Something I anticipate is smarter storage that can do some filtering on push down predicates. There's compute on the storage nodes that is being wasted today. I was kinda expecting BigQuery to do this under the hood, but it seems like they don't, which is a shame. BigQuery isn't faster than, say, trino on gcs, even though Google could do some major optimisations here.
BigQuery Storage Read API claims to support filters and simple projections pushed down to the storage: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/storage. See also this recent paper: https://research.google/pubs/biglake-bigquerys-evolution-tow...
I've also recently proposed a Table Read protocol that should be a "non-vendor-controlled" equivalent of BigQuery Storage APIs: https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/table-transfer-proto...