05/14/2026
"The era of the pilot is over, the era of the agent is here."
Thomas Kurian said it twice from the main stage at Google Cloud Next '26 and the whole conference was scaffolded around it.
Here's what that timeline actually looks like:
2024 was hype. 2025 was prototype. 2026 is revenue.
The companies that get funded in the next eighteen months will be the ones that can show production deployments, not demos.
That's why we built SHAED on Google Cloud and why our AI lives inside real procurement workflows โ Shop, Track, Document โ instead of sitting beside them. Our platform isn't preparing to be production-ready, it already is.
Architect for production from day one, including the complicated parts. Identity. Audit logs. Governance. Evals.
Our CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Pritchard wrote up 20 lessons from his three days at Next '26.
๐ Read Ryan's full article in the comments below.