‘We predicted last year that Gemini was going to drive Workspace services, and we saw that come to fruition for sure,’ says Pythian CEO Brooks Borcherding.
Top Google Cloud partner Pythian saw its Google Workspace revenue soar 175 percent last year with the company’s CEO more bullish than ever about Gemini in 2026.
“We predicted last year that Gemini was going to drive Workspace services, and we saw that come to fruition for sure,” Pythian CEO Brooks Borcherding told CRN.
“We saw 175 percent growth in our Workspace services year over year, and that’s all driven by change management around Gemini adoption and acceleration of Gemini deployment from a Workspace perspective,” said Borcherding.
[Related: Google Cloud’s New Partner Network Is Here: 12 Huge AI, Features And Changes To Know]
Pythian is a data, analytics and AI specialist and is one of Google Cloud’s top partners in North America, winning the 2025 Google Cloud Database Partner of the Year Award for North America.
‘AI-First’ Mentality In 2026
Borcherding is an innovative leader and longtime IT executive with decades of experience working at companies including Atos, Avaya and Cisco.
He is also the former CEO of cloud services company Cloudreach, IT services company NaviSite and network management company LiveAction.
“The headline this year is bringing an AI-first mentality to our business. That might sound obvious, but that is holistically across the business,” said Borcherding.
“We’re embracing Gemini internally for all our employees,” he said. “We’re really pushing them to adopt Gemini, to look at how they can build their own agents, look at how they can change the way that they do their work and drive their work more efficiently.”
In an interview with CRN, Borcherding explains Pythian’s AI strategy in 2026, Google Workspace with Gemini momentum and Google Cloud’s new flagship partner program, the Google Cloud Partner Network, which went live Jan. 15.
As one of Google Cloud’s top Workspace partners, how much are Workspace sales increasing for you?
We predicted last year that Gemini was going to drive Workspace services, and we saw that come to fruition for sure.
We saw 175 percent growth in our Workspace services year over year, and that’s all driven by change management around Gemini adoption and acceleration of Gemini deployment from a Workspace perspective.
Now with Google Enterprise and the overarching brand, Workspace Gemini is linking down to Enterprise Gemini. It’s giving us a nice, holistic story to engage with our customers.
We’re also embracing Gemini, in our case, internally for all our employees.
AI is going to drive data hygiene. It’s dependent on data hygiene. So as we drive more demand for AI, it’s creating more demand for our pull-through services for our traditional core, which has always been data engineering and data analytics.
So how is Pythian using Google Gemini internally to drive growth or efficiency gains?
The headline this year is bringing an AI-first mentality to our business. That might sound obvious, but that is holistically across the business.
We’re embracing Gemini internally for all our employees.
For example, we’re really pushing them to adopt Gemini, to look at how they can build their own agents, look at how they can change the way that they do their work and drive their work more efficiently.
And we’re really looking at our own internal hygiene to AI-enable that to be just a better company, a more efficient company, a more productive company.
We’re focusing on helping companies adopt AI to improve their own IT operations internally.
Then we have our AIOps for ourselves. So how are we truly leaning in to embrace AI for our managed services?
So how do we improve the ticket responses? How do we automate common responses? And how do we use it to continue to look at improving our customers’ infrastructure?
All that type of internal hygiene, AI is now quite capable of doing. So we’re really embracing it very comprehensively.
What do you think about the new AI capabilities inside Google Cloud’s new parter program, the Google Cloud Partner Network?
It’s always been very much a manual effort to try to make sure you’re getting credit for everything that you’re doing for Google in the past.
So I have to have a team that’s doing that, and Google has a team on their end. And we’re always working together to make sure that we get credit for the investments we’re making, the credentials we have, and our customers.
So this new AI will hopefully do all of that, which is going to be a massive step forward.
The insight that they’re providing to us is great.
It’s going to be incredibly valuable for us. It’s going to be a true differentiator for Google and the whole partner ecosystem.
Having AI is going to be a much more advanced way to truly measure partner success.
With Alphabet recently surpassing a $4 trillion market cap, do you think Pythian picked the right cloud provider in Google Cloud to go all in with versus the other cloud providers?
Google was the obvious partner for us because of our data centricity, and the only partner that had the full AI stack completely.
You really can’t compete when you’re looking at it from a services partner perspective.
So Google gives us the best toolkit to leverage to deliver these services to our customers.
We’ve had great success with Google this year. Our influence, our direct revenue, our field engagement—all the key metrics for us have been up significantly year over year from 2024 to 2025 and we’re expecting the same from 2025 to 2026.
We’re expecting a great year. From where things stand right now, I couldn’t be more bullish about the kind of position that we have in the market with everything that’s going on.
I couldn’t be happier with our choice to go with Google.
