Mike Thiessen, PwC & Rebecca Potts, Google
This conversation recorded live at Google Cloud Next 2026 explores enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence, practical implementations of AI agents and personalization, and considerations for governance and cloud-native infrastructure. The discussion examines how organizations prioritize high-impact use cases and prove value quickly while embedding security and change management from day one. Rebecca Potts of Google is Director, North America Strategic Industries, Partner Sales. Mike Thiessen of PricewaterhouseCoopers is U.S. Chief Clients and Markets Officer. Alison Kosik and John Furrier of theCUBE Research host the session. Potts explains how personalized shopping agents, unified customer profiles and Google’s Agent Platform accelerate proof-of-value, shorten sales cycles and enhance personalization. They highlight the role of forward-deployed engineers and agent tooling in delivering measurable outcomes and faster time to value. Thiessen emphasizes responsible AI, governance and operational guardrails to align speed with trust and compliance. They underscore the importance of embedding security and change management, defining measurable outcomes such as productivity and revenue growth, and using cloud-native infrastructure to scale pilot deployments. Key takeaways include starting with clear business use cases and demonstrating value quickly, pairing rapid implementation with a responsible AI framework and governance, and prioritizing cloud-native architectures and forward-deployed engineering to accelerate enterprise adoption and measurable impact.