The best idea I heard at Google Cloud Summit in June had nothing to do with events, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
It came out of Antigravity, Google's agentic development platform. The premise is that you hand a complex job to an AI agent and it goes off and plans it, writes it, runs it and checks it. It's very powerful, and almost entirely invisible while it happens.
That creates an obvious problem, because it's hard to trust work you can't see.
Google's answer is the part I love. The agents produce what they call Artifacts, which show the working rather than just the result: task lists, implementation plans, screenshots and browser recordings of what the agent did and why.
The agent shows its homework, and that's the whole trust mechanism. It's a very simple idea.
Show the working
That's a design principle, and a good one.
Google had a product doing something remarkable where nobody could see it. Instead of making a louder claim about it, they produced the evidence and handed it over.
We're in exactly the same business.
Every brand we work with is being asked to prove something that is hard to see. That the AI is safe. That the supply chain is clean. That the platform will hold. That the company is what it says it is on the website. You can't resolve any of that with a claim, because claims are what people have learned to discount.
You resolve it by showing the working, and I don't know a better medium for that than a room.
An event is an Artifact
I think this is what we've been doing all along without a good word for it.
When Google Cloud puts more than 3,000 people into ICC Sydney and gives them Developer Labs to sit down in, that's an Artifact. It's the working, made visible. You can touch the thing, push it, and ask the person who built it a question they weren't expecting, then watch how they answer.
A film asks people to trust you, while a demo they're allowed to break lets them check for themselves. The second is worth far more than the first, and always has been. Antigravity just gave me a better way to explain why.
These also stack up. The keynote shows the ambition, the lab shows the capability, and the person sitting next to you who has already done the migration shows it works outside the marketing department. A well designed event delivers all three in a single afternoon.
What I'm taking into the next brief
Four things, and none of them cost much.
- Design the evidence as well as the moment. Ask early what the room is proving, and what a person could hold up afterwards as proof. If there's no answer, the event is just decoration.
- Let people see the process as well as the result. The making is often more persuasive than the made thing. Show the plan, the version that failed, the bit that was hard.
- Put the builders in the room. Engineers answering engineers is the highest trust exchange available to a technology brand, and it's one of the cheapest things on the run sheet.
- Send people home with the proof. A recording, a result, or something they built in the lab and can show their boss on Monday.
Why I find this exciting
There is a version of the AI story where everything disappears into software and the room stops mattering. I don't believe that for a second, and Antigravity is part of the reason.
Some of the best engineers in the world built the most autonomous software they could, and then immediately turned around and built a way to show people what it was doing. They understood that capability without evidence doesn't get adopted.
Evidence is our whole craft. We've spent nearly twenty years working out how to make people believe something by letting them experience it rather than be told it.
The more of the world that disappears into software, the more valuable that gets. As technology gets harder to see, the job of showing it gets more important, and that's the work we want to be doing.