{"id":4449368,"date":"2026-04-28T21:35:01","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T19:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.deptagency.com\/insight\/moving-past-the-agent-hype-to-the-stack\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T13:31:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T11:31:44","slug":"moving-past-the-agent-hype-to-the-stack","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.deptagency.com\/en-uki\/insight\/moving-past-the-agent-hype-to-the-stack\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving past the agent hype, to the stack: Our take on Google Cloud Next 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/mask><\/g><\/svg>\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tInsights\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\tMoving past the agent hype, to the stack: Our take on Google Cloud Next 2026<\/h1>
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\n\t\tJon Judah\t\t
\n\t\tSVP, Experience & Engineering\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tDate\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tApril 28, 2026\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n<\/div>\n\n\n\tEvery conference cycle has its moment when a word stops meaning anything.

You\u2019ve watched it happen with “platform,” then “experience,” then “transformation,” and, most recently, with “AI” itself.<\/h2>\n\tAt the beginning of Google Cloud Next 2026, it seemed like “agent” was about to join the list. Every keynote, press release, and booth on the floor leaned on it. If you were there, odds are you found yourself wondering by midweek whether anyone could still tell you what makes one agent different from another.

But sit through the keynotes and the breakouts, read what the analysts are filing afterward, and a quieter, more interesting story comes into focus:

It is not really about agents. It is about what sits underneath them.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\tThe real reveal was the stack, not the agents<\/h2>\n\tThomas Kurian opened the week by telling enterprises that the pilot phase of AI is over. He framed Google’s pitch as owning the stack from chip to inbox<\/a> while competitors hand customers pieces and ask them to assemble the platform themselves.

If that sounds like a tagline, you\u2019re not wrong. But, if it is, it\u2019s certainly not an empty one. Here\u2019s what Google unveiled this week:<\/p>\n\n\t
  • Two new TPUs,<\/a> the 8t and 8i, purpose-built for training and inference<\/li>
  • The new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform<\/a>, which sits on top of Gemini 3.1<\/li>
  • An Agentic Data Cloud<\/a> that lets agents act on data wherever it lives<\/li>
  • Wiz<\/a>, now formally part of an end-to-end security layer<\/li>
  • Workspace Intelligence<\/a>, which pulls context across Docs, Sheets, Gmail, and Drive<\/li>
  • The new Virgo Network<\/a>, the megascale data centre fabric underneath all of it<\/li><\/ul>\n\n
    Taken together, these announcements make it clear that Google is the only company in the conversation that designs the silicon, trains the model, operates the cloud, owns the data layer, and ships the productivity suite people already use every day.\u00a0

    \u201cNo other provider has all four of infrastructure, model, data platform, and distribution under one roof,\u201d as Andi Gutmans, Google\u2019s VP of Data Cloud, summarised on the showroom floor.\u00a0

    Owning the stack in this way is meaningful. Selling pieces of it with the understanding that some assembly is required creates friction for customers. Friction that costs time, breaks workflows, and burns through budgets.\u00a0

    That\u2019s a meaningful bet to ask brands and businesses to make, and a hard one for anyone else to match right now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\tWhy this changes the competition<\/h2>\n\t\u201cAgent\u201d and \u201cAI\u201d are rapidly becoming synonymous. And while providers who only own a slice of the stack are newly visible, Google Next demonstrated how stack ownership is starting to show its benefits.\u00a0

    The agent story at Microsoft, for example, still depends heavily on a model partner whose strategic interests are not always aligned with theirs. Nevertheless, they are continuing to win deals hand over fist. As is OpenAI, which, for all its momentum, does not own infrastructure at scale or a workplace distribution channel.\u00a0

    Meanwhile, Google Cloud closed its most recent quarter sitting on     $240 billion of contracted work<\/a>, up 55% sequentially and more than double the prior year.\u00a0

    As JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth pointed out, Agents don\u2019t just generate revenue; they make the relationship sticky. And, once an enterprise wires its workflows through an agent platform, ripping it out becomes far harder than swapping a model API.

    The TL;DR?<\/strong> The model layer of agentic AI is becoming a commodity. The stack is becoming the moat.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\tOwning the stack is necessary, but not sufficient<\/h2>\n\tStack ownership matters. But for most CMOs, it is not the headline. What they want to know is simpler: Can this technology drive growth?

    That is the question we keep hearing at DEPT\u00ae, too. Not which provider has the best demo, but who can turn these building blocks into outcomes that matter.

    Marvin Chow,<\/a> VP of Global Marketing at Google, captured it well when he said, “marketing engineers are the hire of 2026.”<\/p><\/div>\n\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\t\n\tChow\u2019s argument lands because knowing the tools is not the same as knowing how to make them work together. The teams that can do that will be the ones that create value.

    That idea came up repeatedly in our conversations at Cloud Next, with both Google engineers and marketing leaders. It also echoed something we saw a decade ago, when Google first brought its cloud stack to market. At the time, many questioned whether it was as enterprise-ready as Azure or AWS. What those critics missed was that Google was already operating at massive scale across its own ecosystem, and we were there building alongside them.

    As our experts look ahead to what the agentic era holds, our experience at Cloud Next validated a shared feeling: that this next phase of work demands a set of skills that blends marketing and engineering experience with practical knowledge of agentic AI.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\tSo, now what?<\/h2>\n\tThe story coming out of Cloud Next 2026 is not about what separates Google\u2019s agentic model from the rest. It\u2019s that the advantages of owning an integrated stack are showing up at the exact moment the rest of the market is racing to commoditise the layer above.\u00a0

    For brands trying to figure out where to invest, the question they need to ask is not which<\/em> partner, but rather how<\/em> that partner can wire their stack to work that actually moves the business.

    So where do you start? In our experience, the teams that get this right begin with the workflow. Pick one revenue or growth motion that has an obvious bottleneck. Map it end-to-end. Ask which step a well-designed agent could absorb, and which steps still need a human in the loop. Build something that addresses that bottleneck, measure it honestly, and use what you learn to fund the next one.

    This is the discipline we have been formalising inside DEPT\u00ae, building on our     Growth Invention <\/a>Flywheel to give clients a repeatable way to identify, prototype, and scale agentic work. The brands that do this right are the ones we believe will shape the next decade.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n
    \n\tON OUR MINDS<\/span><\/h2>\n\tVIEW ALL INSIGHTS<\/a>\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t
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