I’ve spent most of the past three weeks in technical training rooms for Google Cloud.

Every Customer Engineer in Google Cloud is taking a full week in-person to go through this curriculum. Think about that for a second. In 2026, pulling more than 10,000 technical field engineers off the road and our of their calendar for five straight days of intensive in-person training is a serious logistical and financial bet.

It’s a genuine demonstration of commitment from our leadership. I’m completely pro-being-serious about this topic.

Skin in the Game

Did I learn a ton of new technical trivia? No. I helped build some of the content. I tested most of the hands-on labs before we rolled them out.

I’ve attended two full sessions because I’ve been embedded as a subject matter expert. My job was helping the presenters, fielding hard edge cases, and adding depth of experience when difficult questions hit the floor. Most of the people on my team are facilitating at least two of these week-long sessions.

That level of skin in the game shouldn’t be underestimated.

We were told to push back on customer meetings. We were told to clear our calendars and focus completely on this training. When I talk to enterprise customers, one of my most common refrains is simple: “If you’re going to be serious about something, then be serious about it.”

This is Google Cloud being serious about building genuine AI expertise in the field. That makes me proud, and it leaves me deeply heartened.

The Sharp Edges of Speed

The training wasn’t a pristine corporate retreat. It was planned and built very quickly.

To be fair, everything around AI is moving quickly right now. That is the nature of the beast. You don’t get the luxury of twelve months of instructional design when the foundational models and orchestration paradigms change every quarter.

Because we moved fast, the training came with sharp edges:

  • Tough travel schedules: Sunday arrivals and sessions running past lunch on Friday.
  • Interactive lab friction: Fleeting environment hiccups, quota bottlenecks, and real-time troubleshooting.
  • Presentation flow: Slide narratives that needed live adjustments as discussions evolved.

In a lesser organization, with less on the line, sharp edges like that can breed cynicism. People roll their eyes, grumble about logistical hiccups, and check out.

That didn’t happen here. OK. Some of it happeend here. But we didn’t take our eyes or minds off the goal.

The People in the Room

The most exciting part of these sessions was the caliber of the people sitting at the tables.

Nobody sat there waiting to be spoon-fed. The engineers in the room stayed locked in on the exercises. They stayed focused on learning the tooling. Most importantly, they evaluated every single topic through one lens: How does this bring meaningful value to our customers?

During one session, an exercise sparked a twenty-minute technical debate about the fundamentals of an agentic session. We dissected context boundaries, state management, tool execution loops, and error recovery. That is the exact kind of deep systems discussion that I love to have. And when field resources are comfortable with those fundamentals, if gives them confidence when talking to their customers and using AI to solve problems.

We weren’t arguing about benchmark scores or speculative marketing slides. We were debating how to prevent hallucinations during a critical database lookup. We were talking about how to reduce friction for a developer sitting at their desk on a Tuesday morning. We kept bringing every architectural decision back to customer value and customer pain.

No Hype, All Value

The tech industry is drowning in AI hype right now. It is easy to get cynical when every marketing deck promises autonomous perfection. I wrote earlier today about focusing on the solution rather than the hype, and watching these engineers put that principle into practice was refreshing.

Real engineering doesn’t happen on marketing decks. It happens in rooms full of focused practitioners who are willing to wrestle with messy tools, ask uncomfortable questions, and master the fundamentals.

Google Cloud put real resources behind that belief this month. Our engineers met the moment with curiosity, discipline, and customer focus.

No hype. All value. It’s some of the best training I’ve ever been part of.