In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Sarbjeet Johal, founder and chief executive officer of Stackpane, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss Google's full-stack AI momentum and what enterprises must prioritize as the industry shifts from AI experimentation to agentic execution. Johal ties Google's sharply improved market standing — stock up 111% over the past year — to its vertical integration advantage: by building its own TPUs, the company avoids steep GPU margins paid to third-party suppliers, giving it structurally better AI economics than most cloud peers. He details two new TPU generations announced at the show, one for training with 2.7x price-to-performance gains and one for inference delivering a 5x latency improvement, underscoring Google's push to own the full hardware stack from silicon to Gemini.
Additionally, Johal shares a three-part framework for matching AI to the right system type — systems of record, engagement and innovation — arguing that generative AI fits most naturally where language, not deterministic outcomes, drives value. The discussion unpacks the rising cost reality of production AI, including hidden token expenditures triggered every time a model is swapped and retested at scale. Furrier highlights open table formats like Iceberg and the data lakehouse as the single highest-leverage point for unifying data feeds and letting agents operate at full speed. Both analysts identify agent governance as the defining wave ahead — mirroring how DevSecOps unlocked enterprise cloud adoption — and flag change management, not technology, as the primary barrier slowing organizations down. From mapping the nascent primitives of an agentic AI stack to developing the "triple threat" skillset of build, operate and invest, the conversation charts a clear-eyed path through the execution risks of moving too slowly — or too fast — in the current AI cycle.
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Jim Anderson, Google Cloud & Dan Rosenthal, Anthropic
In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Sarbjeet Johal, founder and chief executive officer of Stackpane, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss Google's full-stack AI momentum and what enterprises must prioritize as the industry shifts from AI experimentation to agentic execution. Johal ties Google's sharply improved market standing — stock up 111% over the past year — to its vertical integration advantage: by building its own TPUs, the company avoids steep GPU margins paid to third-party suppliers, giving it structurally better AI economics than most cloud peers. He details two new TPU generations announced at the show, one for training with 2.7x price-to-performance gains and one for inference delivering a 5x latency improvement, underscoring Google's push to own the full hardware stack from silicon to Gemini.
Additionally, Johal shares a three-part framework for matching AI to the right system type — systems of record, engagement and innovation — arguing that generative AI fits most naturally where language, not deterministic outcomes, drives value. The discussion unpacks the rising cost reality of production AI, including hidden token expenditures triggered every time a model is swapped and retested at scale. Furrier highlights open table formats like Iceberg and the data lakehouse as the single highest-leverage point for unifying data feeds and letting agents operate at full speed. Both analysts identify agent governance as the defining wave ahead — mirroring how DevSecOps unlocked enterprise cloud adoption — and flag change management, not technology, as the primary barrier slowing organizations down. From mapping the nascent primitives of an agentic AI stack to developing the "triple threat" skillset of build, operate and invest, the conversation charts a clear-eyed path through the execution risks of moving too slowly — or too fast — in the current AI cycle.
Jim Anderson, Google Cloud & Dan Rosenthal, Anthropic
In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Jim Anderson, vice president of North partner ecosystem at Google Cloud, joins Dan Rosenthal, head of partners at Anthropic, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier about how their three-year partnership is driving enterprise AI from experimentation to full-scale production. Rosenthal reveals that Anthropic has grown from a $9 billion to more than $30 billion annual run rate in just three months, crediting Google's infrastructure scale as essential to that trajectory. Anderson frames the partnership's core value as d...Read more
Jim Anderson
Vice President, NA Partner Ecosystem & ChannelsGoogle Cloud
Dan Rosenthal
Head of Cloud PartnershipsAnthropic
In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Jim Anderson, vice president of North partner ecosystem at Google Cloud, joins Dan Rosenthal, head of partners at Anthropic, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier about how their three-year partnership is driving enterprise AI from experimentation to full-scale production. Rosenthal reveals that Anthropic has grown from a $9 billion to more than $30 billion annual run rate in just three months, crediting Google's infrastructure scale as essential to that trajectory. Anderson frames the partnership's core value as d...Read more
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What has changed the most for you over the three years of the partnership?add
What is the current state of enterprise adoption of generative AI?add
How are enterprises balancing and implementing performance and trust in their adoption of generative AI, and how do infrastructure and orchestration choices (e.g., frontier models vs systems, TPUs, vendor partnerships) factor into that?add
How will the Google Cloud–Anthropic partnership ensure AI is adopted safely and with trust by enterprises (including when to choose Gemini versus Claude)?add
Jim Anderson, Google Cloud & Dan Rosenthal, Anthropic
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John Furrier
>> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here in Las Vegas for Google Next 2026. We're here for three, four days coverage. We're here at the Partner Summit. There's a lot of action happening to customer stories, but the most important thing happening is the AI revolution is here. How we work and play and do society work is going to be changing big time. We have two heavy hitters here. Jim Anderson, he's the Vice President of North Partner Ecosystem at Google. Good to see you again.
Jim Anderson
>> Good to see you, John.
John Furrier
>> Dan Rosenthal, Head of Partners of Anthropic. Hot company. You guys are powering it with Google. Thanks for joining theCUBE today.
Jim Anderson
>> Well, thanks for coming in next again.
John Furrier
>> This is day zero, which is when the Partner Summit kicks off and the show kicks off tomorrow. We'll have live coverage, but the top story coming into the show is how much the world has changed. And the partnership with Anthropic is insignificant. You guys have been on a tear just in capabilities, performance, business performance, but the technology side has just been amazing. How is this partnership working out with you guys and what's coming out of the oven, as they say?
Jim Anderson
>> Well, I'll just start by first, thank you, Dan, for the partnership. I remember when Dan and the group came and met me, a couple people in 2023. But we're really proud of our partnership with Anthropic and how we've been able to scale it over the past couple of years to really bring value to our customers and drive, like you say, making a difference and making AI a reality with our customers.
John Furrier
>> Dan, talk about the three years now into the partnership. And it seems like a lifetime just three years ago.
Jim Anderson
>> Right.
John Furrier
>> What's changed the most for you?
Daniel Rosenthal
>> I think two things have really jumped out as what's changing fast is one, the product market fit. Literally every enterprise in the world is using this technology and wants to go deeper in it. And so, we've just seen that accelerate over the past few years and you and I were talking about it specifically around coding. Every company in the world is thinking, "How do I adopt this? How do I write software more quickly, more efficiently, better quality?" And the second is scale. We see that. We've gone from a nine billion run rate to north of 30 billion here in three months since the start of the year. We can't do that without a partner like Google.
John Furrier
>> Jim, when we talked in the past on theCUBE, we always use the expression, the rising tide floats all boats. The tide's coming in fast. If you go back and just look over the past year, just the performance from the infrastructure all the way up to the Anthropic and the AI native applications that are coming on, been significant change.
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> How has that changed the ecosystem and what does that mean for the customers?
Jim Anderson
>> Well, I think there's a couple of things. Our strategy is to provide a full AI financial stack and really to try to de-risk a customer's journey for AI. And we do that with obviously working with partners, third-party partners and first-party partners to give customers the agility to make sure they can pick the right technology for the right time and the right environment that they're working with. But in general, what we see is customers really are trying to maximize their time, the value associated with AI technologies. And by driving close partnerships working with customers, we're able to do that and actually de-risk this AI journey. And that's really what it's about right now, getting that time to value, de-risking the journey, and working closely with partners to make that happen.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, it's been a great relationship. Congratulations. Let's get to the action.
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> A lot of people are shifting the enterprise last year. I won't say blew up in terms of adoption, but certainly, everyone sees it. There's been a lot of Agentic work, certainly Gen AI. Yeah, use cases like RAG and search, discovery was the pit capable. Now, agents are here. What is the enterprise focus now? Because you're starting to see now where the code's getting better, the functionality's getting better with the AI. You got the agent wave here. This is a big part of it where the models play a big role, but also the infrastructure. What's the state of the enterprise with Gen AI?
Daniel Rosenthal
>> Yeah, I can take that one. I think we think about how enterprises adopt this technology in three pillars. So, the first is your employees, just getting more productive using it. That's a seat-based model. The second is your internal processes, how you actually run your business. And the third is those external products that you're reinventing with AI. So, we try to come in with a plan and a strategy to do all three things. And so, what's really starting to fire is customers are using it across all three dimensions at once and trying to figure out how to realize that value. And I think we said it before, something like coding led to agents and more experimentation there. So, I think of a great mutual customer of ours that's using Google Cloud, that's using Anthropic, which is Shopify. And they built an amazing agent that just helps, it's called Sidekick, and it just helps any store owner, any business owner get the full potential and have their agent work for them to maximize their presence in e-commerce.
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah. And I would just build on that. I think one of the key differences, customers are truly seeing ROI associated with some of this technology. We talk about a Replit that's leveraging Claude and a Google infrastructure to do micro apps to drive productivity in their business. You talk about Palo Alto, which once again is leveraging technology and Gemini enterprise and where they're seeing a 20% to 30% increase in velocity and then leveraging technology like Gemini Enterprise for their Copilot activity. So, I think I talk about AI has become a reality with regards to a lot of customers and they were building on that to try to do more.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting the whole narrative a couple years ago with the frontier models, but okay, the frontier model is going to be, the be-all, end-all for Gen AI. But when you look at the performance, it's a systems game. We hear things like orchestration is a big word. We're going to hear a lot here at Google Next. Gemini is going to be big handling a lot of orchestras. You can hear a lot of things about new TPUs, new NVIDIA relationships, all kinds of action happening under the hood. So, there's still action going on at the infrastructure. So, that's just evolving very, very fast. But the two things that are jumping out in the enterprise is performance and trust. And this is where, if you think about it on an axis, this is like how people evaluate teams, in general, like whether you're on the Navy SEALs or you have whatever team, performance and trust. Trust is a huge factor this year. Any thoughts on how that's playing out, how you guys see that implementing out because this is going to be the hot top?
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. First, we talk about proven paths to business outcomes. And that helps build trust. We can go to a customer, talk about a proven path with regards to it, talk about not how I just use it externally, but how I've used it internally and my operational lessons associated with that, that builds trust that you can help them more on a digital journey. I tell people that AI, in general, is a journey and not a transaction. And you want to trust who you're going on that journey with. And we're seeing that through proven pathways and those types of things.
John Furrier
>> Dan, Claude's been great support for people. I've heard stories. I've had my own story. Everyone has their own personal story, how their life's changed. Trust is huge when you have that assistance and augmentation to human intelligence.
Daniel Rosenthal
>> Yeah. It's a huge responsibility. We take it seriously. It is the core of our mission, which is to make sure that the adoption of this technology and this transition for society, as a whole, goes well. And so, I think that's one of the things that we try to do in the partnership is say, we are a partnership you can trust. And we do that also by leading with choice. So, there are going to be some use cases that it's better with Gemini, others better with Claude. But this is a place, our partnership, Google Cloud plus Anthropic is where an enterprise can build for the long term with confidence and trust us to do the right thing in terms of how we build safety into our models, into the depth and sophistication of the infrastructure that underlies them.
John Furrier
>> When we look back on this time, we're probably going to look at the bets that were made. That's a really good bet and it looks like it's paying out. How does that change how you do partnerships? And Jim, how does that change the ecosystem equation?
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah, I think if you really look at the ecosystem equation, it's moved from simply a transaction to one that's focused in on creating a digital workforce, so you might say, built on a constant and continuous integration, adoption, and optimization life cycle with the customers. So, we now working with partners to de-risk that journey, as I talked about a little bit earlier, but make sure that they keep up with that journey and those types of things. So, we have a much more dynamic environment we're dealing with.
John Furrier
>> How's your partnership strategy and execution changed, Dan?
Daniel Rosenthal
>> I think it just execute wherever we can as fast as we can. This is where having a partner of Google's scale is so valuable because we're growing so quickly. Our customers have these needs, they want the product, they want to build with it. And yeah, scale is really the name of the game.
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah. We talk about speed to execution, right? Customers want to see their ROI sooner or not later with regards to it. And once again, close partnerships make that happen.
John Furrier
>> One of the things that's come up this year, the constant theme is speed, acceleration.
Jim Anderson
>> Yep.
John Furrier
>> Every 30 days, something new is happening. How do people keep up and how do you guys keep up on the innovation side? Because this is a challenge. It's almost like it's every 30, 60 days, new model, new approach. Now, Agentic is coming on super fast. Last year, we didn't see that growth in adoption.
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> What's the strategy? What's the tactic? Any best practices on how to keep up with the case way in AI?
Jim Anderson
>> Well, it's hard, right? I joke sometimes with people that if you're not careful, you can go from being an expert to idiot in just four weeks type of thing with this technology. But what we're doing from a Google standpoint is we're really working hard to make sure people have the skillsets to take advantage of this technology. We're offering certifications for employees, workforce development skills, Gemini enterprise, agent readiness type of programs, which are free that people can take advantage of. And we're investing ourselves more on the forward deployed engineers that we can work with our partners to really integrate this technology into the environment and sharing, once again, best practices with regards to their journey. So, it's a continuous process of sharing information and learning along the way as we do it. And that's the best way we see so far.
John Furrier
>> Dan, you guys are running hard. You're leading the charge. You're setting the pace. What are you seeing in terms of how people can level up and stay leveled up? What's the-
Daniel Rosenthal
>> Well, we were talking about, I love that you just started using Claude as an assistant. And so, when you're interacting with the technology daily, you feel what's changing. And you can always just ask Claude or ask Gemini, "How can I be using this better?" And you can have a great dialogue just to even understand what are the new features? What are the capabilities? How can I use my data better? So, for us, it's just about living in that technology and pushing it. And I think that's what everybody in every company in the world needs to be thinking about is just start working with it. Just start asking questions, engage.
John Furrier
>> I miss a lot of meetings because I'm coding. I'm like, "Oops, 10 minutes late." Building apps is fun now.
Jim Anderson
>> Well, that's going to help me as a-
John Furrier
>> In 30 years now, I'm like back in the saddle again.
Jim Anderson
>> Exactly.
John Furrier
>> I don't have to write a line of code. I just tell it what to do.
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah, I know. It's incredible. It might help my grades at Princeton if I want to have it as a computer science major, but it's great to see that.
John Furrier
>> Well, this is what's interesting is that you have a lot of impact. This reminds me of the early PC revolution where every business, every person is impacted by this. It's not just you buy software and you bend around it, you're in it and you're going to have direct impact. Has that changed how you guys organize your teams, your mission? It changes the playbook. It's a little bit wider aperture in terms of the go to-market for Google, but also from an application standpoint.
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Everything's customized in a way.
Jim Anderson
>> Yeah. I think you have to customize experience. You got to start with the outcome and focus on how you lead customers to that outcome and like I said, de-risk that journey. Clearly, ourselves, there's things like industry expertise. I think the most exciting thing, I like to say AI is about an ecosystem where you're combining our innovation, working with first party and third party products, right? And you're combining that with organizational readiness capabilities, change management capabilities from our partners, really to ensure the chance of success with our customers. So, this whole ecosystem is coming down and our goal is to make that as frictionless as possible for our customers.
John Furrier
>> Well, you guys do a lot of great work. I remember when I was in business school, there was a book called From Good to Great. AI makes good to great and great to super great, and you're seeing that play out. People are more productive. How can people learn about agents? What are you guys doing? Can you share some of the things that Google and Anthropic are doing to help businesses and people get their hands on the technology, apply it to their business? Are there new programs? Are there things you have? Can you share and put a plugin or just amplify what's out there that people can lean into?
Daniel Rosenthal
>> Yeah. So, we just had our first Partner Summit, which is a big moment for us. And we had literally tens of thousands of partners in the ecosystem apply to be part of our partner program within a week of doing that. We've launched a certification program where people can get skilled. We've got partner tiers that we're building. So, for anyone in the ecosystem that wants to get involved in this partnership, which I think is going to be enduring and incredibly strong in the enterprise, I'd encourage them to sign up, start learning, lean in with us, and figure out how to bring that to your customers.
John Furrier
>> That's a great go-to market, too.
Daniel Rosenthal
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Plus it's good margin for the partners because they can be more productive.
Daniel Rosenthal
>> Oh, absolutely. And again, customers are just asking for this. They want help in changing the way they work.
John Furrier
>> Jim, what about you? You have a lot of complexity in Google, not complexity, I should say, a lot of moving parts. You got big systems, you got software, you got Gemini's doing great. What's on your agenda? What can you share?
Jim Anderson
>> Well, I think once again, if we stay focused on what the key goal is, and that is really shortening the time, the value associated with this technology and how do we best do that. And we do that through education, skillsets. We have programs out, certifications across the board and really working on enablement a lot with our partners right now. A big focus on enablement. And that's why we're making investments like FDEs embedded with our partners to help customers integrate this technology into their environment and develop the proof points they need for success moving forward type of thing.
John Furrier
>> Awesome. Final question for both of you. I'd love you to weigh in on this because you're leading the industry on the frontier model also on the enablement. The role of management's changing. We're seeing the C-suite leaning into this. There's been statements like, "We won't even have a job. Agents will be running our job." Two, the changing role of curation, orchestration, these things apply to the C-suite. We're seeing three major areas in the market, developers, deep tech and C-suite. All the roles in those areas are changing. Developers certainly get in the superpower with the coding. Deep tech is now coming democratized and available. And the role of the leaders running companies is changing. Any thoughts on how people should think about not just re-skilling, but resetting their mindset, tactics on how to be a better leader?
Jim Anderson
>> Well, it's a great question. I think, first, our goal has always been to democratize innovation and make sure that people can take advantage of and those types of things. Along that, you talked about three different dimensions. Key to AI is breaking down those silos, right? So, now, those groups need to work together in a cross-functional way to drive the business outcomes that they're going to... Leadership today is much more about agility than any one specific talent and those types of things. And if you have the agility and you're bringing groups together and collaborating in ways maybe you haven't done before, we think that can prepare you for the future. I tell a lot of people, I think you can't look at AI as a feature. You have to really look at it as a primary business engine for you moving forward and try to take advantage of that.
John Furrier
>> And a little mind shift. Dan, your thoughts on this is it's going to be a hot talk for at least next year or so.
Daniel Rosenthal
>> No, I think I would encourage all leaders to just be more ambitious. What you can get done now has just fundamentally changed. And so, start from the first principle of what would be truly transformational for our business? Where do we have moats in differentiation and how can we use this technology to accelerate it?
John Furrier
>> Thanks so much for taking the time. Appreciate coming out of your busy schedule, making time for theCUBE. Appreciate it.
Jim Anderson
>> Thank you for inviting me.
John Furrier
>> All right. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE here at Google Next 2026. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier
Daniel Rosenthal