Grady.
Steve O’Grady
How are we doing?
James Governor
We are here at Google Next 2025, and we’re here to talk a little bit, a quick take on our reckon about the events. And I think I’ll put you on the hotspot, Steve.
Steve O’Grady
All right.
James Governor
What are your key takeaways from Google Next?
Steve O’Grady
Key takeaways. I think one of the things that we’ve seen is some incremental progress towards taking individual AI primitives and services and bringing them together. I think the addition of natural language query support to AlloyDB is very interesting in terms of breaking down the barriers in terms of accessing databases. And then, I guess, lastly, for me, I think the, just the continued prog ress towards taking AI and putting it into lots and lots of different verticals, I think is pretty cool. How about yourself?
James Governor
Well, I think from my perspective, there are a couple of things. I think on the data side that you mentioned, I’m super interested to see, look, if we’re going to have, we’re going to have to have foundational, standardized, consolidated layers in terms of a data fabric. So it doesn’t matter what database engine you’ve got, that all needs to be integrated. And even being able to do that across different clouds. If you’re going to have AI, you want that control. You don’t want to be moving your data around all the time. I think as a portfolio, that’s one of the things that Google is doing really effectively right now. So that was a key takeaway for me. Tell me a bit more about this query thing, natural language query, because I think for a lot of people, they’re thinking about it’s all about code assistance. It’s all about developers writing software. So Steve, the industry at large is obsessive at the moment about code assistance. It’s generative AI, very much a development thing. Why are you so excited about the query language thing?
Steve O’Grady
So as long as we’ve had databases in the industry, we have taken information of all shapes and sizes and stuck them in databases. The only way to get it out was a query language of some sort, typically SQL, We’ve got lots of other variants of it. But if we can get to a point where that’s not the gate anymore, we don’t need somebody who can write SQL to get information out of the database. We get to a point where all of a sudden, this is Rachel’s least favorite word, but we democratize access to that data because all that you need to be able to do is write a sentence, and all of a sudden, you get your information back. So that to me is a really big deal and potentially a game changer for me moving forward.
James Governor
Okay. Rachel Stephens. That’s Rachel Stephens, our colleague. I think in terms of, let’s take that further in terms of democratizing it. I mean, as a front-end, the obvious opportunity for Google going forward is to just be using when you’re using Google Sheets, and you can do that in there with a query. We might even use that ourselves.
Steve O’Grady
I think we will.
James Governor
Okay, so that’s our quick reckons, our quick take on Google Next 2025.
Steve O’Grady
Wait, there’s one more. There’s more. There’s too many people here.
James Governor
Tell me more about the-
Steve O’Grady
There’s too many people. It’s great. Google. Wonderful. You got a ton of people to attend your event. You need a bigger venue.
James Governor
Well, it’s not like the cloud, man. It’s hard to just spin that up.
Steve O’Grady
It doesn’t scale elastically.
James Governor
Physical infrastructure doesn’t scale like that.
Steve O’Grady
But no, it’s a good problem to have.
James Governor
Okay. I would have happily scaled down the crowd yesterday to get into that keynote.
Steve O’Grady
That’s right.
James Governor
Okay. Thanks, everybody..
