mic-icon The Data & AI Chief | Episode 141

How Google Is Building Enterprise Trust in Agentic AI

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Current EpisodeEP141: How Google Is Building Enterprise Trust in Agentic AI
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Andi Gutmans

Andi Gutmans

VP and GM for Data Cloud

Google Cloud

Episode Overview:

For most enterprises, autonomous AI agents still feel like a risk waiting to happen. Andi Gutmans, Vice President and General Manager for Data Cloud at Google, joins Cindi Howson to explain what it takes to build the data foundation that trustworthy agentic AI depends on. He breaks down how organizations can finally activate the 90 percent of enterprise data that's unstructured, why tokenmaxxing is the wrong way to measure AI value, and how open standards like Apache Iceberg are helping leaders tear down fragmented, multi-cloud data silos and unify data across clouds.

Key Moments:

    03:55
    Perception vs. Reality in Trusting Autonomous AI
    Waymo is safer than a human driver by the numbers, but most people still choose Uber. Andi explains why closing that trust gap takes time.
    09:40
    Activating the 90% of Unstructured Data
    Most enterprise data sits in images, PDFs, and contracts, never touched by traditional analytics. Andi explains how AI finally makes that dark data usable.
    16:37
    Crawl, Walk, Run: Scaling Autonomous Agents in Production
    Virgin Voyages cut weather disruption rebooking from six hours to eleven minutes with autonomous agents. Andi explains the thresholds that made scaling safe.
    19:54
    Token Efficiency Over Tokenmaxxing
    Andi pushes back on tokenmaxxing as a measure of progress. Real success means the best outcome with the fewest tokens and the cheapest model for the job.
    27:01
    Breaking Down Data Silos with a Borderless, Open Lakehouse
    Most enterprises run on a messy mix of multiple clouds. Andi explains how open standards like Apache Iceberg tear down those walls.

Key Quotes: 

How Google Is Building Enterprise Trust in Agentic AI

“Over ninety percent of enterprise data is actually unstructured data... AI is really good at reasoning around this unstructured data, and so we can make a hundred percent of the data state light up.”

Andi Gutmans
How Google Is Building Enterprise Trust in Agentic AI

“If you take a Waymo, you're actually eighty percent less likely to get into a hurtful accident than if you take a service with a human driver. Still, most people prefer to take the Uber versus the Waymo…  It's going to take time to earn the trust to understand what quality outcomes we can drive.”

Andi Gutmans
How Google Is Building Enterprise Trust in Agentic AI

“The way we're thinking about the data platform is the best context is the context that drives the outcomes you need with the least amount of tokens and processing.”

Andi Gutmans

Mentions: 

Guest Bios: 

Andi Gutmans

Andi Gutmans is the General Manager and Vice President for Data Cloud at Google, which includes operational databases, analytical data platforms, open lakehouse technologies, and Business Intelligence. His core focus involves building, managing, and scaling highly innovative data services to deliver a leading AI-native data platform for businesses.

Before joining Google Cloud, Gutmans was VP Analytics at AWS, where he managed services such as Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, and Amazon EMR. Prior to that, he co-founded and served as CEO of Zend Technologies, a company built around the open-source PHP language, of which he was a co-creator. Andi Gutmans is a highly experienced leader with over 20 years dedicated to open source contributions. He is particularly renowned as a co-creator of the open-source PHP language, which has become one of the most widely used languages for web development. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and served on the Eclipse Foundation’s board of directors. Gutmans holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

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