Google Cloud Next: It's About Control, Not AI

Google Cloud Next is expected to deliver more than another round of AI announcements. The real story is Google's attempt to build the operating system for the agentic enterprise, targeting the control plane where AI actually executes work, not just assists with it. While the industry debates model benchmarks and chatbot quality, Google is repositioning Gemini as an orchestration layer, redesigning infrastructure for persistent always-on agents, and turning BigQuery into a reasoning surface. The moves put Google in direct competition with AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and Databricks for ownership of the enterprise execution layer.