Last month I had the opportunity to attend Google Cloud Next ’25, and I’m still riding the wave of inspiration after three days immersed in the future of Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
One highlight was joining a thought-provoking panel on best practices for data migrations—but equally exciting was diving into a wave of new product innovations, especially the incredible momentum around BigQuery. Google unveiled a powerful lineup of BigQuery enhancements that push the product forward—not just as a data warehouse, but as a platform transforming how brands activate their data and tap into the power of Google Cloud.
Rather than listing every update, this post focuses on five standout BigQuery announcements that unlock fresh opportunities for marketing teams to build new and customized data-driven capabilities for their organizations, especially when integrated with Google Marketing Platform (GMP).
As a GCP Premier Partner and GMP Certified Sales Partner, our data and technology consulting teams can help brands put these new features into action by building bespoke solutions that are tailored to their unique business goals, marketing challenges, and technical infrastructure.
Let’s dive into what’s new—and more importantly, why it matters.
The Future of BigQuery: What’s New
Google’s updates to BigQuery focus on three key areas: accelerating AI-powered insights, simplifying data pipelines, and enhancing productivity.
Collectively, these updates unlock opportunities for marketing organizations to build unique data-driven capabilities —specifically around deeper insights, intelligent automation, and real-time decision-making.
While it’s tough to pick a favorite, here are five standout announcements that highlight the new possibilities for marketers.
1. Gemini in BigQuery (Preview): AI-Powered Data Prep
Gemini is coming to BigQuery, bringing powerful AI assistance to a wide range of tasks including data prep, SQL code generation, translation, and metadata curation.
How could this translate to new capability for a marketing organization? Imagine this: A consumer electronics company has recently launched a new product. They want to understand how their audiences are reacting across millions of multilingual social posts so they can analyze consumer sentiment, uncover insights for creative messaging, and capture ideas for future product features and enhancements. With Gemini, BigQuery can now help automatically translate, analyze sentiment, and identify key themes across these posts. This can all happen without switching tools, unlocking a faster and more efficient way to analyze sentiment.
These insights can then be quickly pushed from BigQuery straight into GMP tools like Display & Video 360 (DV360) or Search Ads 360 (SA360). This enables immediate activation—whether it’s customizing ad creative based on positive sentiment or fine-tuning bidding strategies for audiences showing strong interest in new features. It’s a powerful way to close the loop from insight to action.
Note: This feature is in Preview. Preview offerings are publicly announced, but are not necessarily feature-complete.
2. BigQuery Multimodal Tables (Preview): Structured Meets Unstructured
BigQuery now supports multimodal tables, enabling teams to store and analyze structured (e.g., customer data) and unstructured (e.g., images, audio, video) data in a single table.
This creates loads of possibilities for marketers and technical teams alike, but one potential opportunity invovles new capabilities for analyzing video performance.
This update means that marketing organizations can use BigQuery to blend structured and unstructured data, so they can combine impressions and engagement metrics with visual elements extracted from video frames—like facial expressions or product placements—enabling smarter creative decisions. These insights can be used not only to create more impactful creative, but can also be activated in GMP to inform optimizations and maximize performance.
Note: This feature is in Preview. Preview offerings are publicly announced but are not necessarily feature-complete.
3. AI Query Engine (Pre-announce): Built-In Language Models for SQL
The new AI Query Engine enables SQL-based access to language models, making tasks like semantic search, sentiment analysis, and text classification easier than ever—and all without leaving BigQuery.
Think of a publisher that needs to auto-categorize news articles. With the AI Query Engine, they can embed a language model in a SQL query to analyze content themes and automate tagging. This translates to powerful content management, built directly into your workflow.
Note: This feature is pre-announced and entering Private Preview soon.
4. BigQuery Continuous Queries: Real-Time Analytics at Scale
This update introduces real-time, serverless analytics over streaming data using SQL—at BigQuery’s scale.
Now, marketing teams can track key metrics like website visits, campaign clicks, or social buzz as they happen. With continuous queries, you can respond in real time, optimize campaigns on the fly, and stay ahead of fast-changing trends.
Imagine an online fashion retailer launching a highly anticipated 24-hour flash sale. With BigQuery Continuous Queries, their marketing team can create capability to monitor sales velocity for specific items, track website traffic spikes from different campaign sources (easily identifiable through GMP's campaign tracking feature), and even get real-time alerts on cart abandonment rates, all as they happen. If a particular promotional channel isn't driving conversions as expected, or if a popular item is about to sell out, they can instantly adjust their ad spend directly within GMP, update website banners to highlight alternative products, or trigger personalized recovery emails to shoppers who abandoned their carts. This means maximizing every minute of the sale, optimizing ROI on the fly, and ensuring a smoother customer experience during peak demand.
5. BigQuery ML Expansion: Support for Claude, Llama, Mistral & More
BigQuery ML now supports leading open-source and proprietary models like Anthropic’s Claude, Llama, and Mistral—hosted on Vertex AI.
This opens new capabilities for marketing organizations by creating the capability to do things like churn prediction, audience segmentation, and content personalization—right inside BigQuery. Want to auto-generate ad copy with Claude or build a more accurate prediction model using Llama? Now you can—without needing advanced ML expertise or external tools.
Conclusion: Turn BigQuery Innovation into Marketing Impact
The BigQuery updates showcased at Google Cloud Next ’25 aren’t just technical milestones—they’re strategic tools that empower marketing teams to work smarter, move faster, and unlock new capabilities for their businesses, especially when integrated with Google Marketing Platform.
As a GCP Premier Partner and GMP Certified Sales Partner, we’re excited to help brands turn these new features into tailored, data-driven solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes. Whether you’re looking to streamline your analytics workflows, personalize customer experiences, or enable real-time decision-making at scale, BigQuery offers new opportunities to make it happen.
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