From systems of intelligence to systems of action: Yasmeen Ahmad on the agentic data cloud

Is your data strategy stuck in the last decade? Join Stephanie Wong and Yasmeen Ahmad (Managing Director, Data Cloud) live from Google Cloud Next '26 as they dissect the evolution of the Agentic Data Cloud. For years, data platforms were "systems of intelligence"—perfect for reports that often sat on a shelf. Today, Google is transforming them into "systems of action" where AI agents reason over real-time data to drive immediate business ROI. Key Insights: The "Invisible Context" Breakthrough: Why traditional data quality only gets agents to 50% accuracy. Yasmeen explains how Google is now "coding" business intuition and hidden meanings into the data layer. The Knowledge Catalog: Discover how the Knowledge Catalog creates an inferred schema across thousands of unstructured documents (like PDFs), allowing agents to navigate enterprise data without blowing the context window. Intent-Driven Engineering: A move away from fixed persona-based agents. With the new Data Agent Kit, agents can natively orchestrate BigQuery, Spark, and operational systems to complete end-to-end intents. The Cross-Cloud Lakehouse: Learn how Google is embracing a multi-cloud reality. Through Apache Iceberg and Cross-Cloud Interconnect, agents can access data in AWS or Azure with sub-second latency as if it were local. Agent-Scale Economics: As "swarms" of agents replace human clicks (driving 10-20x more API traffic), Yasmeen discusses how Google’s vertical integration—from the new TPU v8 to BigQuery’s 230x token reduction—keeps costs sustainable. Watch more from Google Cloud Next '26 to see how the Agentic Data Cloud is shortening 45-minute human processes into mere seconds. #GoogleCloudNext #DataCloud #AIAgents #BigQuery #GenerativeAI #DataStrategy #ApacheIceberg