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Google I/O 2026 is four days out. If you ship anything that touches a Google model, the keynote is about to change capability assumptions your team never approved against. I have done this dance for six straight years of keynotes, and the pattern is always the same: an engineer pastes a Verge link into Slack on Wednesday, someone says "we should look at this", and three weeks later a capability we never reviewed quietly shipped inside a tool we already authorized.

This year I tried something different. Friday morning I sat down with a coffee and wrote a five-line watchlist for the keynote - vendor signals plus one specific engineering action per signal. The exercise was small enough to feel silly. Then I realized the format reuses for every keynote that follows. AWS re:Invent. Microsoft Build.…