The occasion for these interviews, at least for the last three years, is Kurian’s annual keynote at Google Cloud Next. You can watch the keynote here, and read the blog about Google’s announcements here. I spoke to Kurian a week ago, on April 15, and at that time only had access to the afore-linked blog post.

With regards to the keynote, which I have since watched, I thought it was a powerful opening: Kurian returned to last year’s theme, about a unified architecture, but emphasized that the use cases were no longer theoretical or pilots but running at scale for real users. He also emphasized — in a foreshadowing of a point we discussed below — that Google itself was running on the same infrastructure as Google Cloud. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, meanwhile, talked about Google’s capex investment, and that (1) half of it was going towards Google Cloud, and (2) that Google Cloud was running the same stack as Google itself.

I sense a theme! Pichai also emphasized security, a point that Kurian was also careful to raise in our talk, before discussing the shift to agents. To that end, in this interview — which again, was conducted before the keynote — we discuss agents.

Specifically, I wanted to get Kurian’s take on the quality of Gemini’s harness (unsurprisingly, he thinks it’s great). Google has an integration advantage, but is it paying off in such a large company? I was also curious about how Google thinks about TPUs specifically and the cloud business generally in terms of balancing its internal needs with external customers like Anthropic.

We also talk about the software ecosystem, why Google still believes in partnerships, and why the company was ready to seize the AI moment (hint: it’s because of Kurian). As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player. On to the Interview: An Interview with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian About the Agentic Moment This interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Topics: Agents | Integrating With Google | Cloud Priorities | Cybersecurity | Knowledge Graph | Models and Partners Agents Thomas Kurian, welcome back to Stratechery. I promise I have recording turned on this year — in fact, I have two recordings turned on. TK: Thank you so much, Ben.

Good to see you, thanks for taking the time. Well, I look forward to talking to you. It’s good to talk to you for multiple interviews, much better than talking to you multiple times in one interview, so we’re already doing better this year.

But like last year, we are recording before your Google Next keynote. We’re actually quite a bit ahead, I think we’re several days ahead, but this podcast won’t be released until after the keynote. Therefore, I’m going to ask the exact same question I asked last year.

Specifically, I like watching keynotes, not for the announcements, but for the framing that happens up front. Last year, that framing was infrastructure, [Google CEO] Sundar Pichai actually delivered that at the opening, then you came in and talked about that, and that was the context for everything that you talked about. What is the framing this year?

TK: The framing this year is that as AI models have become more sophisticated, we see customers evolving the use of AI models from being used to answer questions in a chatbot-like fashion, to actually automating tasks on their behalf, and to automate process flows within the organization. By automating process flows, you both get efficiency improvements, productivity improvements, frankly, you can also change the way that you introduce new products and services to market, for example. In order to do that well, the technology, what you need is a world-class agent platform and to underpin the agent platform, you need world-class infrastructure.

You need the way that the agents interact with your company’s data and your business — so you need capabilities to help an agent really understand the company’s business information and context. I think, as you’ve seen in the press, AI and cyber have become very contextual now, there’s a lot of concerns that AI will accelerate the speed of cyber attacks on people’s systems, and so we’re going to be talking about how we’re bringing AI and our cyber technology together to protect, including the integration of Wiz, and then we’re introducing Gemini Enterprise and our agent platform to customers. That’s sort of the theme of what we’re talking about. You mentioned agents last year, everyone was talking about them to a degree, what has really changed from last year to this year that makes this different