Nearly 100 alliance leaders joined us at 7:30 AM in Vegas for conversations Cloud GTM leaders at Next needed to have. Yesterday we hosted our largest GCP Marketplace Strategic Breakfast at Google Cloud Next.

The room was senior. Alliance and marketplace leaders from Grafana, Replit, Alteryx, Red Hat, and dozens more. Many chose this over an extra hour of sleep.

Dai Vu, Managing Director of Google Cloud Marketplace, joined us for a candid discussion. Subhash Jawahrani brought additional depth from the Data Platform & AI side of Marketplace.

A panel brought a sharp operator perspective. David Mauer (LucidLink) moderated. Subhash Jawahrani, John Jahnke (Tackle), and Rolf Heimes (Incorta) shared what's actually working — and what's changing — in co-sell, channel, and marketplace execution on GCP.

A few themes stood out:

→ Marketplace is becoming a trust layer, not just a procurement channel

As agentic AI scales the number of publishers, Google Cloud will play a bigger role in signaling quality to buyers. Discoverability will increasingly reward real performance — not just listing presence.

→ The $750M agentic AI investment is designed to move partners from prototype to production

New resources include agentic AI prototyping support, forward-deployed engineering teams, and usage incentives. This is structured to accelerate real adoption, not just experimentation.

→ Gemini Enterprise and Workspace are becoming agent distribution surfaces

The vision is contextual discovery — agents recommended to users based on what they're working on, not just intentional search. A significant new distribution path for ISVs.

→ The user experience will be shifting to the agent control plane

For many SaaS products, customers will increasingly experience the product through an agent — not the ISV's own UI. A2A, MCP, and API-first architecture become strategically critical. Alliance and product teams need to be in the same room now.

→ Marketplace commerce is getting more ecosystem-native

Google is working toward integrating more partners into Marketplace transactions. Both GCP and ISVs with strong ecosystems recognize the value channel partners bring to customers and helping to scale.

Thank you to our speakers and everyone who attended. The quality of the insight from speakers reflected the quality of the people and in the room and their in-depth questions.

Big thank you to our partners — Tackle.io (Presenting Partner), LucidLink, and Incorta — for making this possible.

This was our largest in-person breakfast yet. We'll be back.