Alison Wagonfeld, Google Cloud ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Context & Strategic Theme:

• The RAISE Summit 2025 in Paris marks the event's second year, highlighting AI's transition to a global stage with a focus on sovereign cloud, realized use cases, and economic visibility.
• Alison Wagenfeld, CMO of Google Cloud, identifies a market shift toward "replatformization" across security and IT, driven by horizontal processing and parallel tech trends.

Google Cloud's Full-Stack Strategy:

• Google invests across the entire AI stack, from infrastructure (TPUs and partnerships with Nvidia/GPUs) to model development and application layer logic.
• The company positions itself as "AI First," accelerating from its 2016 announcement to full-stack execution involving world-class models like Gemini, VO, and Lyria.
• Internal products are becoming "AI native," integrating DeepMind research directly into tools like BigQuery rather than keeping research separate from product engineering.
• Over 500 customers are reported to be building with Google AI and achieving visible ROI.

Ecosystem & Partnership Dynamics:

• Google is embedding Gemini across partner ecosystems, with recent announcements including integration with Databricks and other major ISVs.
• The market is seeing a trend of "Customer AI competency centers," where enterprises build internal teams to compare and contrast models rather than creating true frontier research models.
• Enterprises increasingly engage in "market research to research," actively testing model performance daily to determine best-fit solutions for their specific use cases.

Protocol Standards & Agent Interoperability:

• Google Cloud champions open standards to ensure agent interoperability, specifically supporting Model Context Protocol (MCP) and the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol.
• These protocols enable secure interaction between agents built on different platforms (e.g., Google, Workday, Oracle, Microsoft), allowing enterprises to scale faster without vendor lock-in.
• Connectors using these protocols are already operational, facilitating immediate value extraction for customers building with Google Cloud's "Agent Space."

Market Outlook & Business Trends:

• Despite "hype" and bubble concerns, clear lines of sight exist regarding AI value propositions, with VC firms and startups increasingly building in-house research capabilities to stay competitive.
• The ecosystem strategy involves collaboration with global system integrators (SIs) and ISVs to drive uptake among both entrepreneurial startups and large enterprises.
• The current trajectory suggests a parallel processing environment where business logic at the application layer is as critical as hardware advancements.