If AI is the new Gold Rush, then supporting tech vendors are the merchants who get rich selling shovels to the prospectors. None is more foundational than Google Cloud, who have just expanded their Data Cloud with new data engineering agents, tools to integrate with external agents, and improvements to their data platforms. Most notably, they’ve announced a new Spanner columnar database engine for high-speed real-time queries, addressing one of the biggest weaknesses in cloud-stored data.

CDP Zeta Global has unveiled Athena, a “superintelligent” voice-activated interface that delivers instant answers, smarter decisions, and agentic actions throughout the Zeta platform. It activates a suite of agentic apps that can adapt to each user’s specific goals and styles. Early access will begin later this year, with a suite of agentic apps to follow in the first half of next year.