Google Cloud COO: Partners key to customer AI implementation

According to Francis deSouza, COO, Google Cloud, partners are vital for customers to help identify the places in the organization where AI implementation will have the highest ROI.

Google Cloud’s presence in Southeast Asia continues to grow significantly, especially with businesses in the region continuing to embark on their cloud journey as well as develop and deploy more AI use cases.

According to Francis deSouza, COO, Google Cloud, the increased footprint the hyperscaler has in the region is a testament to their continued support to the growth they’re witnessing in the region.

Google Cloud currently has four data centers in Singapore. It also data centers in Thailand, and data centers under construction in Indonesia and Malaysia. Looking at customers in the region, 7 of the 10 top banks in Indonesia, as well as 70% of the country’s unicorns are using Google Cloud. In Malaysia, Google Cloud is providing services to 450,000 employees in the public sector while Singapore’s DBS bank is the first bank in SEA to see a strong profit from AI initiatives that are supported by Google Cloud.

Despite some organizations looking to run AI workloads on premise for security and regulatory reasons, deSouza mentioned that there has been an increasing ask for Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure that allows them to do that.

“We're the only hyperscaler that offers flavors of cloud that give you increasing control of the data, as well as the models that you're running. So, we offer flavors where you can use the public cloud, and our models are available, obviously, in the cloud. But we can offer you use of the data, where you are maintaining data sovereignty. This means that you can be guaranteed that the data and the models, both in terms of data at rest as well as processing data, will only keep the data in the boundary that you've defined, all the way to how you can use models in a cloud way where it's disconnected from the public cloud,” explained deSouza in a media briefing at Google Cloud’s APAC headquarters in Singapore.

Another interesting point highlighted by deSouza was the demand for localization from customers in the region. He said that customers want to create models that have regional-specific content.

“We have partnered with AI Singapore to help create a model that is trained with local data and regional data on our open-source offering, Gemma. And so, what that does is it has a lot of the local cultural nuances that are pre-trained into the model and offered into the market. We believe that's going to continue to be a desire from our customers to create localized versions of models that are trained with the nuances of a culture or multiple cultures or language. We're very proud of the partnership we have with AI Singapore here to do that,” said deSouza.

The AI ROI

With businesses in the region still looking at return of investment (ROI) when investing in AI, deSouza said that Google Cloud is hearing that there’s a return in two ways for the customers.

First, it's all about becoming more operationally efficient. Prudential Singapore, which is a Google Cloud customer, have improved their claims processing by using agents. Other customers have also said that they can now do much more efficient marketing, for example, by creating collateral more cheaply, creating collateral across more languages more quickly than they could before. These are the operational improvements by leveraging AI they’re getting.

Second, Google Cloud is witnessing customers have access to new businesses, new revenue streams associated with AI and access to their data. That provides a strong ROI as well for customers.

“The thing we hear from our customers is they definitely want to understand where AI will have the biggest impact for them, that they're hearing lots of possibilities. But again, it's not a one size fits all. And so, in our conversations with customers, we spend a lot of time talking about where AI will have the biggest impact. For some customers, it will be about customer support while for some other customers, it will be about improving the personalization of their marketing outreach at a much lower cost than they could do before. In other customers, including for us, it's about accelerating the writing of code,” said deSouza.

deSouza pointed out that over 30% of the code that runs in production at Google is written by AI. This in turn is a tremendous ROI for them. With customers, it's mostly about helping them identify the use cases that will have the most impact for them.

“In our interactions with our customers, if you pick it right and you use the right tool for the job, there is a very strong ROI associated with AI implementation. And the payback is less than a year for the projects that were studied in the study that we did. And then over a three-year period, the ROI associated with those investments was over 700%. And so again, it's about choosing the right scenario, choosing the best tools for the ROI,” added deSouza.

The role of partners in the region

To ensure the best ROI, partners play an important role for Google Cloud. For deSouza, partners are a critical part of Google Cloud’s ecosystem. He explained that most of the consulting that customers need comes from the partners.

“For every dollar that a customer will spend with Google, they'll spend multiple dollars with the consulting, which is the partner community. There are many parts to what we need from that partner ecosystem. One is to partner with our customers to help identify the places in that organization where an AI implementation will have the highest ROI. That's based on a partner understanding the environment of that company but also having a breadth of experience in implementing AI at other companies to be able to share that,” said deSouza.

deSouza also stated that partners are vital because they help customers design the implementation. This not only includes the change management associated with the infrastructure that they used to have, but also the processes that they used to have, and the skills that they will need to bring in and help manage the change for companies.

“These are the kind of things that are critical to a successful implementation that partners bring into the ecosystem. That need is going to continue to grow as we continue to see AI adoption expand,” concluded deSouza.