In a powerful display of the transformative power of the cloud and AI, Google Cloud is helping the U.K. government in its quest to cut expenses by about $50 billion while also helping prominent customers dramatically reduce the time required to keep pace with 21st-century expectations.
In a whirlwind few days during the Google Cloud Summit in London, the world’s fastest-growing major cloud and AI vendor announced major engagements with:
- the U.K. government to replace “ball and chain technology” and ultimately help cut public-sector costs by 45 billion pounds, or about $50 million;
- the Imperial War Museum to preserve 20,000 hours of oral interviews that was expected to have required 22 years to complete using manual processes; and
- Morrisons Supermarkets to help its 10 million weekly customers find products in seconds.
That’s an impressive array of business outcomes and expectations, and it also underscores the ability of the cloud and AI to improve and accelerate a near-limitless range of old and new processes while simultaneously creating new opportunities for growth and for great customer experiences.
Regarding its sweeping new partnership with the UK government, Google Cloud said the goal is to ensure British citizens “can get the information and support from government services — from healthcare, to bin collections and tax returns — more easily and without undue stress, as well as targeting the £45 billion [about $50 billion] jackpot technology offers the public sector in efficiency savings.”
As I’ve often noted, efficiency and productivity gains are wonderful — but in the emerging AI Economy, cost-savings are not enough: advanced technology must also be used to drive growth and new opportunities.
And that’s where the concept of using technology to “engineer time” — -a term I first heard from former FedEx CIO Rob Carter about 25 years ago — becomes so vital because it provides the link between efficiency and opportunity, between productivity and growth. Deployed properly, this idea allows businesses and other large organizations to deploy more and more of their people and time and investments in the pursuit of growth and dazzling customers.
At the Imperial War Museum, the preservation of those 20,000 hours or oral testimony from 8,000 men and women in the British armed services and related fields can now be completed in about a month rather than what was expected to take more than two decades. From the Google Cloud press release:
This process, which would have manually taken an estimated 22 years, will instead take only a few weeks and will significantly enhance how users can access and search this extensive oral history collection, quickly finding the material they are looking for and moving easily between written transcripts and the original audio recordings.
“This project is a big step forward in our mission to broadening access to our vast collections,” said Nick Hodder, Director, Digital Engagement and Transformation at Imperial War Museums. “Our expert curators have been fully involved in this work, ensuring the technology delivers very high levels of accuracy, including understanding and interpreting accents, historical facts and military terminology. This landmark collaboration between IWM, Capgemini, and Google Cloud is a significant innovation and a first for a UK museum.”
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Helping Morrisons’ Use Speed to Delight Customers
As we all know from our personal as well as our professional lives, patience is becoming a very rare commodity, particularly when people are shopping and making near-instant purchasing decisions. To help ensure Morrisons can capitalize on those opportunities and ensure shoppers are delighted rather than frustrated as they show a great willingness to do business with the supermarket chain, Google Cloud worked with Morrisons to build an in-app Product Finder. From the press release:
Built with Gemini AI models on Google Cloud’s advanced platforms, including BigQuery and Cloud Run functions, this innovative tool helps shoppers quickly locate products within stores, even during busy periods and seasonal rearrangements.
The Product Finder, which saw 50,000 daily uses during the recent Easter period, allows customers to simply type in a product name and instantly receive information on its aisle and precise location within the store. This real-time guidance significantly improves efficiency and customer satisfaction, particularly when temporary store layouts are in effect.
Peter Laflin, Chief Data Officer at Morrisons, highlighted the impact of this new solution: “Having all our data in BigQuery has allowed Morrisons to create new solutions for customers that wouldn’t have been possible before. The Product Finder is a prime example of how we’re leveraging technology to make shopping easier and more efficient for our customers.”
Final Thought
While productivity is good on its own, it becomes great when it is inextricably linked to growth initiatives. As Morrisons CDO Laflin explains, projects initially designed to boost efficiency and productivity have also helped the supermarket chain “to create new solutions for customers that wouldn’t have been possible before.”
Then there’s the museum project whose timeline has been flattened from 22 years — 22 years!! — to one month. As Imperial War Museums director of digital engagement and transformation Nick Hodder said, the project is “a big step forward in our mission to broadening access to our vast collections” and “a first for a UK museum.” Anyone want to bet other UK museums will be lining up to learn all about it?
As I’ve said before, business leaders need to realize that as they map out their plans for creating the futures of their companies, the challenge is not technology — there’s more than enough of that. Rather, it’s harnessing the imagination to see a very different future and then exerting the will to bring that vision to life with the vast abundance of cloud and AI tools that is expanding in significant ways every single day.
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