Google Cloud Unveils Sweeping Analytics Enhancements at Next 2025 Conference
Google Cloud made a slew of analytics-related announcements at its Next 2025 conference this week, including a range of enhancements to BigQuery, its flagship database for analytics. BigDATAwire caught up with Yasmeen Ahmad, managing director of data analytics, to get the scoop.
New AI Agents
As we previously reported, Google Cloud is devoting significantly resources to helping its customers build and manage AI agents. That works includes building a new Agent Development Kit (ADK), creating a new Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication protocol that completes Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the creation of an Agent Garden, among (many) other innovations.
The company is also embedding pre-built AI agents into its own software services, including BigQuery. There are new specialized agents for data engineering and data science tasks; new agents for building data pipelines; and new agents for performing data prep tasks, such as data transformation, data enrichment, and anomaly detection.
Google Cloud is infusing its products with AI and AI agents (Anggalih Prasetya/Shutterstock)
New BigQuery Engines
In addition to the new knowledge engine, Google Cloud announced that it’s developing a new AI query engine for BigQuery. The BigQuery AI query engine will enable queries to foundation models like Gemini to occur simultaneously with traditional SQL queries to the data warehouse.
Querying structured and unstructured at the same time will open a host of new analytic and data science use cases, Google Cloud says, including building richer features for models, performing nuanced segmentation, and uncovering hard-to-reach insights.
BigQuery notebook, a data science notebook alternative to Jupyter, has also been enhanced with AI. Google Cloud is introducing “intelligent SQL cells” that understand the context of customers’ data and offer the data scientist suggestions as they write code. It’s also leveraging AI to enable new exploratory analysis and visualization capabilities.
Data Foundation Enhancements
Like the first two areas, the third big area of improvement in the Google Cloud analytics environment – enhancements to the data foundation (the data fabric) and data governance – touches on other areas too.
For instance, just as the AI query engine in BigQuery lets users use Gemini against their data, they can also now manage unstructured data in BigQuery through the new support for multimodal tables (structured and unstructured data).
Google Cloud is rolling out a preview of a new feature called BigQuery governance that will provide a single, unified view for data stewards and professionals to handle discovery, classification, curation, quality, usage, and sharing. It includes automated data cataloging (GA) as well as new experimental feature, automatic metadata generation.
Conclusion
Google Cloud has made significant strides in enhancing its analytics capabilities, including the introduction of AI agents, new BigQuery engines, and data foundation enhancements. These advancements will enable customers to make more informed decisions, streamline their workflows, and unlock new insights from their data.
FAQs
Q: What are the new AI agents in BigQuery?
A: The new AI agents in BigQuery are specialized for data engineering and data science tasks, building data pipelines, and performing data prep tasks, such as data transformation, data enrichment, and anomaly detection.
Q: What is the new AI query engine for BigQuery?
A: The new AI query engine for BigQuery enables queries to foundation models like Gemini to occur simultaneously with traditional SQL queries to the data warehouse.
Q: What are the data foundation enhancements?
A: The data foundation enhancements include new support for multimodal tables (structured and unstructured data), automated data cataloging, and automatic metadata generation.
Q: What is the new BigQuery governance feature?
A: The new BigQuery governance feature provides a single, unified view for data stewards and professionals to handle discovery, classification, curation, quality, usage, and sharing.
Q: What is the future of data governance with Google Cloud?
A: Google Cloud is betting on AI to automate much of the data governance work in its data fabric. The company is showcasing demos of automated semantic generation at scale, cataloging over objective or over unstructured data.
