Google Cloud CEO on the role of partners and working with AI startups

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian discussed the role of partners in helping customers in their AI journey at the AI Asia: Building Beyond Borders conference in Singapore.

Partners continue to play an important role for Google Cloud. Be it in Southeast Asia or anywhere, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian partners are crucial in helping customers in their AI journey.

In media briefing session at the AI Asia: Building Beyond Borders conference in Singapore, Kurian mentioned that Google Cloud sees three different things that partners are doing using AI, especially with Gemini now available on the GDC.

First, there's a set of partners who are building their own agents and they make it available to customers through a catalogue or like a marketplace where customers can discover agents and use it.

Second, there are partners who are building connectivity between those agents and applications.

“For example, if you have an agent that wants to look up inventory and that inventory is in the system, you have to teach the agent how to understand what's the inventory and how to retrieve it and what are the parts and product numbers, all that. There are partners doing a lot of that work so that you can actually adapt it,” Kurian said.

Third, there are also partners who are helping customers think through change management.

“There's a change that has to happen in how the organization embraces AI. We have partners who are specializing in that change process also. For example, what's the way that you skill somebody in a new job or reskill it? There are a whole range of partners doing this,” Kurian added.

Data centers

Given the increasing use of AI in Singapore, Kurian was also asked if Google had enough capacity in its data centers in the country to support the demand, especially from the need of power.

Kurian explained that Google has had a data center in Singapore for a long time now and they were lucky to be one of the early ones in.

“We also have both for cost and power. In most countries, it's not space, but power, that's the limitation on the amount of compute you can run. We've brought a new Tensor Processing Unit System, a TPU, that's extremely power efficient. It's about 2.2 times more power efficient per flop than you get off on the market. All that allows us to roughly double the capacity that you can serve here. Right now, we don't have an issue,” Kurian stated.

Meanwhile, Goh Wei Boon, Chief Executive, GovTech Singapore, who was also present at the media briefing, pointed out that Singapore is still far from reaching the limit in the data center capacity.

“Google can continue to make data more efficient with fewer tokens and so on. That helps a lot, and I think that is not just happening in Google, it's happening across the different tech companies. We don't feel that we are reaching the limit any time soon,” Goh said.

AI startups

Kurian also highlighted that most of the AI startups and unicorns in the world are using Google Cloud. And this is where he believes Google Cloud’s commitment in providing AI startups with the capability to help them grow is critical.

“We have a program to help AI startups use our infrastructure, TPU, GPU, etc. We have a process where if you are an AI startup and you build on a platform and you want to expose your model so that the developer community around the world can access it, we do provide people the ability to do that provided the model obviously needs some quality bars,” Kurian said.

Kurian also mentioned that Google Cloud has built and will be soon announcing an agent marketplace whereby if a startup in a particular domain has built a great agent, they can publish that agent and all of Google Cloud’s customers can find it.

“So there's a lot of different things we're doing with it. If you look at the unicorn companies which are companies that have reached a certain scale in AI, almost all of them are our customers. Part of the reason is we got them very early. So, they grew with us and a lot of work has gone into making it easy for the startup to not just build using our tools but also help them grow with us.”

“It also is super interesting for our customers because if they want to use a tool and let's say they're in healthcare and they want a specific agent of some kind, they don't have to build everything themselves. They can find these agents and use them. And so, you'll see us building more of that,” Kurian concluded.