By Dylan Murphy, Vice President of Product at Ocient
Fresh off Google Cloud Next 2025, one thing is clear: the future of artificial intelligence isn’t just about flashy demos or breakthrough models. It’s about data. The quality of it. The quantity of it. The ability to move it, analyze it, and trust it.
This might sound obvious, but in a moment where hype often outpaces reality, it’s an important reminder. If your organization is focused on building a resilient, future-proof strategy for AI and analytics, it’s not about chasing every shiny object. It’s about investing in the foundation that will power innovation for the next decade: your data infrastructure.
At Ocient, we believe in separating signal from noise in the same way that our product does every day for customers. After spending time at Google Cloud Next week, I wanted to share a few reflections and hopefully offer some reassurance to those feeling skeptical about the unrelenting pace of change.
Hype is a Sugar Rush. Data Infrastructure is a Meal.
One theme that resonated across the Google Cloud keynotes and sessions is that AI needs more than clever algorithms; it needs a steady diet of high-quality, high-velocity data. Enterprises that succeed with AI aren’t the ones who grab the latest off-the-shelf LLM and hope for the best. They are the ones who can feed AI systems massive volumes of clean, rich, real-time data — reliably, securely, and cost-effectively.
Without that, even the most sophisticated AI models are like sports cars running on empty. They might look impressive on paper, but they won’t get far.
At Ocient, we call it a Compute Adjacent Architecture™. We design systems and solutions that keep compute resources close to where the data lives, eliminating bottlenecks, and maximizing throughput. It’s how you future-proof your analytics. Not by betting on the model of the month, but by building a foundation that can handle the next wave — and the one after that.
The Real Winners Will Be Boring (In a Good Way)
In the short term, it’s tempting to make splashy moves to “get into AI” with pilot projects, prototype deployments, and headline announcements. But as someone who’s been building products for two decades, I can tell you: sustainable success is rarely the flashiest story. It’s the slow, steady, often “boring” work of investing in the fundamentals.
The companies I spoke to at Google Cloud Next who are winning with AI today aren’t necessarily the ones making headlines. They’re the ones quietly modernizing their pipelines, auditing their data governance, tuning their ingestion speeds, optimizing their query engines. They are building the scaffolding that will support whatever breakthroughs come next.
If you’re feeling skeptical about where to place your bets, here’s my advice: look for investments that make your data architecture more scalable, more flexible across stakeholders, and more performant. That’s where your ROI will come from, not from picking the “right” LLM which will be increasingly commoditized in 2025.
Future-Proofing Means Playing the Long Game
To buyers weighing their next moves in data and AI, I’ll close with this: don’t confuse movement with progress.
The tech world is moving fast, yes. But speed without direction leads to wasted cycles and sunk costs. The winners in this new AI-driven era will be the ones who invest thoughtfully: in their data platforms, in their architecture, in their ability to scale efficiently as new needs arise.
At Ocient, we’re here to help organizations do exactly that to design solutions for today’s demands while staying nimble enough for tomorrow’s breakthroughs.
The future of AI is being built right now. Not by chasing trends, but by laying the foundation for insights at unprecedented scale and speed.
If you focus on the data, the rest will follow. Reach out if we can help.