today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack how tech and mindset together will decide the winners in the 2026 AI economy.

Highlights

00:31 — Google Cloud, has just had a pretty interesting engagement with BNY Mellon. BNY used to be called Bank of New York, merged with Mellon — a massive financial services organization — and they've got what I think is a brilliant AI strategy. It's simply: “AI for everyone, everywhere, everything."

01:24 — BNY has chosen to take Gemini Enterprise and adapt it into BNY’s own sort of home-built AI platform called Eliza. And again, as I noted here, a big part of BNY's mindset on this — their approach to it — is to say: everybody in the organization now has access to the Eliza platform, and now with Gemini Enterprise as well.

02:40 — Now, this is something that Google Cloud CTO Will Grannis and I recently discussed on a podcast episode. Fascinating comments from Will — we’ve got a lot of that covered in a detailed article that will be posted later this morning on this whole BNY–Google Cloud collaboration.

03:19 — Will said, look: you can make two lists. On one side, there's a list of companies that succeeded with AI in spite of their culture. He said the other list is companies that succeeded with AI because of their culture. And he said one of those lists will be empty. Guess which one that'll be?

04:07 — I think that's going to be one of the big issues and stories going into 2026. The companies that are going to win in the AI economy are going to be ones that are able to master that duality of both the technology and the culture/mindset thing. It has been a fun year here in the Cloud Wars, and we've got more coming up tomorrow — a special Christmas episode of Cloud Wars Minute.

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