When extreme weather or unexpected natural disaster strikes, time is the single most critical resource. For public sector agencies tasked with emergency management, the challenge isn’t just about crafting a swift response, it’s about communicating that response to citizens effectively. At our recent Google Public Sector Summit, we demonstrated how Google Workspace with Gemini is helping government agencies turn complex, legally-precise official documents and text into actionable, personalized public safety tools almost instantly, thereby transforming the speed and efficacy of disaster response communication.
Let’s dive deeper into how Google Workspace with Gemini can help transform government operations and boost the speed and effectiveness of critical public outreach during a natural disaster.
The challenge: Turning authority into action
Imagine you are a Communications Director at the Office of Emergency Management. In the aftermath of a severe weather event, the state government has just issued a critical Executive Order (EO), which serves as a foundational text, legally precise, and essential for internal agency coordination. However, its technical, authoritative language is not optimized for the public’s urgent questions such as: “Am I safe? Is my family safe? What should I do now?”
Manually translating and contextualizing this information for the public, and finding official answers to critical questions – often hidden in the details – can create a dangerous information gap during a fast-moving natural disaster.
Built on a foundation of trust
Innovation requires security. Google Workspace with Gemini empowers agencies to adopt AI without compromising on safety or sovereignty, supported by:
FedRAMP High authorization to meet the rigorous compliance standards of the public sector.
Data residency & access controls including data regions, access transparency, and access approvals.
Advanced defense mechanisms like context-aware access (CAA), data loss prevention (DLP), and client-side encryption (CSE).
Operational resilience with Business Continuity editions to help keep your agency connected and operational during critical events.
Google Workspace with Gemini: Your natural disaster response partner
This is one area where Google Workspace with Gemini can help serve as your essential natural disaster partner, by empowering government leaders to move beyond manual translation and rapidly create dynamic, user-facing tools.
For example, by using the Gemini app, the Communications Director at the Office of Emergency Management can simply upload the Executive Order PDF and prompt Gemini to ‘create an interactive safety check tool based on these rules.’ Gemini instantly parses the complex legal definitions—identifying specific counties, curfew times, and exemptions—and writes the necessary code to render a functional, interactive interface directly within the conversation window.
What was once a static document becomes a clickable prototype in seconds, ready to be tested and deployed.
Image: Gemini turns natural disaster declaration into an interactive map
Three core capabilities driving transformation
This process is driven by three core Google Workspace with Gemini capabilities.
Unprecedented speed of transformation. The journey from a complex, static document to a working, interactive application is measured in minutes, not days or weeks. This acceleration completely changes the speed of development for mission-critical tools. In a disaster, the ability to deploy a targeted public safety resource instantly can be life-saving.
Deep contextual understanding.Gemini’s advanced AI goes beyond simple summarization. When provided with a full document and specific instructions, it can synthesize the data to perform complex tasks. For example, Gemini can analyze an executive order to identify embedded technical terms and locations, interpreting them as specific geographic areas that require attention. It extracts this pertinent information—while citing sources for grounding—and can transform raw text into a practical, location-aware tool for the public.
A repeatable blueprint for any natural disaster. The entire process—from secure document upload to the creation of a working, live application—is repeatable. This means the model can be saved and leveraged for any future public safety resource, whether it’s a severe weather warning, a health advisory, or a general preparedness guide. This repeatable blueprint future-proofs an agency’s ability to communicate quickly and effectively during any emergency.
Serving the public with speed and clarity
By leveraging Google Workspace with Gemini, public sector agencies can ensure that official emergency declarations immediately translate into clear, actionable details for the public. This shift from dense legal text to personalized guidance is paramount for strengthening public trust, improving citizen preparedness, and ultimately keeping communities safe.
Are you ready to drive transformation within your own agency? Check out the highlights from our recent Google Public Sector Summit where leaders gathered to share how they are applying the latest Google AI and security technologies to solve complex challenges and advance their missions. Learn more about our Google Workspace Test Drive, and sign up for a no-cost 30-day pilot which provides your agency with full, hands-on access to the entire Google Workspace with Gemini, commitment-free, on your own terms.
AWS Clean Rooms now publishes events to Amazon EventBridge for new member invitations and table readiness, delivering real-time insights and increasing transparency to collaboration members. Invited members to a collaboration now receive an EventBridge notification when invited to a Clean Rooms collaboration, making it easier for members to review new invitations and join collaborations. Collaboration members are also notified when AWS Entity Resolution resources are associated to a collaboration, such as ID mapping tables and ID namespaces, enabling you to automatically start analysis that uses related records across collaborators’ datasets. For example, when a publisher invites an advertiser to a collaboration, the publisher can automatically run their media planning analyses as soon as the advertiser has created their ID mapping table in the collaboration, reducing time-to-action from hours to minutes and increasing transparency between collaboration members.
With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can create a secure data clean room in minutes and collaborate with any company on AWS or Snowflake to generate unique insights about advertising campaigns, investment decisions, and research and development. For more information about the AWS Regions where AWS Clean Rooms is available, see the AWS Regions table. To learn more about collaborating with AWS Clean Rooms, visit AWS Clean Rooms or AWS Entity Resolution.
We are announcing memory for chat agents in Amazon Quick Suite – a feature that allows users to get personalized responses based on their previous conversations. With this feature, Quick Suite remembers the preferences users specify in chat and generate responses that are tailored to them. Users can also view their inferred preferences and remove any memory they don’t want Quick chat agents to use.
Previously, chat users needed to repeat their preferences around response format, acronyms, dashboards, and integrations in every conversation. They also had to clarify ambiguous topics and entities in chat, increasing the tedious back and forth needed to get accurate and insightful responses. Memory addresses this pain point by remembering facts and details about users in a way that ensures responses provided to users continuously learn and improve. Users also control what Quick Suite remembers about them – all the memories are viewable and removable by users, and users have the choice to start chat in Private Mode in which conversations are not used to infer memories.
Memory in Quick Suite chat agents is available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon). To learn more, visit the Amazon Quick Suite User Guide.
Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8i-flex instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The M8i-flex instances offer up to 15% better price-performance, and 2.5x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation Intel-based instances. They deliver up to 20% better performance than M7i-flex instances, with even higher gains for specific workloads. The M8i-flex instances are up to 30% faster for PostgreSQL databases, up to 60% faster for NGINX web applications, and up to 40% faster for AI deep learning recommendation models compared to M7i-flex instances.
M8i-flex instances are the easiest way to get price performance benefits for a majority of general-purpose workloads like web and application servers, microservices, small and medium data stores, virtual desktops, and enterprise applications. They offer the most common sizes, from large to 16xlarge, and are a great first choice for applications that don’t fully utilize all compute resources.
Starting today, you can enable Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Route 53 to monitor the performance and health of Route 53 Resolver endpoints and any target name servers associated with your outbound Resolver endpoints.
Amazon Route 53 Resolver endpoints make hybrid cloud configurations easier to manage by enabling seamless DNS query resolution between your on-premises data center and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). The new metrics can be enabled on CloudWatch for each of your Resolver endpoints allowing you to assess the response latency of DNS queries received by the Resolver endpoints, the number of query responses that resulted in SERVFAIL, NXDOMAIN, REFUSED, or FORMERR statuses. You can also view the availability of target name servers associated with outbound Resolver endpoints, by viewing the response latency of the target server, and the number of queries that resulted in a timeout. The new metrics make it easy for you to quickly evaluate the health of your Route 53 Resolver endpoints and the associated target name servers.
Amazon Quick Suite browser extension now supports Amazon Quick Flows, enabling you to run workflows directly within your web browser, eliminating the need to manually extract information from each web page. You can invoke workflows that you’ve created or that have been shared with you, and pass web page content as input—all without leaving your browser.
This capability is great for completing routine tasks such as analyzing contract documents to extract key terms, or generating weekly reports from project dashboards that automatically notify stakeholders.
Quick Flows in browser extension is available now in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (Ireland). There are no additional charges for using the browser extension beyond standard Quick Flows usage.
To get started, visit your Chrome, Firefox or Edge store page to install browser extension and sign in with your Quick Suite account. Once you sign in, look for the Flows icon below the chat box to invoke your flows. To learn more about invoking Quick Flows in browser extension, please visit our documentation.
Amazon Connect provides two new evaluation question types to capture deeper insights on human and AI agent performance. Managers can now create questions that allow multiple answer selections, such as the products that the customer was interested in during a sales conversation. Additionally, managers can capture dates for customer and agent actions within evaluation forms. For example, you can record when a customer applied for a loan and when it was approved.
This feature is available in all regions where Amazon Connect is offered. To learn more, please visit our documentation and our webpage.
AWS announces a new cost allocation feature that uses existing workforce user attributes like cost center, division, organization, and department to track and analyze AWS application usage and cost. This new capability enables customers to allocate per-user monthly subscription and on-demand fees of AWS applications, such as Amazon Q Business, Amazon Q Developer, and Amazon QuickSight, to respective internal business units.
Customers should import their workforce users’ attributes to IAM Identity Center, the recommended service for managing workforce access to AWS applications. After importing the attributes, customers can enable one or more of these attributes as cost allocation tags from the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. When users access AWS applications, their usage and cost are automatically recorded with selected attributes. Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) professionals can view and analyze costs in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS CUR 2.0, gaining visibility into how different teams drive AWS usage and costs.
Support for cost allocation using user attributes is generally available in all AWS Regions, excluding GovCloud (US) Regions and China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia) Regions.
Starting today, customers can use Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink in Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region to build real-time stream processing applications.
Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink makes it easier to transform and analyze streaming data in real time with Apache Flink. Apache Flink is an open source framework and engine for processing data streams. Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink reduces the complexity of building and managing Apache Flink applications and integrates with Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon DynamoDB streams, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), custom integrations, and more using built-in connectors.
You can learn more about Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink here. For Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink region availability, refer to the AWS Region Table.
The AI state of the art is shifting rapidly from simple chat interfaces to autonomous agents capable of planning, executing, and refining complex workflows. In this new landscape, the ability to ground these intelligent agents in your enterprise data is key to unlocking true business value. Google Cloud is at the forefront of this shift, empowering you to build robust, data-driven applications quickly and accurately.
Last month, Google announced Antigravity, an AI-first integrated development environment (IDE). And now, you can now give the AI agents you build in Antigravity direct, secure access to the trusted data infrastructure that powers your organization, turning abstract reasoning into concrete, data-aware action. With Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers powered by MCP Toolbox for Databases now available within Antigravity, you can securely connect your AI agents to services like AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Spanner, Cloud SQL, Looker and others within Google’s Data Cloud, all within your development workflow.
Why use MCP in Antigravity?
We designed Antigravity to keep you in the flow, but the power of an AI agent is limited by what it “knows.” To build truly useful applications, your agent needs to understand your data. MCP acts as the universal translator. You can think of it like a USB-C port for AI. It allows the LLMs in your IDE to plug into your data sources in a standardized way. By integrating pre-built MCP servers directly into Antigravity, you don’t need to perform any manual configuration. Your agents can now converse directly with your databases, helping you build and iterate faster without ever leaving the IDE.
Getting started with MCP servers
In Antigravity, connecting an agent to your data is a UI-driven experience, eliminating the challenges we’ve all faced when wrestling with complex configuration files just to get a database connection running. Here’s how to get up and running.
1. Discover and launch
You can find MCP servers for Google Cloud in the Antigravity MCP Store. Search for the service you need, such as “AlloyDB for PostgreSQL” or “BigQuery,” and click on Install to start the setup process.
Launching the Antigravity MCP store
2. Configure your connection
Antigravity presents a form where you can add your service details such as Project ID and region. You can also enter your password or have Antigravity use your Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials for additional security. These are stored securely, so your agent can access the tools it needs without exposing raw secrets in your chat window.
Installing the AlloyDB for PostgreSQL MCP Server
See your agents in action
Once connected to Antigravity, your agent gains a suite of “tools” (executable functions) that it can use to assist you, and help transform your development and observability experience across different services. Let’s take a look at a couple of common scenarios.
Streamlining database tasks with AlloyDB for PostgreSQL
When building against a relational database like PostgreSQL, you may spend time switching between your IDE and a SQL client to check schema names or test queries. With the AlloyDB MCP server, your agent handles that context and gains the ability to perform database administration and generate high-quality SQL code you can include in your apps — all within the Antigravity interface.
For example:
Schema exploration: The agent can use list_tables and get_table_schema to read your database structure and explain relationships to you instantly.
Query development: Ask the agent to “Write a query to find the top 10 users,” and it can use execute_sql to run it and verify the results immediately.
Optimization: Before you commit code, use the agent to run get_query_plan to ensure your logic is performant.
Antigravity agent using the MCP tools
Unlocking analytics with BigQuery
For data-heavy applications, your agent can act as a helpful data analyst. Leveraging the BigQuery MCP server, it can, for example:
Forecast: Use forecast to predict future trends based on historical data.
Search the catalog: Use search_catalog to discover and manage data assets.
Augmented analytics: Use analyze_contribution to understand the impact of different factors on data metrics.
Building on truth with Looker
Looker acts as your single source of truth for business metrics. Looker’s MCP server allows your agent to bridge the gap between code and business logic, for example:
Ensuring metric consistency: No more guessing whether a field is named total_revenue or revenue_total. Use get_explores and get_dimensions to ask your agent, “What is the correct measure for Net Retention?” and receive the precise field reference from the semantic model.
Instantly validating logic: Don’t wait to deploy a dashboard to test a theory. Use run_query to execute ad-hoc tests against the Looker model directly in your IDE, so that your application logic matches the live data.
Auditing reports: Use run_look to pull results from existing saved reports, allowing you to verify that your application’s output aligns with official business reporting.
Build with data in Antigravity
By integrating Google’s Data Cloud MCP servers into Antigravity, it’s easier than ever to use AI to discover insights and develop new applications. Now, with access to a wide variety of data sources that run your business, get ready to take the leap from simply talking to your code, to creating new experiences for your users.
To get started, check out the following resources:
Today, we’re announcing enhanced network policy capabilities in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), allowing customers to improve the network security posture for their Kubernetes workloads and their integrations with cluster-external destinations. This enhancement builds on network segmentation features previously supported in EKS. Now you can centrally enforce network access filters across the entire cluster, as well as leverage Domain Name System (DNS) based policies to secure egress traffic from your cluster’s environment.
As customers continue to scale their application environments using EKS, network traffic isolation is increasingly fundamental for preventing unauthorized access to resources inside and outside the cluster. To address this, EKS introduced support for Kubernetes NetworkPolicies in the Amazon VPC Container Network Interface (VPC CNI) plugin, allowing you to segment pod-to-pod communication at a namespace level. Now you can further strengthen the defensive posture for your Kubernetes network environment by centrally managing network filters for the whole cluster. Also, cluster admins now have a more stable and predictable approach for preventing unauthorized access to cluster-external resources in the cloud or on-prem using egress rules that filter traffic to external endpoints based on their Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN).
These new network security features are available in all commercial AWS Regions for new EKS clusters running Kubernetes version 1.29 or later, with support for existing clusters to follow in the coming weeks. ClusterNetworkPolicy is available in all EKS cluster launch modes using VPC CNI v1.21.0 or later. DNS-based policies are only supported in EKS Auto Mode-launched EC2 instances. To learn more, visit the Amazon EKS documentation or read the launch blog post here.
Today, AWS announces PDF export and CSV data download capabilities for AWS Billing and Cost Management Dashboards. These new features enable you to export your customized dashboards as PDF files for offline analysis and sharing, and download individual widget data in CSV format for detailed examination in spreadsheet applications. With these capabilities, you now have more ways to distribute AWS cost insights across your organization, in addition to sharing dashboards with can-view or can-edit access.
Billing and Cost Management Dashboards allows you to export entire dashboards or individual widgets as PDF files directly from the console, eliminating the need for screenshots or manual formatting. The PDF export feature provides formatted reports that maintain consistent appearance and preserve dashboard layouts, making them ideal for sharing with stakeholders during board meetings, reviews, or strategic planning sessions. For detailed data analysis needs, you can export individual widget data in CSV format, enabling analysts to perform granular examination of specific cost metrics in their preferred spreadsheet tools.
AWS Billing and Cost Management Dashboards PDF and CSV export features are available at no additional cost in all AWS commercial Regions, excluding AWS China Regions.
To get started, visit the AWS Billing and Cost Management console and select “Dashboards” from the left navigation menu. For more information, see the AWS Billing and Cost Management Dashboards export user guide.
Building Generative AI applications has become accessible to everyone, but moving those applications from a prototype to a production-ready system requires one critical step: Evaluation.
How do you know if your LLM is safe? How do you ensure your RAG system isn’t hallucinating? How do you test an agent that generates SQL queries on the fly?
At its core, GenAI Evaluation is about using data and metrics to measure the quality, safety, and helpfulness of your system’s responses. It moves you away from “vibes-based” testing (just looking at the output) to a rigorous, metrics-driven approach using tools like Vertex AI Evaluation and the Agent Development Kit (ADK).
To guide you through this journey, we have released four hands-on labs that take you from the basics of prompt testing to complex, data-driven agent assessment.
Evaluating Single LLM Outputs
Before you build complex systems, you must understand how to evaluate a single prompt and its response. This lab introduces you to GenAI Evaluation, a service that helps you automate the evaluation of your model’s outputs.
You will learn how to define metrics, such as safety, groundedness, and instruction following. You will also learn how to run evaluation tasks against a dataset. This is the foundational step for any production-ready AI application.
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Evaluate RAG Systems with Vertex AI
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a powerful pattern, but it introduces new failure points: did the search fail to find the document, or did the LLM fail to summarize it?
This lab takes you deeper into the evaluation lifecycle. You will learn how to verify “Faithfulness” (did the answer come from the context?) and “Answer Relevance” (did it actually answer the user’s question?). You will pinpoint exactly where your RAG pipeline needs improvement.
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Evaluating Agents with ADK
Agents are dynamic; they choose tools and plan steps differently based on the input. This makes them harder to test than standard prompts. You aren’t just grading the final answer; you are grading the trajectory, which is the path the agent took to get there.
This lab focuses on using the Agent Development Kit (ADK) to trace and evaluate agent decisions. You will learn how to define specific evaluation criteria for your agent’s reasoning process and how to visualize the results to ensure your agent is using its tools correctly.
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Build and Evaluate BigQuery Agents
When an agent interacts with data, precision is paramount. A SQL-generating agent must write syntactically correct queries and retrieve accurate numbers. A hallucination here doesn’t just look bad, it might lead to bad business decisions.
In this advanced lab, you will build an agent capable of querying BigQuery and then use the GenAI Eval Service to verify the results. You will learn to measure Factual Accuracy and Completeness, ensuring your agent provides the exact data requested without omission.
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Trust Your AI in Production
Ready to make your AI applications production-grade? Start evaluating your model’s outputs or the trajectory taken by your agents with these codelabs:
These labs are part of the AI Evaluation module in our official Production-Ready AI with Google Cloud program. Explore the full curriculum for more content that will help you bridge the gap from a promising prototype to a production-grade AI application.
To build a production-ready agentic system, where intelligent agents can freely collaborate and act, we need standards and shared protocols for how agents talk to tools and how they talk to each other.
In the Agent Production Patterns module in the Production-Ready AI with Google Cloud Learning Path, we focus on interoperability, exploring the standard patterns for connecting agents to data, tools and each other. Here are three hands-on labs to help you build these skills.
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Connecting to Data with MCP
Once you understand the basics, the next step is giving your agent access to knowledge. Whether you are analyzing massive datasets or searching operational records, the MCP Toolbox provides a standard way to connect your agent to your databases.
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Expose a CloudSQL database to an MCP Client
If you need your agent to search for specific records—like flight schedules or hotel inventory—this lab demonstrates how to connect to a CloudSQL relational database.
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From Prototype to Production
By moving away from custom integrations and adopting standards like MCP and A2A, you can build agents that are easier to maintain and scale. These labs provide the practical patterns you need to connect your agents to your data, your tools, and each other.
These labs are part of the AgentProduction Patterns module in our official Production-Ready AI with Google Cloud Learning Path. Explore the full curriculum for more content that will help you bridge the gap from a promising prototype to a production-grade AI application.
Share your progress using the hashtag #ProductionReadyAI. Happy learning!
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now automates certificate provisioning and distribution for Kubernetes workloads through AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK). Previously, ACM automated certificate management for AWS-integrated services like Application Load Balancers and CloudFront. However, using ACM certificates with applications terminating TLS in Kubernetes required manual steps: exporting certificates and private keys via API, creating Kubernetes Secrets, and updating them at renewal. This integration extends ACM’s automation to any Kubernetes workload for both public and private certificates, enabling you to manage certificates using native Kubernetes APIs.
With ACK, you define certificates as Kubernetes resources, and the ACK controller automates the complete certificate lifecycle: requesting certificates from ACM, exporting them after validation, updating Kubernetes Secrets with the certificate and private key, and automatically updating those Secrets at renewal. This enables you to use ACM exportable public certificates (launched in June 2025) for internet-facing workloads or AWS Private CA private certificates for internal services in Amazon EKS or other Kubernetes environments. Use cases include terminating TLS in application pods (NGINX, custom applications), securing service mesh communication (Istio, Linkerd), and managing certificates for third-party ingress controllers (NGINX Ingress, Traefik). You can also distribute certificates to hybrid and edge Kubernetes environments.
This feature is available in all commercial, AWS GovCloud (US), and AWS China regions where ACM is available. To learn more, visit the Git hub link or read our documentation and our pricing page.
Starting today, the general-purpose Amazon EC2 M7a instances are now available in AWS Europe (London) Region. M7a instances, powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors (code-named Genoa) with a maximum frequency of 3.7 GHz, deliver up to 50% higher performance compared to M6a instances.
With this additional region, M7a instances are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Spain, Stockholm, London). These instances can be purchased as Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot instances. To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the M7a instances page.
Welcome to the first Cloud CISO Perspectives for December 2025. Today, Francis deSouza, COO and president, Security Products, Google Cloud, shares our Cybersecurity Forecast report for the coming year, with additional insights from our Office of the CISO colleagues.
As with all Cloud CISO Perspectives, the contents of this newsletter are posted to the Google Cloud blog. If you’re reading this on the website and you’d like to receive the email version, you can subscribe here.
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Forecasting 2026: The year AI rewrites the security playbook
By Francis deSouza, COO, Google Cloud
Francis deSouza, COO and president, Security Products, Google Cloud
We are at a unique point in time where we’re facing a generational refactoring of the entire technology stack, including the threat landscape. 2025 was a watershed year in cybersecurity, where AI moved to the forefront of every company’s agenda, changing the game for both security offense and defense.
While threats continue to intensify — with attackers using AI for sophisticated phishing and deepfakes — defenders also have been gaining ground. This year’s evolutions will continue to drive change in the coming year, and our annual Cybersecurity Forecast report for 2026 explores how today’s lessons will impact tomorrow’s cybersecurity across four key areas: artificial intelligence, cybercrime, nation-state threats, and regulatory obligations.
Organizations haven’t spent enough time preparing their workforces to use AI securely. It is essential that companies build a learning culture around security that includes true AI fluency.
1. The rise of agentic security automation
AI and agents will redefine how organizations secure their environment, turning the security operations center from a monitoring hub into an engine for automated action. This is critical because the window of opportunity has decreased; bad actors operate in hours, not weeks.
As data volumes explode, AI agents can give defenders a speed advantage we haven’t had in years. By stepping in to detect anomalies, automate data analysis, and initiate response workflows, your security teams can focus on the complex decisions that require human judgment. This shift won’t just improve speed — it will drive similar gains in proactively strengthening your entire security posture.
2. Building AI fluency as a defense
We will likely see a wave of AI-driven attacks targeting employees, largely because the weak link in security remains the user. Organizations haven’t spent enough time preparing their workforces to use AI securely. It is essential that companies build a learning culture around security that includes true AI fluency.
Every organization should deploy something like our Model Armor to protect their AI models. Implementing a validation layer at the gateway level ensures that guardrails are active controls rather than just theoretical guidelines.
However, technology is only half the equation. We also need a security-conscious workforce. If we don’t help our employees build these skills, teams simply won’t be equipped to identify the new wave of threats or understand how best to defend against them.
This means looking past standard training, and investing in efforts, like agentic security operations center (SOC) workshops and internal cyber war games efforts, to help educate their employees on what the threat landscape looks like in an AI world.
Read on for the key points from the Cybersecurity Forecast report, bolstered with new insights from our Office of the CISO.
AI advantages
Widespread adoption of AI agents will create new security challenges, requiring organizations to develop new methodologies and tools to effectively map their new AI ecosystems. A key part of this will be the evolution of identity and access management (IAM) to treat AI agents as distinct digital actors with their own managed identities.
AI adoption will transform security analysts’ roles, shifting them from drowning in alerts to directing AI agents in an agentic SOC. This will allow analysts to focus on strategic validation and high-level analysis, as AI handles data correlation, incident summaries, and threat intelligence drafting.
The heightened capability of agentic AI to take actions and execute tasks autonomously elevates the importance of cybersecurity basics. Organizations will need to create discrete boundary definitions for the authorization, authentication, and monitoring of each agent.
Taylor Lehmann, director, health care and life sciences
A year from now, we’re going to have an awesome security opportunity to secure a new persona in our organizations: Knowledge workers who produce truly useful, mission-critical applications and software using ideas and words — but not necessarily well-written, vetted, and tested code.
We’re going to need better and more fine-grained paths to help these new “idea-native developers” who use powerful AI tools and agents to build, test, submit, manage and blast secure code into secure production as safely and as fast as they can. In 2026 and 2027, we’re going to see how big this opportunity is. We should prepare to align our organizations, operations, and technology (OOT) to take advantage of it.
A corollary to this comes from our DORA reports: Just as AI has amplified productivity and begun optimizing work, it amplifies organizational dysfunctions — especially those that lead to inefficiently and ineffectively secured data.
Marina Kaganovich, executive trust lead
The heightened capability of agentic AI to take actions and execute tasks autonomously elevates the importance of cybersecurity basics. Organizations will need to create discrete boundary definitions for the authorization, authentication, and monitoring of each agent.
Beyond technical controls, organizational defense will depend on fostering an AI-literate workforce through training and awareness, as staff shift from performing tasks to architecting and overseeing agents. To be successful, organizations will require a fundamental shift in risk-informed culture.
Bill Reid, security advisor
Aggressive adoption of agentic AI will drive a renewed interest in threat modeling practices. Security teams will be asked to deeply understand what teams are trying to build, and will need to think about the data flows, the trust boundaries, and the guardrails needed.
Agentic AI will also demand that the supply chain be considered within that threat model, beyond the software bill of materials (SBOM), to look at how those services will control autonomous actions. It will also force a renewed look at identity and entitlements, as agents are asked to act on behalf of or as an extension of employees in the enterprise.
What may have been acceptable wide scopes covered by detective controls may no longer be sufficient, given the speed of action that comes with automation and the chaining of models together in goal seeking behavior.
Vesselin Tzvetkov, senior cybersecurity advisor
As Francis noted, agentic security operations are set to become the standard for modern SOCs, dramatically enhancing the speed and capabilities of security organizations. The agentic SOC in 2026 will feature multiple small, dedicated agents for tasks like summarization, alert grouping, similarity detection, and predictive remediation.
This shift will transform modern SOC roles and processes, moving away from tiered models in favor of CI/CD-like automation. AI capabilities and relevant know-how are essential for security personnel.
As AI drives new AI threat hunting capabilities to gain insight from data lakes in previously underexplored areas, such as OT protocols for manufacturing and industry-specific protocols like SS7 for telecommunications, the overall SOC coverage and overall industry security will improve.
Vinod D’Souza, director, manufacturing and industry
In 2026, agentic AI will help the manufacturing and industrial sector cross the critical threshold from static automation to true autonomy. Machines will self-correct and self-optimize with a speed and precision that exceeds human capacity.
The engine powering this transformation is the strategic integration of cloud-native SCADA and AI-native architectures. Security leaders should redefine their mandate from protecting a perimeter to enabling a trusted ecosystem anchored in cyber-physical identity.
Every sensor, service, autonomous agent, and digital twin should be treated as a verified entity. By rooting security strategies in data-centered Zero Trust, organizations stop treating security as a gatekeeper and transform it into the architectural foundation. More than just securing infrastructure, the goal is to secure the decision-making integrity of autonomous systems.
AI threats
We anticipate threat actors will move decisively from using AI as an exception to using it as the norm. They will use AI to enhance the speed, scope, and effectiveness of their operations, streamlining and scaling attacks.
A critical and growing threat is prompt injection, an attack that manipulates AI to bypass its security protocols and follow an attacker’s hidden command. Expect a significant rise in targeted attacks on enterprise AI systems.
Threat actors will accelerate the use of highly manipulative AI-enabled social engineering. This includes vishing (voice phishing) with AI-driven voice cloning to create hyperrealistic impersonations of executives or IT staff, making attacks harder to detect and defend against.
The increasing complexity of hybrid and multicloud architectures, coupled with the rapid, ungoverned introduction of AI agents, will accelerate the crisis in IAM failures, cementing them as the primary initial access vector for significant enterprise compromise.
Anton Chuvakin, security advisor
We’ve been hearing about the sizzle of AI for some time, but now we need the steak to be served. While there’s still a place for exciting, hypothetical use cases, we need tangible AI benefits backed by solid security data of value and benefits obtained and proven.
Whether your company adopts agents or not, your employees will use them for work. Shadow agents raise new and interesting risks, especially when your employees connect their personal agents to corporate systems. Organizations will have to invest to mitigate the risks of shadow agents — merely blocking them simply won’t work (they will sneak back in immediately).
David Stone, director, financial services
As highlighted in the Google Threat Intelligence Group report on adversarial use of AI, attackers will use gen AI to exploit bad hygiene, employ deepfake capabilities to erode trust in processes, and discover zero-day vulnerabilities. Cyber defenders will likewise have to adopt gen AI capabilities to find and fix cyber hygiene, patch code at scale, and scrutinize critical business processes to get signals to find and stop exploitation of humans in the process.
Security will continue to grow in importance in the boardroom as the key focus on resilience, business enablement, and business continuity — especially as AI-driven attacks evolve.
Jorge Blanco, director, Iberia and Latin America
The increasing complexity of hybrid and multicloud architectures, coupled with the rapid, ungoverned introduction of AI agents, will accelerate the crisis in IAM failures, cementing them as the primary initial access vector for significant enterprise compromise.
The proliferation of sophisticated, autonomous agents — often deployed by employees without corporate approval (the shadow agent risk) — will create invisible, uncontrolled pipelines for sensitive data, leading to data leaks and compliance violations. The defense against this requires the evolution of IAM to agentic identity management, treating AI agents as distinct digital actors with their own managed identities.
Organizations that fail to adopt this dynamic, granular control — focusing on least privilege, just-in-time access, and robust delegation — will be unable to minimize the potential for privilege creep and unauthorized actions by these new digital actors. The need for practical guidance on securing multicloud environments, including streamlined IAM configuration, will be acutely felt as security teams grapple with this evolving threat landscape.
Sri Gourisetti, senior cybersecurity advisor
The increased adversarial use of AI for the development of malware modules may likely result in “malware bloat” — a high volume of AI-generated malicious code that is non-functional or poorly optimized, creating significant noise for amateur adversaries and defenders.
Functional malware will become more modular and mature, designed to be compatible and interact with factory floor and OT environments as the manufacturing and industrial sector moves beyond initial exploration of generative AI toward the structural deployment of agentic AI in IT, OT, and manufacturing workflows.
Widya Junus, strategy operations
Over 70% of cloud breaches stem from compromised identities, according to a recent Cloud Threat Horizons report, and we expect that trend to accelerate as threat actors exploit AI. The security focus should shift from human-centered authentication to automated governance of non-human identities using Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and Workload Identity Federation (WIF).
Accordingly, as AI-assisted attacks lower the barrier for entry and cloud-native ransomware specifically targets APIs to encrypt workloads, organizations will increasingly rely on tamper-proof backups (such as Backup Vault) and AI-driven automated recovery workflows to ensure business continuity — rather than relying solely on perimeter defenses to stop every attack.
Cybercrime
The combination of ransomware, data theft, and multifaceted extortion will remain the most financially disruptive category of cybercrime. The volume of activity is escalating, with focus on targeting third-party providers and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities for high-volume data exfiltration.
As the financial sector increasingly adopts cryptocurrencies, threat actors are expected to migrate core components of their operations onto public blockchains for unprecedented resilience against traditional takedown efforts.
As security controls mature in guest operating systems, adversaries are pivoting to the underlying virtualization infrastructure, which is becoming a critical blind spot. A single compromise here can grant control over the entire digital estate and render hundreds of systems inoperable in a matter of hours.
Next year, we’ll see the first sustained, automated campaigns where threat actors use agentic AI to autonomously discover and exploit vulnerabilities faster than human defenders can patch exploited vulnerabilities.
David Homovich, advocacy lead
In 2026, we expect to see more boards pressuring CISOs to translate security exposure and investment into financial terms, focusing on metrics like potential dollar losses and the actual return on security investment. Crucially, operational resilience — the organization’s ability to quickly recover from an AI-fueled attack — is a non-negotiable board expectation.
CISOs take note: Boards are asking us about business resilience and the impact of advanced, machine-speed attacks — like adversarial AI and securing autonomous identities such as AI agents. Have your dollar figures ready, because this is the new language of defense for boards.
Crystal Lister, security advisor
Next year, we’ll see the first sustained, automated campaigns where threat actors use agentic AI to autonomously discover and exploit vulnerabilities faster than human defenders can patch exploited vulnerabilities.
2025 showed us that adversaries are no longer leveraging artificial intelligence just for productivity gains, they are deploying novel AI-enabled malware in active operations. The ShadowV2 botnet was likely a test run for autonomous C2 infrastructure.
Furthermore, the November 2025 revelations about Chinese state-sponsored actors using Anthropic’s Claude to automate espionage code-writing demonstrates that barriers to entry for sophisticated attacks have collapsed. Our security value proposition should shift from detection to AI-speed preemption.
The global stage: Threat actors
Cyber operations in Russia are expected to undergo a strategic shift, prioritizing long-term global strategic goals and the development of advanced cyber capabilities over just tactical support for the conflict in Ukraine.
The volume of China-nexus cyber operations is expected to continue surpassing that of other nations. They will prioritize stealthy operations, aggressively targeting edge devices and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities.
Driven by regional conflicts and the goal of regime stability, Iranian cyber activity will remain resilient, multifaceted, and semi-deniable, deliberately blurring the lines between espionage, disruption, and hacktivism.
North Korea will continue to conduct financial operations to generate revenue for the regime, cyber espionage against perceived adversaries, and seek to expand IT worker operations.
Sovereign cloud will become a drumbeat across most of Europe, as EU member states seek to decrease their reliance on American tech companies.
Bob Mechler, director, Telco, Media, Entertainment and Gaming
The telecom cybersecurity landscape in 2026 will be dominated by the escalation of AI-driven attacks and persistent geopolitical instability. We may witness the first major AI-driven cybersecurity breach, as adversaries use AI to automate exploit development and craft sophisticated attacks that outpace traditional defenses.
This technological escalation coincides with a baseline of state-backed and politically-motivated cyber-threat activity, where critical infrastructure is targeted as part of broader geopolitical conflicts. Recent state-sponsored campaigns, such as Salt Typhoon, highlight how adversaries are already penetrating telecommunications networks to establish long-term access, posing a systemic threat to national security.
Toby Scales, security advisor
Sovereign cloud will become a drumbeat across most of Europe, as EU member states seek to decrease their reliance on American tech companies.
At the same time, the AI capability gap will continue to widen and both enterprises and governments will chase agreements with frontier model providers. Regulatory bodies may seek to enforce “locally hosted fine-tuned models” as a way to protect state secrets, but will face predictable opposition from frontier model developers.
Meeting regulatory obligations
Governance has taken on new importance in the AI era. Key areas of focus are expanding to include data integrity to prevent poisoning attacks, model security to defend against evasion and theft, and governance fundamentals to ensure transparency and accountability.
CISOs and governance, risk, and compliance teams should work together to build an AI resilience architecture, establish continuous AI health monitoring, integrate AI into business continuity and incident response, and embed AI resilience into security governance.
Bhavana Bhinder, security, privacy, and compliance advisor
In 2026, we will see the validated AI operating model become the industry standard for healthcare and life sciences (HCLS), with a shift from pilot projects to organizations seeking full-scale production deployments that are compliant and audit-ready by design. The logical evolution for HCLS will move towards agentic evaluation, where autonomous agents act as real-time auditors.
Instead of periodic reviews, these agents will continuously validate that generative AI outputs (such as clinical study reports) remain factually grounded and conform to regulatory standards. Organizations using governed, quality-scored data necessary to trust advanced models like Gemini across the drug lifecycle, clinical settings, and quality management will depend on AI workflows that natively support industry- and domain-specific regulations.
Odun Fadahunsi, senior security risk and compliance advisor
As regulators and sectoral bodies in finance, healthcare and critical infrastructure define AI-specific resilience obligations, CISOs must treat AI resilience as a primary pillar of security, not a separate or optional discipline. AI systems are poised to become so deeply embedded in identity, fraud detection, customer operations, cloud automation, and decisioning workflows that AI availability and reliability will directly determine an organization’s operational resilience.
Unlike traditional systems, AI can fail in silent, emergent, or probabilistic ways — drifting over time, degrading under adversarial prompt, and behaving unpredictably after upstream changes in data or model weights. These failure modes will create security blindspots, enabling attackers to exploit model weaknesses that bypass traditional controls.
CISOs and governance, risk, and compliance teams should work together to build an AI resilience architecture, establish continuous AI health monitoring, integrate AI into business continuity and incident response, and embed AI resilience into security governance.
For more leadership guidance from Google Cloud experts, please see ourCISO Insights hub.
Here are the latest updates, products, services, and resources from our security teams so far this month:
Responding to React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182): Follow these recommendations to minimize remote code execution risks in React and Next.js from the React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182) vulnerability. Read more.
How Google Does It: Securing production services, servers, and workloads: Here are the three core pillars that define how we protect production workloads at Google-scale. Read more.
How Google Does It: Using Binary Authorization to boost supply chain security: “Don’t trust, verify,” guides how we secure our entire software supply chain. Here’s how we use Binary Authorization to ensure that every component meets our security best practices and standards. Read more.
New data on ROI of AI in security: Our new ROI of AI in security report showcases how organizations are getting value from AI in cybersecurity, and finds a significant, practical shift is underway. Read more.
Using MCP with Web3: How to secure blockchain-interacting agents: In the Web3 world, who hosts AI agents, and who holds the private key to operations, are pressing questions. Here’s how to get started with the two most likely agent models. Read more.
Expanding the Google Unified Security Recommended program: We are excited to announce Palo Alto Networks as the latest addition to the Google Unified Security Recommended program, joining previously announced partners CrowdStike, Fortinet and Wiz. Read more.
Why PQC is Google’s path forward (and not QKD): After closely evaluating Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), here’s why we chose post-quantum cryptography (PQC) as the more scalable solution for our needs. Read more.
Architecting security for agentic capabilities in Chrome: Following the recent launch of Gemini in Chrome and the preview of agentic capabilities, here’s our approach and some new innovations to improve the safety of agentic browsing. Read more.
Android Quick Share support for AirDrop: As part of our efforts to continue to make cross-platform communication easier, we’ve made Quick Share interoperable with AirDrop, allowing for two-way file sharing between Android and iOS devices, starting with the Pixel 10 Family. Read more.
Please visit the Google Cloud blog for more security stories published this month.
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Threat Intelligence news
Intellexa’s prolific zero-day exploits continue: Despite extensive scrutiny and public reporting, commercial surveillance vendors such as Intellexa continue to operate unimpeded. Known for its “Predator” spyware, new GTIG analysis shows that Intellexa is evading restrictions and thriving. Read more.
APT24’s pivot to multi-vector attacks: GTIG is tracking a long-running and adaptive cyber espionage campaign by APT24, a People’s Republic of China (PRC)-nexus threat actor that has been deploying BADAUDIO over the past three years. Here’s our analysis of the malware, and how defenders can detect and mitigate this persistent threat. Read more.
Get going with Time Travel Debugging using a .NET process hollowing case study: Unlike traditional live debugging, this technique captures a deterministic, shareable record of a program’s execution. Here’s how to start incorporating TTD into your analysis. Read more.
Analysis of UNC1549 targeting the aerospace and defense ecosystem: Following last year’s post on suspected Iran-nexus espionage activity targeting the aerospace, aviation, and defense industries in the Middle East, we discuss additional tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed in incidents Mandiant has responded to. Read more.
Please visit the Google Cloud blog for more threat intelligence stories published this month.
Now hear this: Podcasts from Google Cloud
The truth about autonomous AI hacking: Heather Adkins, Google’s Security Engineering vice-president, separates the hype from the hazards of autonomous AI hacking, with hosts Anton Chuvakin and Tim Peacock. Listen here.
Escaping 1990s vulnerability management: Caleb Hoch, consulting manager for security transformations, Mandiant, discusses with Anton and Tim how vulnerability management has evolved beyond basic scanning and reporting, and the biggest gaps between modern practices and what organizations are actually doing. Listen here.
The art and craft of cloud bug hunting: Bug bounty professionals Sivanesh Ashok and Sreeram KL, have won the Most Valuable Hacker award from the Google Cloud VRP team. They chat about all things buggy with Anton and Tim, including how to write excellent bug bounty reports. Listen here.
Behind the Binary: The art of deconstructing problems: Host Josh Stroschein is joined by Nino Isakovic, a long-time low-level security expert, for a thought-provoking conversation that spans the foundational and the cutting-edge — including his discovery of the ScatterBrain obfuscating compiler. Listen here.
To have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered twice a month to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. We’ll be back in a few weeks with more security-related updates from Google Cloud.
We can all agree that the quality of AI-driven answers relies on the consistency of the underlying data. But AI models, while powerful, lack business context out of the box. As more organizations ask questions of their data using natural language, it is increasingly important to unify business measures and dimensions, ensure consistency company-wide. If you want trustworthy AI, what you need is a semantic layer that acts as the single source of truth for business metrics.But how do you make that data accessible and actionable for your end users? Building off the recent introduction of Looker’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, in this blog we take you through the process of creating an Agent Development Kit (ADK) agent that is connected to Looker via the MCP Toolbox for Databases and exposing it within Gemini Enterprise. Let’s get started.Step 1 – Set up Looker Integration in MCP Toolbox
MCP Toolbox for Databases is a central open-source server that hosts and manages toolsets, enabling agentic applications to leverage Looker’s capabilities without working directly with the platform. Instead of managing tool logic and authentication themselves, agents act as MCP clients and request tools from the Toolbox. The MCP Toolbox handles all the underlying complexities, including secure connections to Looker, authentication and query execution.
The MCP Toolbox for Databases natively supports Looker’s pre-built toolset. To access these tools, follow the below steps:
Connect to Cloud Shell. Check that you’re already authenticated, and that the project is set to your project ID using the following command:
Install the binary version of the MCP Toolbox for Databases via the script given below. This command is for Linux; if you run on Macintosh or Windows, ensure that you download the correct binary. Check out the releases page for your Operation System and Architecture and download the correct binary.
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<ListValue: [StructValue([(‘code’, ‘export OS=”linux/amd64″ # one of linux/amd64, darwin/arm64, darwin/amd64, or windows/amd64rncurl -O https://storage.googleapis.com/genai-toolbox/v0.12.0/$OS/toolboxrnchmod +x toolbox’), (‘language’, ”), (‘caption’, <wagtail.rich_text.RichText object at 0x7fa5baae0a30>)])]>
Deploy Toolbox to Cloud Run
Next, you’ll need to run MCP Toolbox. The simplest way to do that is on Cloud Run, Google Cloud’s fully managed container application platform. Here’s how:
The Cloud Run will ask if you want Unauthenticated, select No.Allow Unauthenticated: N
Step 2: Deploy ADK Agent to Agent Engine
Next, you need to configure Agent Development Kit (ADK), a flexible and modular framework for developing and deploying AI agents. ADK was designed to make agent development feel more like software development, to make it easier for developers to create, deploy, and orchestrate agentic architectures that range from simple tasks to complex workflows. And while ADK is optimized for Gemini and the Google ecosystem, it’s also model-agnostic, deployment-agnostic, and is built for compatibility with other frameworks.
Vertex AI Agent Engine, a part of the Vertex AI Platform, is a set of services that enables developers to deploy, manage, and scale AI agents in production. Agent Engine handles the infrastructure to scale agents in production so you can focus on creating applications.
Open a new terminal tab in Cloud Shell and create a folder named my-agents as follows. You also need to navigate to the my-agents folder.
Now you’re ready to use adk to create a scaffolding, including folders, environment and basic files, for our Looker Agent Application via the adkcreate command with an app name looker_app:
Gemini model for choosing a model for the root agent
Vertex AI for the backend
Your default Google Project Id and region
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<ListValue: [StructValue([(‘code’, ‘Choose a model for the root agent:rn1. gemini-2.5-flash-001rn2. Other models (fill later)rnChoose model (1, 2): 1rnrnrn1. Google AIrn2. Vertex AIrnChoose a backend (1, 2): 2rnrnEnter Google Cloud project ID [your_current_project_id]:rnEnter Google Cloud region [us-central1]:rnrnAgent created in /home/romin/looker-app:rn- .envrn- __init__.pyrn- agent.py’), (‘language’, ”), (‘caption’, <wagtail.rich_text.RichText object at 0x7fa5bd2720a0>)])]>
Observe the folder in which a default template and required files for the Agent have been created.
First up is the .env file:
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<ListValue: [StructValue([(‘code’, ‘GOOGLE_GENAI_USE_VERTEXAI=1rnGOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT=YOUR_GOOGLE_PROJECT_IDrnGOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION=YOUR_GOOGLE_PROJECT_REGION’), (‘language’, ”), (‘caption’, <wagtail.rich_text.RichText object at 0x7fa5bd272220>)])]>
The values indicate that you will be using Gemini via Vertex AI along with the respective values for the Google Cloud Project Id and location.
Then you have the __init__.py file that marks the folder as a module and has a single statement that imports the agent from the agent.py file:
Finally, take a look at the agent.py file. The contents can be edited to similar to the example below:
Insert the Cloud Run URL highlighted here (. not the one with the project number in the url).
code_block
<ListValue: [StructValue([(‘code’, ‘import osrnfrom google.adk.agents import LlmAgentrnfrom google.adk.planners.built_in_planner import BuiltInPlannerrnfrom google.adk.tools.mcp_tool.mcp_toolset import MCPToolsetrnfrom google.adk.tools.mcp_tool.mcp_session_manager import SseConnectionParams, StreamableHTTPConnectionParamsrnfrom google.genai.types import ThinkingConfigrnfrom google.auth import compute_enginernimport google.auth.transport.requestsrnimport google.oauth2.id_tokenrnrn# Replace this URL with the correct endpoint for your MCP server.rnMCP_SERVER_URL = “YOUR_CLOUD_RUN_URL/mcp”rnif not MCP_SERVER_URL:rn raise ValueError(“The MCP_SERVER_URL is not set.”)rndef get_id_token():rn “””Get an ID token to authenticate with the MCP server.”””rn target_url = MCP_SERVER_URLrn audience = target_url.split(‘/mcp’)[0]rn auth_req = google.auth.transport.requests.Request()rn id_token = google.oauth2.id_token.fetch_id_token(auth_req, audience)rn # Get the ID token.rn return id_tokenrnrnrnroot_agent = LlmAgent(rn model=’gemini-2.5-flash’,rn name=’looker_agent’,rn description=’Agent to answer questions about Looker data.’,rn instruction=(rn ‘You are a helpful agent who can answer user questions about Looker data the user has access to. Use the tools to answer the question. If you are unsure on what model to use, try defaulting to thelook and if you are also unsure on the explore, try order_items if using thelook model’rn ),rnplanner=BuiltInPlanner(rnthinking_config=ThinkingConfig(include_thoughts=False, thinking_budget=0)rn),rntools=[rnMCPToolset(rnconnection_params=StreamableHTTPConnectionParams(rnurl=MCP_SERVER_URL,rnheaders={rn”Authorization”: f”Bearer {get_id_token()}”,rn}rn),rnerrlog=None,rn# Load all tools from the MCP server at the given URLrntool_filter=None,rn)rn],rn)’), (‘language’, ”), (‘caption’, <wagtail.rich_text.RichText object at 0x7fa5bd272940>)])]>
NOTE: Ensure you grant the Cloud Run Invoker role to the default Agent Engine Service Account (i.e., service-PROJECT_NUMBER@gcp-sa-aiplatform-re.iam.gserviceaccount.com)
Step 3: Connect to Gemini Enterprise
Now it’s time to create a Gemini Enterprise app (instructions here).
Run the below command with the GCP Project Number, Reasoning Engine resource name output from the ‘deploy agent_engine’ command above, and your Gemini Enterprise Agent ID from the Gemini Enterprise Apps interface:
Your Looker data will now be available within your Gemini Enterprise app.If you don’t have access to this feature, contact your Google Cloud account team.
Querying business data made easier
Connecting Looker’s semantic layer to Vertex AI Agent services by way of the ADK and MCP Toolbox is a big win for data accessibility. By exposing your trusted Looker models and Explores in Gemini Enterprise, you empower end-users to query complex business data using natural language. This integration closes the gap between data insights and immediate action, ensuring that your organization’s semantic layer is not just a source of passive reports, but an active, conversational, and decision-driving asset.
Today, many organizations operate with data that’s trapped in silos, in disconnected legacy systems and is days or hours old. However, the rise of AI presents the need and opportunity to unify these environments, tap into unstructured data from audio, video, and text files, which together, makes up more than 80% of enterprise data and enable business decisions informed by real-time data. Data teams navigating AI also face a new set of challenges such as automating complex workflows and apps, grounding them in enterprise data, activating real-time insights on multimodal data, and building a foundation that inspires trust in AI.
Google’s Data Cloud is an AI-native platform designed to unify an organization’s entire data foundation and enable intelligent applications and agentic experiences. Data Cloud integrates Google infrastructure, intelligence, and data platform with pioneering AI advancements, including Gemini for working with data, automation of metadata management and governance, and flexible workflows for developers, allowing customers to focus on innovation and business outcomes rather than integration challenges.
Recently, we were honored to be recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Integration Tools. In our opinion this demonstrates Data Cloud’s tight integration with data integration tools and vision for AI, including customer use cases for multimodal data processing, and scalable, efficient vectorization. In addition, we were recognized as a leader in the Forrester Wave™ :Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025. In this blog post, we take a look at recent updates and innovations that we believe made recognition from these two leading analyst firms possible.
Boost productivity with Gemini-powered intelligence
Data agents are revolutionizing the way different data roles operate by bringing automation, intelligence, and natural language capabilities into their daily workflows. Whether you’re a data analyst querying and visualizing data more efficiently, a developer building smarter applications, or a data scientist accelerating model development, agents can help streamline repetitive tasks and boost your productivity. Data engineers benefit from automated data preparation and pipeline management, while ML engineers can deploy and monitor models more effectively. Even business users, who traditionally rely on technical teams for insights, can now interact with data directly using natural language.
Recent innovations to Gemini with BigQuery for data engineering provide automation to build data pipelines to ingest, transform, and validate data. This includes data transformations like data cleaning, deduplication, formatting, standardizing, joins, and aggregations as well as data quality to enforce rules and standards. Building on these capabilities, the Data Engineering Agent further accelerates productivity by intelligently automating these standard integration patterns and proactively monitoring pipeline health.
Speed efficiency with multimodal automation and governance
We are removing the friction to build AI applications using autonomous vector embedding for multimodal data. Building on our BigQuery Vector Search capabilities, data teams can build, manage, and maintain complex data pipelines without needing to update vector embeddings. BigQuery now takes care of this automatically with added capabilities for agents to connect user intent to enterprise data. This is powering customer systems like the in-store product finder at Morrisons, which handles 50,000 customer searches on a busy day.
We are also helping organizations ensure their data platform acts as a real-time brain for AI, including orchestration and AI-infused services. Governance is foundational to data and AI success. In today’s world of distributed data spanning lakes, warehouses, and operational systems, intelligence is impossible without unified governance.
New automated cataloging with Dataplex Universal Catalog allows data teams to discover, ingest, and index metadata from a wide range of sources, minimizing the effort involved in cataloging data, and providing a near-real-time view of your data and AI landscape. Dataplex provides context to your data teams and your agents beyond the normal scope of a universal catalog. It leverages Gemini to continuously derive relationships and auto-generate business semantics, providing AI agents with trusted, real-time context.
Ericsson uses Dataplex to deliver a unified business vocabulary to users, including data classification, ownership, retention policies, and sensitivity labels. This allows different data personas to instantly understand a data origin, increasing trust and reducing investigation time.
Optimize workloads for broad usability
Managing data across cloud and hybrid environments can be piecemeal, leading to costly inefficiencies, redundant storage, and complex data movement.
To help, visual pipelines provide a code-free user experience for designing, deploying, managing and monitoring pipelines, with a metadata-driven approach to improving developer productivity. And enhancements to data preparation in BigQuery provide a single platform to clean, structure, enrich and build data pipelines.
For ML transformations supporting retrieval augmented generation (RAG) use cases, recent innovations enhance model inference to ML models in real-time or batch. And support for libraries and frameworks for multimodal data allows data teams to leverage multiple models in a single pipeline, improving accuracy and recall.
Integrating real-time data and context for AI
Agents need context in order to be effective and are significantly limited when they rely on static or outdated information. To make accurate decisions that genuinely help users and the business, they need real-time access to the current state of your systems and users. We launched Managed Service for Apache Kafka last year to help you integrate your operational and transactional data into your AI and data platform that in turn can then power your AI agents. This year, we added critical enterprise capabilities such as Apache Kafka Connect, VPC Service Controls, mutual TLS authentication, and Kafka access control which have helped customers like MadHive deploy to production in a matter of months. To enable new streaming architectures, we added User-Defined Functions support (UDFs) in Pub/Sub for transforming messages (like JSON) before they go to destinations like BigQuery, allowing custom logic, validation, and enrichment on the streaming data and making Pub/Sub pipelines more powerful and flexible. We also enhanced Dataflow, the advanced unified streaming and batch processing engine with critical capabilities such as parallel updates, Managed I/O, Google Cloud TPU support, speculative execution and more to bring the power of AI enabled data processing to advanced stream processing use cases such as continuous ML feature extraction and real time fraud detection.
Data integration and streaming momentum
It was a busy year for the Google Data Cloud team, and we are honored to be recognized in these recent Gartner and Forrester reports. We look forward to continuing to innovate and partner with you on your data transformation journey.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivityhere .
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, Michele Launi, Nina Showell, Robert Thanaraj, Sharat Menon, 8 December 2025
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Pioneering organizations have been using Gemini Live API to build the next generation of multimodal conversational AI that blends voice, vision, and text, to deliver fluid, human-like, and highly contextual interactions. For Google Cloud customers, this means you can deploy low-latency voice and video agents with the stability and performance required for your most demanding workflows.
A new standard with real-time multimodal AI agents
Gemini Live API represents a new standard for bringing AI to life. Imagine an agent that doesn’t just listen, but instantly understands the user’s intent, the context of their screen, captures the emotion in their voice, and responds with a human-like voice — all in real time.
The power behind this dynamic capability is the Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model. Our approach is based on a simple commitment: to bring the same high-quality conversational intelligence found in advanced experiences across Google directly to your enterprise applications.
In a real-time interaction, precision and speed are non-negotiable. Gemini Live API is natively multimodal and is designed to handle the instantaneous complexity of human dialogue:
It can process interruptions mid-sentence without missing a beat, ensuring natural turn-taking.
It understands acoustic cues like pitch and pace, deciphering intent and tone.
It can see and discuss complex visual data (charts, live video, diagrams) shared by a user, providing immediate, contextual assistance.
The confidence to deploy on Vertex AI
Gemini Live API is engineered for enterprise success. Vertex AI provides the security and stability your mission-critical agents need for production.
The Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model is optimized to process a high volume of concurrent interactions with consistent, low-latency performance. Deploying on Vertex AI allows you to leverage our expanding global infrastructure across multiple regions, delivering reliability for your users. Additionally, enterprise-grade data residency features that allow you to manage where your data is processed, helping you meet critical regulatory and compliance standards.
Building real-world impact with Gemini Live API
The true power of Gemini Live API is demonstrated by the companies who are using it today to redefine their customer experiences.
Shopify, the leading global commerce platform, developed Sidekick, a multimodal AI assistant powered by Gemini Live API on Vertex AI. It provides personalized, robust support away from a desk, enabling real-time problem solving that eliminates traditional ticketing workflows.
“Users often forget they’re talking to AI within a minute of using Sidekick, and in some cases have thanked the bot after a long chat. This is an exciting time to be an entrepreneur. New AI capabilities offered through Gemini empower our merchants to win.” – David Wurtz, VP of Product, Shopify
United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) transformed its business process by using their AI Loan Officer Assistant, Mia, to dramatically increase business efficiency for their broker partners.
“By integrating the Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model and harnessing the Gemini Live API capabilities on the Vertex AI platform, we’ve significantly enhanced Mia’s capabilities since launching in May 2025. This powerful combination has enabled us to generate over 14,000 loans for our broker partners, proving that AI is much more than just a buzzword at UWM.” – Jason Bressler, Chief Technology Officer, UWM
SightCall provides remote video support and AI-driven visual assistance, helping customer service and field teams solve problems faster.
“What makes this partnership so exciting is that the Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model isn’t just fast — it’s seamlessly human. When combined with SightCall Xpert Knowledge™, it becomes a real-time expert that knows what your best technicians know… This is the future of visual support.” – Thomas Cottereau, CEO, SightCall
Napster uses the Gemini Live API’s vision and audio capabilities so their users can co-create and receive live guidance from specialized AI companions.
“By utilizing the Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model on Vertex AI, we’ve built something we couldn’t before: AI Companions that see you, see your screen, and respond like real experts in real-time conversation. This combination of vision and audio enables genuine collaboration — no prompting, no engineering — just natural dialogue where AI understands your full context and unlocks creativity and expertise for everyone.” – Edo Segal, CTO, Napster
Lumeris is deploying their health AI assistant, Tom, in high-stakes environments where nuance and emotional sensitivity are non-negotiable.
“The transition to the Gemini Live API on Vertex AI is a strategic investment in more intuitive and efficient patient conversations. The result is a more responsive and personalized voice experience. For Lumeris, our goal is elevating the quality of every interaction between patients and Tom, our agentic primary care team member. This helps us set a new standard for patient care.” – Jean-Claude Saghbini, President and Chief Technology Officer, Lumeris
Newo deploys versatile AI Receptionists that achieve a conversational quality that is truly lifelike and emotionally intuitive, handling tasks from general inquiries to sales.
“Working with the Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model through Vertex AI allows Newo.ai AI Receptionists to achieve unmatched conversational intelligence — combining ultra-low latency with advanced reasoning. They can identify the main speaker even in noisy settings, switch languages mid-conversation, and sound remarkably natural and emotionally expressive. Our Gemini Live API-powered outbound AI Sales Agents can laugh, joke, and truly connect — making every call feel human.” – David Yang, co-founder, Newo.ai
11Sight is redefining customer interactions with AI-powered conversational agents that book appointments and close sales.
“The Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Audio model on Vertex AI gave us the enterprise-grade platform required to rapidly develop our voice AI agents with very low latency. Integrating this solution with our Sentinel AI Agents pushed our call resolution rates from 40% in February to 60% in November.” – Dr. Farokh Eskafi, CTO, 11Sight