Google Cloud Next 2026 | Michelle Ambrose, Endava & Richard Regan, Endava

Michelle Ambrose, Endava & Richard Regan, Endava

In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Michelle Ambrose, senior vice president of the North American Google Cloud Unit at Endava, joins Richard Regan, chief technology officer of the Google Cloud Unit at Endava, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and co-host Alison Kosik about moving enterprises from isolated AI pilots to AI-native transformation at scale. Ambrose, an early Gemini Enterprise launch partner, describes how Endava is actively deploying what it identifies as the largest Gemini Enterprise project in the UK — a shift she frames as moving well beyond chatbots into fully integrated agentic workflows. Regan points to Google's 8th generation TPU and the new Gemini Enterprise agentic platform as the governance infrastructure enterprises have been waiting for, enabling a transition from casual tinkering to production-ready AI with demonstrable ROI. The conversation also explores the human and organizational dimensions of AI adoption — the mindset shifts, change management demands and governance frameworks required to scale responsibly. Regan notes that 75% of all Google code is now written by agents and argues that the tools available today are already sufficient to generate massive economic benefits; enterprises simply need to commit to using them. Ambrose cautions that organizations still in "wait and see" mode risk being leapfrogged within 12 months, drawing a parallel to the early days of cloud adoption. Both guests emphasize Endava's day two operational methodology — built around observability, identity management and agent governance frameworks — as the key to ensuring agentic deployments don't accumulate technical debt or create unmanageable security exposure. From helping CISOs sleep at night to enabling CEOs to fail fast across business cases they couldn't previously resource, the pair outlines why bold experimentation paired with disciplined governance is the defining competitive advantage of the AI-native era.

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Michelle Ambrose, Endava & Richard Regan, Endava

In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Michelle Ambrose, senior vice president of the North American Google Cloud Unit at Endava, joins Richard Regan, chief technology officer of the Google Cloud Unit at Endava, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and co-host Alison Kosik about moving enterprises from isolated AI pilots to AI-native transformation at scale. Ambrose, an early Gemini Enterprise launch partner, describes how Endava is actively deploying what it identifies as the largest Gemini Enterprise project in the UK — a shift she frames as moving... Read more

Michelle Ambrose

SVP North America, Google Cloud Unit Endava

Richard Regan

CTO, Google Cloud Unit Endava

In this interview from Google Cloud Next 2026, Michelle Ambrose, senior vice president of the North American Google Cloud Unit at Endava, joins Richard Regan, chief technology officer of the Google Cloud Unit at Endava, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and co-host Alison Kosik about moving enterprises from isolated AI pilots to AI-native transformation at scale. Ambrose, an early Gemini Enterprise launch partner, describes how Endava is actively deploying what it identifies as the largest Gemini Enterprise project in the UK — a shift she frames as moving... Read more

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What is Endava and what does the company do? add

What have been the standout moments in your partnership with Google Cloud? add

How do you help clients get hands-on with Gemini Enterprise and overcome the business, integration, and change-management challenges of adopting it? add

How do you help clients navigate shadow-AI risks arising from the rise of autonomous agents? add

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Michelle Ambrose, Endava & Richard Regan, Endava

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Alison Kosik

>> Welcome back to Google Cloud Next 26. We are streaming live right here in Las Vegas. I'm Alison Kosik alongside Rebecca Knight. And we're going to be digging into the Google Cloud ecosystem at this point with the next two guests, and I'm going to go ahead and introduce them. We've got Michelle Ambrose. She's the Senior Vice President of Google Cloud Unit North America. Welcome to theCUBE.

Michelle Ambrose

>> Thank you so much.

Alison Kosik

>> And Richard Regan, CTO of Google Cloud Unit. Welcome to theCUBE as well.

Richard Regan

>> Thank you very much.

Alison Kosik

>> So let's dig in and talk about Endava. First of all, for the viewers who don't know what Endava is, give us a little define or an explanation.

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah, sure. So we're a technology services company, about 11,000 people globally, headquartered in London. We've been around for 20 years. We were there in the early days of Agile Scrum delivery. We do a lot of business in financial services, payments, insurance, and we're located globally around the world. And then as Google Cloud Partner, we've been a Google Cloud Partner for about four years now, premier partner for a couple years. And, yeah, we're really excited about what we can get done with Google Cloud.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, there have been so many announcements at this show. Thomas Kurian, obviously, up on the main stage yesterday, so many new products and services. I'm curious to hear as an elite Google partner, what you're most excited about on the Endava team. Do you want to start here?

Richard Regan

>> Yeah, it was awesome to see the announcements today, and they really focus on some of the things that we've been prioritizing of late as well. To see the new 8th generation TPU I thought was really cool. I saw the 7th come out, Ironwood last year, and that we know produced the Gemini 3 series of models. What this new one's going to produce, we can only imagine. To see the new Gemini Enterprise, agentic platform as well, I think bringing that together to provide that level of governance that I think a lot of organizations are looking for now to get things into production effectively. I think that really ties it together for a corporate story where you move away from the vibe code into the tinkering, I guess, that we see elsewhere to something which is more beneficial to organizations to actually show that return on investment.

Alison Kosik

>> Talk us through some of the standout moments in your partnership.

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that we're really most excited about is our partnership on Gemini Enterprise. We were an early launch partner. We've done plenty of projects around the world in Europe, the US and Australia. And we really loved that evolution of really early on. People were just thinking with the platform, buying a few licenses. We're now really excited. I think in the UK, we have the largest Gemini Enterprise project that's active in the UK business. We're actively deploying that right now. And we're really getting to see the power of when you go beyond just a chatbot and sort of using the LLM to do your chatting to a fully integrated enterprise-ready platform, secure, and that folks are starting to use that in their business. They're deploying different agentic workflows and applying that outright. And it's exciting to see the evolution of the product, but then also what we really focus on is helping our customers not just get the technology on board, but then also think about how they embedded in their business, how they think about governance, how they think about security. I think that's actually a really good point, the security announcements with acquisition finally landing and being official and how security for AI is becoming more of the conversation. The risk and governance, particularly in sort of I mentioned we do financial services and healthcare, those are really important parts for those enterprises. They're not small startups that can just tinker around and do whatever they want. They're real risk regulatory compliance issues. So that's been really exciting to start to see the evolution of the technology kind of meet the needs of the industry and we're seeing a lot of that at the moment.

Richard Regan

>> And I guess building on that, as obviously a premier Google Cloud partner, we're also investing to be a specialist security partner. And with the Wiz acquisition as well, it's been phenomenal because we're working towards premier status on that as well. And to be able to cover off all of those different areas with also we've got to follow-the-sun 24/7 security operations center, which puts us in a really unique position to actually look after our client data and the services that we provide.

Rebecca Knight

>> What you're describing sounds like such a ... It's not just the technology. It's also a real workforce transformation and really requires new mindset shifts and different ways of working and really re-imagining the organizations. How do you work with enterprises on those very exceedingly complicated problems?

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah, it's a great one. You want to-

Richard Regan

>> Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly difficult. This is moving at a pace that go back to the beginning of the year, people were talking about now people are stopping writing code. I know Sundar mentioned a few days ago that 75% of all Google Code is now written by agents. So the way that people are operating has changed massively. I think for those who perhaps aren't on the leading edge, as many of us are, I think you just need to use it, right? We're encouraging our teams how to use it. And I think the more you use it, the more you realize the potential of that, and then you'll see the opportunities build on the back of it. So the technology that we have today, I think it doesn't need to improve anymore. If nothing happened, we could still have massive economic benefits just from what we have, but we know that all the labs are trying to improve it. We know there's going to be new models from all the labs incrementally. Google's constantly right at the top of that pack. And so I think it's extremely exciting what's going to happen, but also we can't hold back, right? When people talk about the singularity, we are spiraling at some pace, so I think you have to really use it, strap in, and yeah, look forward to see what happens.

Michelle Ambrose

>> One thing that's also really interesting is we're seeing a shift from, if you go back 18 months ago, like ChatGPT came out, then we saw the enterprise products start to come out for that. And then a lot of it was tinkering pilots, small, single use cases. What we're seeing in a couple of customers in particular, we were originally talking to them about building out one particular ... Rebuild my portal for this particular use case, and it is now becoming increasingly a CEO-led, CIO-led business transformation conversation. And that's really what we're spending a lot of time with customers of like, it's not just about a technology, it's about a mind shift set. We've got to think about not just like, how can I use AI to do what I do better today, but what else is possible?

Alison Kosik

>> Well, on that point, how should a CEO or a CIO prioritize where to apply AI? Is it about cost-cutting? Is there a bigger play at hand here?

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah. I mean cost-cutting is the natural and was the starting point for everybody. Every CFO and CIO was like, "This is amazing. I can figure out how to save some costs, but also drive more value. I can take the automated process work out of many, many corporate functions, HR, legal, finance, backend operations really went in with a cost-cutting view." I think future minded CEOs and CIOs are not looking to just completely remove capability, but actually get the folks in their organization out of the mundane work. But to go back to your question, how should they be thinking about it? I really think it is a ... And I think we were all talking about it a year ago. I was at Gartner a month ago and they were like, "We're kind of like right the hype cycle. There's been a lot of hype, but we're getting really real now." And I really think that shift of, you have to start thinking about not like where should I use our AI, but like how is AI being deployed in every part of my organization to differentiate and either drive growth or streamline operations, but like it has to be a broader conversation than just point solutions.

Richard Regan

>> I think there's a challenge as well. If you do just do cost out, there's only 100% you can save. And so at some point, your business is going to wither to a very small number. Whereas if you look for additional value or trying to find where you can add things, then you've got infinite potentially to grow. I mean, we saw recently ... I mean, I don't know if product placement, but Allbirds were a sneaker company and now they're like a hyperscaler.

Michelle Ambrose

>> I saw that.

Richard Regan

>> It's fascinating. But I was speaking to a CEO the other day and he had 10 different business cases. He couldn't satisfy with his team, but using the tooling that we've now got, he's actually able to experiment and do them extremely quickly, understand if there's value from it, and he can genuinely fail fast. And if they fail fast, fine. In a few months you understand that. But equally the ones that work, he's ahead of the pack now and he's actually able to get the value from all those other ideas that historically he wasn't able to. So I think this is massively additive and we're seeing more and more people who are actually trying these things out. And interestingly, I tend to see that the people who are more senior in organizations are playing more. I think people who are used to marshaling resources, understanding what they actually want, those are the people who are actually starting to create some phenomenal things. So I think it's almost like learning to be a manager is one of the new skills to actually leverage agentic or AI technology.

Alison Kosik

>> And a new landscape learning to be a manager. Yeah, exactly.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, and Richard, to that point, how do you help leaders think about moving from tinkering to transformation and move away from just this flashy, cool demo to actually this can create measurable business impact?

Richard Regan

>> So building on that, some senior leaders are very nervous. So we spend a lot of our time working in financial services, probably half of our work is in financial services and there's regulations and there's compliance and there's like nervousness. And every now and then, there's a story where someone's done some code config and there's been a lawsuit or something. So I think it's giving people the assurance. And I think tools like grounding things in the tools that Google has is extremely useful, because it means that ... And you need to start small to a certain extent, but also you need to have those big jumps. So for your critical ledge, your core business, and especially with financial services, you don't want to be chancing things, right? But if it's like internal activities, there's probably a little bit more leverage or things which don't have necessarily a dire consequence. But whatever you do, you need to have that senior leadership. You need to have the board there to make sure that they're sponsoring it and then encouraging the people to use it themselves so everyone feels empowered and excited by this change.

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah. I think building on that, one thing we really like to do is get hands on. Particularly with Gemini Enterprise, one of our first offerings has been, "Come to do a workshop with us, come to a hackathon, let us show you, let us get you hands on so that you get over some of those things that Richard was talking about." Some of those are perception versus reality. So we really try to get twice tangible and I think that's also one big thing about Endava, because we have deep industry expertise. So that's the other thing is we really do bring alongside getting hands-on with the technology, really bringing experts in payments, banking, insurance, retail along. So they understand where the customer's coming from. They've walked in their shoes usually or like been in that space, so they understand the specific systems, integrations, challenges on the technology side, but also the business challenges and also the reality of what it takes to change an organization. And I think that you mentioned the change management element increasingly. I think a year ago it was like, "Let's just try it." I feel like in the last three or four months, I've had more change management oriented conversations. And so we're really bringing our capability there to help out as well.

Alison Kosik

>> When you look at AI, do you think it's becoming just more of a tool, or is it actually becoming kind of the operating system of the whole enterprise?

Richard Regan

>> I think it's all encompassing. It's impossible to have a conversation that doesn't touch on AI these days. And I think if you go back to the, I guess, back to Henry Ford, right? What would people ask if they had a horse? They want a faster horse. We changed it and made a car. I think we need to think of agents and AI and reimagine the whole operating system of an organization. So instead of having just making things a little more efficient or slightly different, like humans are naturally limited by many areas that we need to sleep. And our interface, the latency of our brains is about 150 milliseconds. Now, a computer can operate in a nanoscale speed and they can never sleep and you can have thousands of them. So how do we reimagine what organizations and value can generate when you have a different type of employee? And it's great to see the different gateways that we've got now and the identity management we have for agents because that's a real worry, right? If an SI, for example, codes and app with an agent for an organization and that does something to a third-party, who's liable? But when you start to create these structures, then I think, I don't want to go into the legal realm, but it really helps to start to segment these things to understand how they operate because we need to. Because when you've got fleets of agents operating 24/7, we need to understand exactly how that works. So I guess to your question, we need to reimagine whole operating system effectively and it's not just giving a human a tool, but it's allowing humans to operate slightly differently.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, what you're talking about, it sounds very risky. And so I'm interested to hear how you're helping clients navigate this shadow AI risk with this rise of autonomous agents.

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah. I think one thing we really focus on, and it's a blend. It's like, "Hey, you need to think bold. We want you to have a big mindset. We want you to try new things, the high security, high risk compliance environment is a challenge." But I think one thing we do because we come from that space, we understand the requirements and we're going very hand in hand. And one of the things is you're always going to have the early adopters and we're really fortunate to have been with Google and a few of our customers to be really early on a few different projects. And then what we're really doing is taking what we're learning there and we're actually in a really tight loop with the product team, getting feedback of things that we're seeing as we start to roll them out. And then we really are working through how do you build out like day two governance and management security. Rich touched on identity. There's a whole range of different things you need to think through. And so we have a framework and a day two methodology that we help customers step through. Once we've gotten to like, where do you want to go with it, we really want to make sure we're not just, to Richard's point, building it, leaving it with you and letting it go, do it thing in your environment. We want to make sure you have controls, observability, security, all the way through the process and appropriate governance, which I think is also really ... We're seeing that evolve very differently across customers. There's a balance of like way too much governance, everything needs to be checked and nobody has freedom. And then the other of like all flowers are blooming and a little bit of chaos is raining. So we've got a recommendation and a framework around a methodology for governance as well that helps let your CISO sleep at night that while you're taking advantage of the technology, you're protecting the company as well.

Alison Kosik

>> And you talk about the day two, so being the most important part of the AI journey. I'm curious what you think the secret sauce is to scaling.

Richard Regan

>> So I think it's minimizing technical debt. We've talked about this a lot and many organizations, they spend a lot of their IT budget maintaining systems. So I think if you build things with the day two in mind, you've got the observability, you make sure that they're effective. As these models start to evolve, are you tracking that they still accurate and effective? So if it's not measured, it doesn't change. So I think it's making sure that we understand exactly what's going to be there. We're thinking of how the upgrade cycle's going to work such that in day two that you don't have like a load of ... People call it slop, not generated. You want to make sure you've got something that's effective that you can continue to manage and to evolve. So when the next generation models come out, can that just slot in, or you're going to have to change things again? So always thinking instead of just, we've built it, it's done, thinking of that very operational mindset of how it's going to evolve in the future.

Rebecca Knight

>> So as we wrap up here, I'm curious to hear where you think the most successful enterprises will be even just a year from now. I love what you said. If we could just say stop, all AI production stops. We're just going to use what we have now. There's still so much richness to be left with, but where do you think we're going to be 12 years from now and what are the most successful companies going to be able to say about how they're using AI?

Richard Regan

>> In 12 months ...

Alison Kosik

>> 12 months, yeah, you mentioned.

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah, a month or a year? That was the one we hear is the big one.

Rebecca Knight

>> Oh, did I say it?

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Oh my god. Yeah. It's a really long day.

Michelle Ambrose

>> I'm like, "That's the big question."

Alison Kosik

>> Well, that is a real question.

Michelle Ambrose

>> So 12 months. You want to take it?

Richard Regan

>> My crystal ball. I think the most successful customers, the ones who've embraced it, the ones who've been bold. Like I mentioned, the return on investment now, if a transformation project took you 6, 18 months, you might not know what's there. But if you can do effectively the same amount of work into development in like a month or two, then it's the ones who've tried, failed, but found the areas where they can benefit. And I think the ones who are bold will have seen their success. Yeah.

Michelle Ambrose

>> Yeah. I think in 12 months, I mentioned it, I really do feel from the range of customers I speak at, if you haven't started at all now, honestly, you're a little late. Honestly, if you're not getting serious, I was talking to a customer or a prospect a little while ago and they're like, "Oh, we're just going to wait and see what everybody else does first." And I'm like, "That might have been the right play with cloud, right?" If we go back to 10, 15 years over the cloud journey, I really think that the AI space is moving so fast that even if you're not ready to go really big, if you are not starting now in 12 months, I think we're going to see in certain industries, either the couple of folks who were early, and like Rich said, failed fast and figured it out, find leapfrogs, leapfrog evolution in either what they can offer or how the more quickly they can do it. And then I think we're going to still see disruption from things we just don't even know yet. We were talking earlier in a meeting about like Uber, before Uber, everybody was optimizing how quickly your taxi call center could be. And then somebody went, "What if the car just came to you?" And I think that comes back to, I think what we're going to see in 12 months, if people who are working on the mindset and getting into it now are going to start to be ... The differentiation will start to be quite noticeable.

Richard Regan

>> Well, I guess the good news is the tooling is getting a lot better, which means the best time to start is now if you haven't started already.

Alison Kosik

>> Yeah. Yeah. All right. Great conversation. Thanks so much.

Michelle Ambrose

>> Thank you so much for having us.

Alison Kosik

>> And you've been watching theCUBE, the leader in live technology coverage. We'll be right back.