On May 20, the region’s cloud-native community gathers again — this time around three parallel tracks dedicated to generative AI, infrastructure, and applied AI use cases.
When Google Cloud Day Bulgaria first landed in Sofia in 2024, it read as a signal: that the country’s cloud-native scene had grown large and serious enough to warrant its own dedicated stop on the regional map. Two editions later, the event has settled into something more familiar — a fixed point on the calendar where Bulgarian engineering teams, regional cloud architects, and Google Cloud’s own leadership compare notes on what the next twelve months will demand of them.
The 2026 edition, scheduled for May 20 at the Sofia Event Center, marks the third consecutive year the event has been held in Bulgaria. The framing this time is unsurprising but telling: generative AI, cloud infrastructure, and application modernization, organized into three parallel tracks of keynotes, deep-dive technical sessions, and customer stories from companies that have moved beyond proofs of concept.
Three tracks, one underlying question
The agenda’s structure suggests a deliberate split between vision and execution. The opening keynote — featuring Google’s Boris Georgiev, Mariya Andonova, Diana Nanova, and Dmitriy Novakovskiy alongside customer voices — sets the strategic frame. Then the day branches into three concurrent streams that together attempt to answer the question every CTO in the room is quietly weighing: how do we actually ship this?
The Vision track leans into the strategic and productivity layer. Sessions cover Gemini Enterprise’s role in what one talk titles “the digital renaissance,” Google Workspace as a platform for human-AI collaboration, and a partner session from Europe Cloud. Notably, Michael Brenzel, Managing Director of Workspace by STACKIT, presents the Schwarz Group’s blueprint for sovereign digital workplaces — a topic that resonates loudly in a year when European data residency has moved from a compliance footnote to a board-level concern. The afternoon turns to growth stories: Dana Baranes-O’Hara on the journey from MVP to unicorn, and InsightsHive co-founder Nikola Kalev on digitizing retail’s last mile with AI.
The Deep Technical track is where the engineers settle in. It opens with Google’s customer engineer Aviv Grebler on agentic triage and investigation in the SOC, moves through SiteGround’s Valentin Chernozemski on disaster recovery strategies, and dedicates a session to landing zones built specifically for AI workloads (Anton Lukin and Cosmin Pascu). Marcos Bechelli’s talk on orchestrating networks at Google scale, Pavel Krejsa on the SRE reliability blueprint, and a tour of the next generation of GKE round out a track that reads like a checklist of the foundational decisions teams will be making this year.
The Applied AI track is the most experimental of the three. Petar Stefanov opens with code execution as an agentic tool, followed by Nikolay Nikolov on scaling physical AI beyond robot demos. INSAIT’s Anton Alexandrov, PhD, will speak on local LLMs and AI sovereignty — a topic that has shifted from academic curiosity to operational requirement in much of Europe. The day closes on agentic SRE with ADK (Arnas Matiukas), proactive analytics through agentic workflows (Jelena Mijuskovic), and Victor Tchervenobrejki on secure agent-to-agent commerce using UCP and AP2 protocols.
Yettel will share an applied AI success story, and several other customer interviews and partner sessions are slotted across the day.
A case in point: Ship.Cars and Europe Cloud
If the talks lay out the architecture, the customer stories show what it costs and what it returns. One example circulating ahead of the event involves Ship.Cars, an automotive logistics platform whose database growth had begun to outpace its existing infrastructure. Working with Europe Cloud — a recurring presence at Google Cloud Day Bulgaria and a Google Cloud Partner of the Year for 2023 — the company restructured its stack around Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Kubernetes, Cloud Storage, networking, and Pub/Sub, with weekly consulting sessions guiding the migration.
The outcome described is the kind that rarely makes headlines but defines whether a company can keep growing: stable infrastructure, more predictable performance, tighter security posture, and the freedom to focus engineering attention on customer experience rather than firefighting capacity. It is also, broadly, the same arc the agenda is built around — companies moving from cloud-as-cost-center to cloud-as-capability.
Beyond the sessions
The schedule deliberately leaves room for the parts of the day that don’t appear in the program. Registration opens at 8:30, with morning networking, a midday break on the terrace, and a closing block from 16:30 to 18:30 dedicated to drinks, snacks, and what the organizers are calling “fun networking” — the kind of unstructured time where partner introductions actually happen and hiring conversations begin.
