Postcards from Google Cloud Next 2026

I was in Vegas for Google Cloud Next 2026 — Oloodi’s first time at the event.

The keynotes fade. The product lists fade. What stays are the moments I keep coming back to. Five postcards.

Postcard 1 — Community first

Before Next even started, I spent two days at the GDE Summit 2026 — the people who shaped me as a Google Developer Expert and who keep pushing me to ship harder things.

It’s tempting to skip the community part to get straight to the keynotes. I won’t. The conversations that compound across years happen in those two days, not in the expo hall. Every product I’ll write about below means more because I got to discuss it first with the people building alongside me.

Postcard 2 — Agentic stops being a demo

Gemini Robotics had robots moving on the floor. Not behind glass. Not a video loop. Robots responding and gesturing in front of a crowd that kept stopping mid-aisle to watch.

I stood there thinking about Mentor AI Notaire — the AI colleague we built at Oloodi for Quebec notaries. The robot in front of me is an embodied agent. Mentor is a conversational one — text and voice. Same family. Same shift: from a thing that describes the world to a thing that acts in it, alongside a human professional.

That’s what I came home with: agentic is no longer the future tense. It moves, it speaks, it works. The vocabulary has changed.

Postcard 3 — From experiments to enterprise scale

I’ve been building on the Agent Development Kit all year. So when I sat down for the Agent Platform sessions, I wasn’t waiting for a revelation — I was waiting for confirmation.

I got it. Everything pointed in the direction we’ve been heading at Oloodi for months: agents as enterprise-grade software, with all that it implies. Patterns for orchestration. Boundaries you can actually defend in front of a compliance officer.

If you’re building agents and the room doesn’t quite feel comfortable yet — keep going. We’re on the right path. The industry is catching up.

Postcard 4 — The booth I almost missed

This one is my biggest takeaway from the whole week.

I stopped at the Baseten booth almost by accident. Had a long conversation with someone on their team. Walked away with their book, Inference Engineering — a free, dense, generous gift to anyone willing to take the discipline seriously.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since. We spend so much time on prompts, RAG, agents, evals — and almost no time on how the model actually runs in production. Latency. Cost per token at scale. Throughput patterns. The unglamorous infrastructure layer that decides whether your beautiful agent ships or dies.

Baseten was my discovery of the week. I’ve started going deeper on inference engineering since.

That book travelled home with a small pile of t-shirts and caps picked up across the expo. Startup booths bring real enthusiasm to their giveaways — it’s a small joy of every Cloud Next.

The Inference Engineering book and a few caps and t-shirts from the conference

In the same aisle, I finally saw TPUs and GPUs in the flesh — silicon we talk about constantly and almost never get to look at, because it’s normally locked away in data centers most of us will never enter. Standing in front of the actual hardware that runs your inference call is a small, weirdly emotional reminder of how much physical reality sits underneath every API call.

Same thread. Same lesson: the infrastructure layer matters more than we usually admit.

Postcard 5 — Where design meets the brain

One last booth I keep coming back to: the AI Design Workshop, showcasing what image generation can now do in the hands of designers. The visuals were genuinely arresting — and that’s the point.

The human brain processes images faster than any other input. Putting generative AI in the hands of designers isn’t a productivity tweak. It’s a new way to think.

Case in point: I came back with an AI-generated image of my avatar next to Jensen Huang’s avatar. The resemblance, the lighting, the natural pose — a year ago, none of this was reliably possible. Today it just works.

AI-generated image of my avatar with Jensen Huang’s avatar

I left convinced the next wave of product differentiation is going to be visual, fast, and personalized in ways we haven’t seen yet. The future of design is going to be very interesting.

What I’m taking home

What stays is what matters:

Mentor AI Notaire keeps growing — and the agentic confirmation from Next gives it tailwind.
Oloodi keeps building on Google Cloud, with new conviction around inference engineering as the next muscle to develop.
My GDE work continues — more talks, more workshops, more sharing with the community that started it all.

The next event is always around the corner. See you out there. 🚀

For the full announcement list, Google published its official Cloud Next 2026 wrap-up.