In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Philip Larson, managing director of the Google Cloud Partner Network at Google, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik to discuss how Google is rebuilding its partner ecosystem for the agentic AI era. Larson explains that the redesigned Google Cloud Partner Network (GCPN) functions as an umbrella spanning ISVs, services partners, data providers and marketplace partners — all aligned to guide enterprises through what he describes as an unavoidable transformation to the agentic enterprise. He details a $750 million investment covering AI training, sandbox credits and deployment vouchers, and underscores that the GCPN itself is built on Google's own unified AI stack, with agents embedded across every stage from partner onboarding through to delivery and support.
The conversation also explores how Larson's team eliminated the friction that typically undermines partner programs — stripping out unnecessary external audits in favor of metrics that actually drive outcomes: certifications, co-sell activity and closed statements of work. A standout example is the agentic SOW analyzer, which now influences 90% of funded engagements just six months after launch. Larson notes that partners are demanding new features at a pace that has compressed release cycles from annual to monthly, reflecting the energy around what he calls a once-in-a-generation opportunity. With 500 agentic customer use cases announced at the event, he outlines a near-future vision where partner agents communicate directly with GCPN agents to surface real-time go-to-market recommendations — building a competitive moat he believes no other hyperscaler can replicate at scale.
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Philip Larson, Google
In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Philip Larson, managing director of the Google Cloud Partner Network at Google, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik to discuss how Google is rebuilding its partner ecosystem for the agentic AI era. Larson explains that the redesigned Google Cloud Partner Network (GCPN) functions as an umbrella spanning ISVs, services partners, data providers and marketplace partners — all aligned to guide enterprises through what he describes as an unavoidable transformation to the agentic enterprise. He details a $750 million investment covering AI training, sandbox credits and deployment vouchers, and underscores that the GCPN itself is built on Google's own unified AI stack, with agents embedded across every stage from partner onboarding through to delivery and support.
The conversation also explores how Larson's team eliminated the friction that typically undermines partner programs — stripping out unnecessary external audits in favor of metrics that actually drive outcomes: certifications, co-sell activity and closed statements of work. A standout example is the agentic SOW analyzer, which now influences 90% of funded engagements just six months after launch. Larson notes that partners are demanding new features at a pace that has compressed release cycles from annual to monthly, reflecting the energy around what he calls a once-in-a-generation opportunity. With 500 agentic customer use cases announced at the event, he outlines a near-future vision where partner agents communicate directly with GCPN agents to surface real-time go-to-market recommendations — building a competitive moat he believes no other hyperscaler can replicate at scale.
Managing Director, Google Cloud Partner NetworkGoogle
In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Philip Larson, managing director of the Google Cloud Partner Network at Google, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik to discuss how Google is rebuilding its partner ecosystem for the agentic AI era. Larson explains that the redesigned Google Cloud Partner Network (GCPN) functions as an umbrella spanning ISVs, services partners, data providers and marketplace partners — all aligned to guide enterprises through what he describes as an unavoidable transformation to the agentic enterprise. He details...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
How has the newly launched partner network designed to rebuild the ecosystem for the AI era been operating, how is it measuring up, and what indicators show the new model is working?add
What is the Google Cloud Partner Network, and is it an umbrella/superset that encompasses the various partners and ecosystem participants?add
How is AI—specifically an agentic architecture—being used to build and support the Google Cloud partner experience and partner ecosystem (from onboarding and training through delivery and support)?add
>> Welcome back to Google Cloud Next 26. I'm Alison Kosik alongside John Furrier, and we are going to delve into right now the partnership area when it comes to Google with Phil Larson. He's the managing director of Google Cloud Partner Network here at Google. Welcome to theCUBE.
Philip Larson
>> Thank you for having me.
Alison Kosik
>> So let's talk about what you just launched. You launched a new partner network and your vision was to kind of rebuild the ecosystem for the AI era. Talk us through how that's been operating, how's it measuring up. What indicators you see that the new model is working?
Philip Larson
>> Great question. Yeah, all indicators are positive. We were just talking a minute ago. We believe that customers fundamentally are on a journey towards an agentic enterprise. All customers on the planet have to undergo that transformation. None of the customers can do that on their own. They need an ecosystem capable of helping them on that path. And so we have purpose built the Google Cloud Partner Network to help build the capacity, the skills, et cetera, and a growing ecosystem of partners that can take customers along that journey. I think if the goal at the end of the day is to help customers transform their businesses in the agentic era, the Google Cloud Partner Network is the mechanism by which they're going to go do it.
John Furrier
>> Can you explain what the partner network is today? Because you have partners. We interviewed Toptal here earlier. They've got zillion awards. The ecosystem's growing. Is it an intentional approach to kind of look at the different players in the network? Because the agentic is going to be very multi-vendor.
Philip Larson
>> 100%.
John Furrier
>> Heterogeneous. Take us through the structure. What does it look like today?
Philip Larson
>> Yeah. The Google Cloud Partner Network consists of the ISVs that are actually building the technology that works well better together with Google. It consists of the services partners that are actually delivering agentic solutions to end customers all the way up to Accenture, Deloitte, and the GSIs, but also the pure play AIs as well. Data providers that are incorporating through data sharing, the data necessary to infuse context into these agentic solutions and marketplace partners that are selling their technology through. So the Google Cloud Partner Network creates a home for all of it. And all of those various players are necessary in order to ultimately create the agentic experience that customers need.
John Furrier
>> So would you consider it a super set or an umbrella, or everything rolls into one thing?
Philip Larson
>> This is the umbrella. Yeah. This is the umbrella. This is the whole ecosystem. This is the programmatic mechanism by which we go to market with all of them.
John Furrier
>> Got it. Okay.
Philip Larson
>> Across every segment, across every geography and across every product line.
John Furrier
>> So you brought it all together into one place, segment it, fund it. Any kind of cool programs you guys have out there now that people should pay attention to?
Philip Larson
>> We'll be announcing later today, I believe it's out in the press. We're putting a $750 million investment into the agentic ecosystem. And it's full scale supporting partners from training around AI, building their skillsets around AI, sandbox credits to do workshops, assessments and pilots with customers to get them going, demand gen to identify which customers are ready to get going with their agentic journey, all the way through to deployment vouchers, forward deployed engineers, services funding to bring those workloads into production.
Alison Kosik
>> Yeah. What's the ultimate goal with that kind of investment?
Philip Larson
>> Get out in front, make sure our partners have the skills they need, the capability they need, and the capacity to go bring customers along the journey. At the end of the day, we're about customer outcomes. The whole program was designed to accelerate customer outcomes and we're adding 750 billion. The numbers here still shock me. $750 billion to go fuel that innovation.
Alison Kosik
>> It is incredible.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you've got the B and that's not an M. A lot of money there, but if you look at the keynote here, I'll just read some of the things that are going on. The Agentic Task Force, Gemini Enterprise App, Enterprise Agent Platform, Agentic Defense, and Agentic Data Cloud, of course you've got the underlying AI infrastructure. Again, full stack, a lot of products, a lot of capabilities there. So putting that out there as fast as possible is going to be a lot of appetite for that.
Philip Larson
>> Yeah. So I did say billion. I meant million. Sorry about that. I could see people-
John Furrier
>> I saw the sign.
Philip Larson
>> Yeah. 750 new million this year into the progress. So sorry, otherwise I'd get in trouble for our PR.
John Furrier
>> Is that a big data center you're building out there?
Philip Larson
>> Yeah, sorry about that. My CEO is like, "Wait, what did you commit to?"
John Furrier
>> Live-streaming. For the record, we're correcting it.
Philip Larson
>> There you go. No, so you mentioned, so on the AI power in the ecosystem, I mean, if we're going to talk the talk, we got to walk the walk. The reason I would do what I do here at Google is I can go build a partner experience that's built on an agentic architecture and I can create a partner experience that's extraordinarily duplicate for any other vendor on the planet to provide, and so we are. We built the Google Cloud Partner Network on our unified AI stack. It's a first-party solution through and through. Every element of it is agentic in nature. So what that means is, from onboarding to training and enablement, there are agents supporting partners along the way through to delivery and support.
John Furrier
>> And you're using agents for the agents.
Philip Larson
>> We're using AI to build the ecosystem for AI to transform customers in the age of AI. It's wild.
John Furrier
>> So one of the big things on that is that we're hearing from your partners is that they look at friction points and AI takes it out. A key value proof point in a lot of the agentic use cases. Where's the friction that you guys are targeting? I mean, I've seen partner networks come and go. I've seen all kinds of shapes and sizes. The one complaint that always comes in is speed and friction.
Philip Larson
>> Yeah. Yeah. I'm hugely passionate on this. I feel fundamentally that most partner programs fail because they try to track too many things that don't actually matter. At the end of the day, accelerating customer outcomes is the path to the end game. It's a journey that we're all on. So the Google Cloud Partner Network removes all of the friction of unnecessary external audits, unnecessary ornaments on the tree just for the sake of having them, and instead measures partners' ability to go contribute to customer outcomes. We do that in a handful of key ways. Are you building up the certifications necessary to have the capacity to deliver? So do you have what we call the book smarts? And more importantly, do you have the street smarts? Have you driven the co-sell, the workshops, assessments, and pilots that have convinced customers to go along on this journey? And have you closed statements of work after statement of work to deliver the services to bring those workloads into production? Those are the metrics that matter in the new program. The rest of it has shifted away. What the message has been to the partners and the things that's really resonated over the partner advisory board that we held on Monday and the other forums that we did yesterday, by removing all that friction and allowing organizations to just focus on their business and accelerating their business, all they need to do is run their business and tell us where they're adding value. That's it.
Alison Kosik
>> What's been the most surprising feedback that you've gotten, whether it's positive or negative since the new program went live?
Philip Larson
>> That's a great question. So this is, I think, what surprised me most. I've run partner programs at software as a service companies at on-prem infrastructure companies. I ran it at a pure hyperscale cloud computing company in the data cloud for a while, and I've come back to Google. And so in the course of that career, usually, you have to take a very measured approach to changes in the ecosystem. There's only so much that can be consumed so quickly. The surprise for me is the partners are asking for the change as fast as we can deliver it. So what used to be an annual release cycle is turned into quarterly release cycle, is turning into monthly release cycles. And the partners on Monday are now asking me, "It's Wednesday, is the new feature live yet?" So I'd say that's the big difference is the energy level is palpable. The partners realize that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to go create insane amounts of value, and they're asking for all of it faster.
John Furrier
>> Well, high velocity.
Philip Larson
>> High velocity.
John Furrier
>> What's the coolest feature you like that you have that's fast, that was built for speed? Is there any kind of feature that jumps out at you saying that's a success point?
Philip Larson
>> Yeah, a couple come to mind. We launched a statement of work analyzer. So the business of services partners closing SOW after SOW, we fund a large number of those SOWs to make them more cost-effective for our customers so they can do more work faster. This agentic SOW analyzer, you can go point your SOW to it. It'll read through it, make you recommendations for how you can go improve it and make it more likely that we'd go fund it. That thing went from zero utilization before it was ... And then we launched it and now 90% of the SOWs we're funding are using it six months later.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, Phil, that's a great point and use case because one of the things that's come out of our coverage, I'm sure you're seeing it too, is that AI can allow you to do things you can never do before.
Philip Larson
>> Totally.
John Furrier
>> This incentive alignment that you just mentioned, small little nuance, but it's important. You can in real time change the incentive behavior of a deal, performance of the partner rather than postmortem analysis, little things like that.
Philip Larson
>> And the little things add up. And that's why it's so important for Google Cloud Partner Network and others over time to build on an agentic architecture because in the long run, partner systems aren't going to be ... Everything's being done through partner managers in the past. Humans talking to humans, downloading spreadsheets, et cetera, very, very quickly. Agents from our partner are going to talk to agents from the Google Cloud Partner Network across onboarding, training, et cetera, et cetera. And it's going to infuse the content from my system into their internal systems. It's going to make targeted recommendations around what learning their reps should do in real time from within their systems. And all of a sudden, the people are going to be sitting on top with an intelligence layer that's helping them figure out how to add value fast.
John Furrier
>> Well, I'd love to tap into your zeitgeist brain, give theCUBE some signaling of what content we should be writing because I think what comes out of this is a really fast flywheel of data that you can be reused for data, whether it's what video should we be doing, what story should be tracking, what incentive dollars or behaviors. I mean, this is really valuable use of AI.
Philip Larson
>> I think so. And the North Star for us, and I'll bring it ... It always comes back to the customer outcomes. If you think of the GCPN, it's an arrow focused on how do we accelerate customer outcomes more focused. The $750 million investment is adding fuel to the steps necessary in order to get partners the skills and the tools they need to accelerate those customer outcomes faster, and we're seeing it. I think we're announcing something like 500 agentic customer use cases across every industry segment, geography. It's not talk right now, it's reality.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. I mean, I just love the speed of having an engine, partner network, and then having the signaling and intelligence built in from day one to make it better. I mean, we're living in a world now where outcomes that are now gettable.
Philip Larson
>> I think that's right. Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. All right. Well, great to have you on. And any optimization or focus you have right now, launching it, making it go faster? What are you focused on? What are your goals?
Philip Larson
>> You kind of nailed it at the beginning. I mean, we as a human civilization, we figured out water, we figured out electricity, we tamed knowledge with the internet. We're in the process of taming intelligence and turning it on like a tap or a faucet. And I'm just thinking through all of the various ways that I can tap into that intelligence to make it more seamless and frictionless to work together with our ecosystem to drive customer outcome.
Alison Kosik
>> Is there another evolution of the partner network that you're currently kind of focusing on?
Philip Larson
>> 100%.
Alison Kosik
>> And what does that look like, in your wildest dreams?
Philip Larson
>> My wildest-
John Furrier
>> AGI version of the partner network, only autonomous.
Philip Larson
>> I mean, I really do think we're on the path, but we haven't realized the full value yet of that agentic future. I believe we're collecting the right information about our ecosystem at scale across the hundreds of thousands of partners participating. And so we've got this data layer that can add context to the intelligence necessary to go drive a very effective go-to-market, more effective than any other hyperscaler could perform at this kind of scale. But that future of partner agents talking to our agents, getting recommendations to go to market and creating that intelligence layer that the humans are guiding and involved in, we're not fully realized there. And it's going to be really ... Well, once you do, that's a competitive moat that's extraordinarily difficult to duplicate.
Alison Kosik
>> We'll really be living in the movie then. Phil Larson, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE.
Philip Larson
>> Thank you for having me. Really appreciate the time.
John Furrier
>> Thanks. Good conversation.
Alison Kosik
>> And you've been watching theCUBE, the leader in live technology coverage. We're going to be back after this.
Alison Kosik
John Furrier