Google Cloud Next 2025 is imminent, with Google Cloud poised to unveil a slew of new cloud, AI, security, and channel announcements to a small army of Las Vegas attendees.
You don’t have to try very hard to guess what the focus of Google Cloud Next 2025 will be: like every other tech conference for the past two years, it will pivot around generative AI. As a proudly AI-first company since 2017, Google has more cause than many others to focus so heavily on the technology.
Though it initially lagged behind in generative AI, with its ‘Bard’ false-start and subsequent Gemini rebrand, Google Cloud has made up the gap since and last year I argued the firm was finally embracing its AI potential.
To build on these gains in 2025, Google Cloud needs to move away from the rat race of small model or tool improvements and produce a convincing argument for organizations to choose GCP as the platform for enterprise AI.
Focusing on Google’s X-factor
The title of this year’s opening keynote is identical to last year’s: ‘The new way to cloud’. In 2024 I suggested this could refer to Google’s tight focus on its AI offerings, to set itself apart from its hyperscaler competitors. The decision to reuse it for 2025 implies that it’s becoming something of a mantra for Google Cloud, promising customers a uniformly ‘new’ approach to every aspect of using their cloud platforms.
At last year’s conference, attendees were treated to a barrage of AI announcements including a massive expansion of AI Agents within Vertex AI and the launch of Gemini Code Assist, its AI pair programmer.
Google Cloud could storm into this year’s event with Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental – its new flagship multimodal model – and claim victory over its rivals on a simple level of performance. It’s more likely to instead focus on all the services that the model will power, however, and use it as an opportunity to show how its infrastructure and platform work together to produce value for customers.
Unlike rivals Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud has rested almost entirely on internal solutions to deliver AI services. Its internal family of Gemini AI models is trained on its own AI infrastructure, largely made up of tensor processing units (TPUs).
There’s some home pride to shout about here and the significance of Google including DeepMind R1 on the benchmarking table for Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental was not lost on me. Threatened by an open source upstart, Google Cloud has worked to show it’s still in another league when it comes to frontier model creation.
Of course, Google Cloud wasn’t alone in taking Chinese rival DeepSeek as a serious issue to address. Silicon Valley as a whole was given a fright in January as consumers and businesses found the free-to-use model met a lot of their hopes for AI. Post DeepSeek, hyperscalers must prove their AI is worth paying for or move aside for the free alternative.
Google Cloud’s USP is not raw performance. Although Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental now tops Hugging Face’s LLM chatbot leaderboard, it will always be able to do more as the engine underneath powerful cloud applications than it can as a user-controlled LLM.
Instead, there’s a story to be told here of a unified platform that offers everything businesses need to make the most of AI without any reliance on third-party offerings. All of this is to say Google Cloud could see real success this year by focusing more on the results and less on the delivery.
The benefits of a unified cloud feed directly into AI, security, and productivity for customers. With the right framing, Google Cloud can draw a direct line between the sophistication of its AI research and the ease with which customers can deploy and benefit from it.
I had the opportunity to attend Google Cloud’s recent London event at the Google DeepMind HQ in London, at which the company announced expanded offerings for UK enterprises including new data residency for agentic AI. At the event, Demis Hassabis, founder and CEO at Google DeepMind, explained that AI is not a silver bullet right now – but that in five to ten years, it will help to massively transform the world around us.
Hassabis’ realistic but optimistic delivery is likely to resonate with optimistic business leaders. It’s widely understood that 2025 is a ‘show your working’ year for AI across the industry, with businesses who have sown the seeds of their AI systems over the past two years now looking for any sign of shoots. Similarly, customers will be looking for cold numbers and reassuringly tangible use cases in the announcements made at Google Cloud Next.
I’ll be looking to see if Hassabis’ tone is matched throughout the Vegas event. Perhaps reassuringly, the generative AI section of the conference microsite is offered under the header “Drive real world results” rather than the more hyperbolic phrases we’ve seen from AI developers in recent years.
Of course, the firm is certain to spend some time providing updates on its more experimental AI research, such as its new universal AI assistant Project Astra. Combining speech recognition and computer vision in a multimodal model may have transformative potential down the line – but it’s unlikely to make waves in business just yet.
Leave businesses wanting the brand
Annual conferences are complex events. Billed as a chance for the host company to unveil their latest and greatest innovations, in practice they end up becoming several events all at once – including a chance for customers to network, discuss what they’ve heard among themselves, and get a feel for the mood music.
Events like Google Cloud Next are also vital staging points for corporate strategy but not in the simple show-and-tell manner of a corporate keynote. The hosts know that everything they announce, say, and do will feed into how their customers think of them for the next 12 months and shape how confident stakeholders are in their business vision. It’s as much a chance for the com
Let me put it another way. Have you ever been to a live comedy night? At the end of the evening you walk away struggling to remember any one joke, but with strong feelings for the overall act – either positive or negative.
Google Cloud is looking for its customers to walk away from Google Cloud Next 2025 feeling great about their cloud provider. To do so, it’ll have to present a cohesive, well thought out message that convinces attendees even if they forget some of its individual announcements. As in comedy, delivery is everything.
Rory Bathgate will be covering Google Cloud Next live from Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas between 9-11 April. To stay up-to-date with the latest news and announcements from the conference, follow our live blog and subscribe to the ITPro newsletter.
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