Next '26 - control the agents, control the enterprise? Google Cloud enters the battle for enterprise AI governance

The question of who governs enterprise AI agents is clearly becoming one of the most contested in the technology industry. The competition is fierce, as your favourite SaaS vendors and enterprise technology partners all make their pitch for being the ‘AI governance and management layer’. As organizations move from experimenting with individual AI tools to deploying hundreds - or thousands - of autonomous agents across their operations, the question emerging is: which platform wins and gets to own the control layer?

At Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas this week, Google made its pitch for that position. The content was dense and there were a slew of announcements - everything from new TPU generations, to a redesigned data architecture, to the formal arrival of Wiz into the Google Cloud security fold - but the strategic principle running through all of it was pretty unmistakable. Google wants to be the operating system for the agentic ...