Google Announces Agentic Data Cloud at Next ’26

Google is officially moving into what it calls the Agentic Era for data, announcing a major transformation of its data ecosystem, now branded as the Agentic Data Cloud.

The core of the Agentic Data Cloud is a new architecture designed for the speed and scale that AI agents require. Traditional data platforms often act as passive repositories, but Google is turning its stack into a system of action.

The headline announcement is the introduction of a cross-cloud, AI-native Lakehouse. This allows organizations to access and analyze data seamlessly, regardless of whether it resides in Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure. By breaking down these silos, Google ensures that AI agents have a holistic view of the entire enterprise data estate without the need for complex, manual data migrations.

One of the biggest hurdles for enterprise AI is hallucination, when an AI makes up facts. To solve this, Google introduced the Knowledge Catalog. This tool acts as a single source of truth, grounding AI agents in trusted business context.

When an agent needs to answer a question or execute a task, it doesn’t just guess; it refers to the Knowledge Catalog to understand specific company terminology, metrics, and relationships. This ensures that the insights generated are accurate, governed, and aligned with company policies.

To manage this new fleet of agents, Google rebranded Vertex AI as the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. This is now the central hub for building, deploying, and governing AI agents.

The move toward an Agentic Data Cloud isn’t just theoretical. Google reported a 30x growth in BigQuery data processed by Gemini over the past year. Companies like Palo Alto Networks and CME Group are already using these tools to dismantle legacy silos and build real-time reasoning engines