The Most Underrated Announcement at Google Cloud Next '26 Has Nothing to Do With Gemini

This is a submission for the Google Cloud NEXT Writing Challenge Everyone at Google Cloud Next '26 was talking about Gemini. New models, bigger context windows, multimodal everything. And fair enough — the agent platform announcements were genuinely exciting. But if you were deploying LLMs in production and skimmed past item #124 in Google's 260-announcement recap, you missed the one that might actually save your users. Predictive latency boost in GKE Inference Gateway. Up to 70% reduction in ti