Next '26 - PwC gets behind Gemini as partnership expands

Google Cloud Next 2026 has kicked off and an early announcement from the company was a $750 million fund to deliver new resources and incentives to partners. Kevin Ichhpurani, President, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud said:

Google Cloud’s partners are already leaders in agentic AI development and deployment, and have become important channels for distributing AI technologies.

Google is continuing with its 100% partner attach strategy driving growth via the global system integrator community. A case in point is with PwC.  The firm's partnership with Google is around four years old. According to Dallas Dolen, PwC’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) Leader for Technology Strategic Alliances:

Google invested in us when we were a tiny practice, helped us with coaching internally as it is hard to get a 175-year-old company to do new things. Now all the top to bottom relationships are there between the two companies and we are accelerating the use of Google tools with our accountants, lawyers and consultants. Around 500 staff are daily users of Google Go-to-Market operations, and a few thousand are using Google Enterprise Security and that number will go up.

PwC’s CISO is at Next and PwC was awarded Google Cloud’s Global Security Partner of the year as PwC announced its new managed security service enabled by Google Security Operations.

PwC and Google also used the event to launch a Gemini Enterprise Center of Excellence (CoE) which is designed to embed engineers directly into client initiatives. Dolen comments:

The big ask from clients is how fast can we deploy and how fast can we get to RoI. When it comes to seeing the benefits, a common pitfall is to focus on savings on people and time, to change the cost-base structure of the business. We need to think about using it for customer acquisition, what to do to raise the top line.

Within PwC we have had to undertake the same journey as a system integrator. AI is different because it is not an engineering only skillset. We need resources that understand the best use cases to work on with customers. To this end we have ring-fenced resources from PwC from specific sectors and verticals such as Finance, Treasury, Tax and Marketing for the Gemini Enterprise Center of Excellence. The PwC strategy is to join forces across different frontier partner CoEs because AI will be a multi-vendor play.

Gemini as orchestration layer should land well with telcos

Amongst the hyperscalers, Google has always lagged behind Amazon and Microsoft in terms of enterprise adoption. Asked if this is changing, Dolen says: 

The Google Cloud business grew from their own requirement for infrastructure for YouTube and Search. Around three or four years ago they started paying strategic attention to this challenge, getting the right actors in the right roles to articulate the proposition. They took the approach that they were fine with being the B-cloud within organizations as the enterprise was not going to be a single cloud environment. The strategy is that once enterprises start using Google’s AI, data and security tools, Google will take more of the enterprise budget. This approach has been fortified by the acquisition of Wiz in March this year.

Perception amongst enterprise buyers is especially important going forward as Google begins to position Gemini as more of an orchestration layer for agents. Dolen comments: 

We are in the middle of the model wars but in truth open models will take precedence and so Google is looking at the orchestration and foundational layer and would like Gemini to succeed here. In the telco space it has a good chance to do this in the edge computing arena because of Android, its smart home devices and Waymo. Model companies will base themselves in one area for enterprise users. The DeepMind teams are doing this now.

Google also has a good sovereignty story because the network was used to service YouTube and Search with points of presence in different countries. They are the leading provider of sovereign cloud, they excel here.

PwC has an AI factory approach in the market building on modern data centres using high performance chips and spanning the broader ecosystem, including energy, all the way through the value chain. For telcos this is critical in updating infrastructure to support AI. Dolen explains:

With telcos capex is important as the total spend on data center build out required is huge. Telcos need to spend around a trillion dollars, but how do they pay for this? This is a global problem that needs to be solved to upgrade infrastructure over the next seven years.

We are working with telcos on this both in terms of their use of AI in the business and how they afford the upgrade in term of capital planning and cash flow planning. This will drive mergers. There is some fringe investment already happening such as the merger between Nvidia and Marvell Technology for edge computing. It is an interesting space – tiny amounts are changing hands at the moment but there is so much more of this to come.

My take

PwC and Google are an interesting pair, a cultural odd couple. However, with the heightened discussions in every country about tech sovereignty and the pressure on telcos to work out how best invest in the network infrastructure to enable AI at the Edge, the opportunity for this partnership to blossom further is looking very good indeed.