Google Cloud Next 2026: It's All About the Agents
Google Cloud Next ‘26 in Las Vegas wrapped recently, and the theme was familiar. If 2025 was the year of experimenting with agentic AI, 2026 will be the year of running it at scale.
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Google Cloud Next ‘26 in Las Vegas wrapped recently, and the theme was familiar. If 2025 was the year of experimenting with agentic AI, 2026 will be the year of running it at scale.
At its “What's Next With AWS” livestream event on April 28, 2026, AWS made three significant announcements that solidify its intent to expand from its foundation as an AI infrastructure provider to a full stack provider, including an AI application and agent platform.
It has become almost a full-time job to stay current with the glut of news in the AI space. This weekly roundup will get you up to speed on the news and happenings with the Big 5 AI vendors in the last week.
Adobe introduced CX Enterprise as an agentic AI platform designed to help brands create content, improve visibility in AI-driven discovery, and orchestrate personalized engagement.
Amazon Nova Forge gives enterprises on AWS a path to building a Frontier AI model trained on their own data, not just consuming a general one. For organizations that have been accumulating customer and operational data for years but lacked the infrastructure and expertise to act on it, this changes the equation. The model stays in your environment; your data never leaves your AWS account, and the output is auditable in ways that general AI tools are not.
It’s been a wild few weeks for Anthropic, starting with the March 26, 2026, exposure of over 3,000 internal assets that were inadvertently tagged as public instead of private on their content management system. The existence of its newest model, Claude Mythos, was revealed in those documents, and what followed has been…well, let’s say startling.
OpenClaw has captured the imagination of AI hobbyists and technophiles, but it is not an enterprise agentic AI platform. Amazon’s Bedrock-based agentic toolset shows what enterprise-grade looks like, and why the comparison is misleading.
Workday has spent eighteen months acquiring the pieces – Sana Labs, Pipedream, Flowise – and the March 2026 global launch is where they converge. The result is an AI layer embedded directly in the system of record, capable of executing tasks, not just suggesting them. For HR and finance leaders in Workday shops, the embedded execution layer raises the bar for any team still considering a custom build.
Databricks spent years as a quiet data infrastructure company. It did not chase security headlines. It built the platform where enterprise data lives. Databrick’s Lakewatch, launched in March 2026, is what happens when you stop treating security as a separate application and run it directly inside that platform instead. For existing Databricks customers, this is not a new vendor decision. It is a question of whether the infrastructure they already own can replace a tool they are probably overpaying for.
Every ERP vendor is now promising AI. The real question for a CIO is not whether the ERP has AI features, because they all do, but whether those features lock you into that vendor’s AI platform or let you use tools your organization already has. At SuiteConnect London in March 2026, NetSuite gave a clear answer to that question. This brief explains what they announced, what it means practically, and what to press on before you sign.
At ZohoDay26, Info-Tech’s John Annand sat down with Ramprakash “Ram” Ramamoorthy (Director of AI Research at Zoho). Over a wide-ranging conversation, John and Ram discussed Zoho’s go-to-market strategy for AI capabilities. This note provides a structured summary of that interview.
NiCE is positioning its CXone Mpower as a platform intended to help contact centers shift from cost centers into growth engines by using customer interaction data as enterprise intelligence.
IBM's approximately $11-billion acquisition of Confluent is less about Apache Kafka itself and more about owning the enterprise-grade, real-time data layer that supports modern analytics and AI workloads. For organizations already running IBM platforms, this has meaningful architectural and commercial implications. For cloud-native organizations, the practical impact is narrower than the announcement suggests.
The latest announcements from NiCE Cognigy reflect the broader CCaaS market shift away from reactive service and toward earlier and more effective interventions. At Nexus 2026, a recurring theme was that the reactive service model is broken. The future model must center on proactive customer experience.
Amazon will bring OpenAI models to its customers for the first time with a $50 billion investment into the ChatGPT creator. Amazon will support AI agent development on the latest GPT models both through Amazon Bedrock and as exclusive third-party cloud distributor of OpenAI Frontier.
AWS just reframed the future of software development and operations with its new Frontier agents: fully autonomous, persistent workers that don’t tire, don’t forget, and don’t wait for human supervision. A new Frontier agent, Kiro, promises to take on multiday development work; the DevOps Agent promises to investigate, resolve, and prevent incidents before your on-call team even wakes up. If AWS delivers even 60 percent of what it claims, every CIO and CTO should be recalibrating their 2026 automation roadmap.
mimik is the first company we've encountered that discusses how to operationalize billions of agents to perform tasks in the physical world, not only within software workflows but also in industrial processes. The company’s core thesis is that the existing cloud-first mobile internet infrastructure is a legacy bottleneck that is unsustainable for the computational, cost, and energy demands of agentic AI. Powered by mimik, DFC-AI seeks to fundamentally reorganize compute distribution by prioritizing the edge.
At Ignite 2025 Microsoft announced several major offerings strengthening its agentic AI platform. The ontology-based IQ layer seems to be the most unexpected innovation from Microsoft.
Adobe’s generative AI tools help enterprises overcome Black Friday content bottlenecks by automating high-volume tasks like video reframing, localization, and personalization. With solutions built for creatives, marketing, and IT, Adobe enables faster campaign readiness, stronger brand consistency, and scalable content production at enterprise speed.
NeuralTrust helps organizations secure the new attack surface created by AI. It combines a Generative Application Firewall (GAF) and agent security controls to protect enterprise AI systems from manipulation, data leaks, and emerging AI-driven threats.
The enterprise agent space is becoming more competitive. On October 9, 2025, Google launched Gemini for Enterprise, and Amazon announced an end-user platform, Quick Suite. Both platforms streamline information access and workflow automation, reducing the need for employees to switch between multiple applications. Amazon Quick Suite centralizes business intelligence, research, and workflow setup in one platform.