Trip report: Google Cloud Summit Sydney 2026

Today's tech conferences are a dangerous place. Vendor booths—spanning from has-beens to wannabes—attempt to lure attendees with everything from socks to games to LEGO. In exchange, you become a marketing lead and target for their AI pitch and how they stand at the forefront of the AI revolution.

But any seasoned IT professional can smell that BS from a mile away.

It's almost always raining in Sydney when there's a cloud conference

Enter Google Cloud Summit Sydney 2026.

With some notable exceptions—particularly in retail—Google Cloud had a tough fight competing against AWS and Azure to win medium and large enterprises during the last decade. There were many reasons for this (maturity/fit being at the top of this list).

What's changing?

Customer growth.

For many years, and for good reasons, I was a tough critic. However, as we enter the AI era, the battleground is changing.

The enterprise IT market is starting to come to Google.

The proof is in the financial results (approximately 45% YoY growth in 2025).

Why?

Google is known for its strengths in data and analytics but it struggled against the IaaS-centric AWS juggernaut and Microsoft's reach. Today, along with Google's other AI assets, Gemini is transforming GCP into a more cohesive and attractive proposition. It's a modern (open) stack that focuses on information and insight rather than infrastructure for legacy workloads.

One of the most notable takeaways from the event, for me, was the expanding set of enterprise customers up on stage. Alongside retailers such as Bunnings, K-Mart and Woolworths were IAG, Transurban and Macquarie Bank.

"Do your research"

Nobody is perfect...but when you operate at hyperscaler you need to be. In this light, who will forget Bard's awkward missteps or questionable Gemini demos that came at almost exactly the wrong moment for Google?

In soccer parlance^, these were 'own goals' that distracted many from what has always been one of Google's strengths. If you want to understand the depth of AI expertise within Google then I recommend watching The Thinking Game, which introduces the viewer to Demis Hassabis and takes you inside the origins of DeepMind (seemingly available on YouTube and the link to the trailer is here).

^ It is World Cup time, after all

Disclosure: Google is not a client of Virtified...and it wouldn't matter if they were. Our research and insights are self-funded and 100% independent of vendor influence.