Underscoring the strategic role that partners ecosystems will play in the massive enterprise AI market, Google Cloud has expanded its strategic alliances with leading systems integrators Deloitte, KPMG, and Cognizant to expand and accelerate AI adoption across the business world.
The expanded alliances with three of the world’s leading systems integrators come as AI has truly reached a tipping point in the corporate world as business leaders fully recognize that AI has moved from being a promising though poorly understood technology to an essential capability for the digital economy.
Each of the three announcements are fairly similar, and here are highlights from each:
Deloitte: “Deloitte’s rapidly expanding Generative AI practice will build and scale solutions to help address the growing demand for Google Cloud’s Generative AI capabilities and help solve some profound business challenges with its AI technologies,” the companies said in a press release. “Deloitte is already leveraging Google Cloud’s AI capabilities and large language models (LLMs) to develop industry-leading solutions that help enable businesses to be more effective and efficient. These solutions will address significant challenges facing enterprises today and are designed with ease-of-use in mind so that developers, employees, and IT teams can immediately see value from their AI investments.”
KPMG: In a VentureBeat article, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian is quoted as saying, “Google Cloud is focused on applying generative AI to practical, real-world use cases that will create value across industries. Through our expanded alliance with KPMG, we will accelerate the application of Google Cloud generative AI throughout the world’s largest organizations, helping them deliver innovation and empower employees, create more value from data and more.”
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Cognizant: A press release from Cognizant and Google Cloud includes this comment from Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar: “I’m extremely excited by the recent breakthroughs in generative AI that can help us move toward transforming our clients’ businesses while accelerating their productivity and thereby driving significant impact. By expanding our long-standing alliance with Google Cloud to leverage our existing technology capabilities, upskill our talent, and deliver advanced technologies to our clients, Cognizant will play a critical role in supporting the global shift to responsible AI use.”
All of those comments are consistent with the bullish vision Google Cloud has expressed for its partners ecosystem, particularly since corporate demand for AI technologies, services, and expertise will soon be booming.
In a conversation earlier this year, Google Cloud corporate vice-president Kevin Ichhpurani, who leads its wide-ranging and fast-growing ecosystem business, offered this overview of what Google Cloud expects from its ecosystem as it dives into the AI Revolution.
“We’re working with technology companies that can help our customers put test data together in order to train the models and manage them like ML operations, which is also a very important part of looking at what’s happening with your model drift, and how do you keep things on track. And then we have a vibrant ecosystem of services companies like McKinsey and Quantiphi and Accenture that are helping customers identify what are the critical processes that can be optimized with AI, and how do you prioritize, and how do you do risk mitigation of leveraging these technologies, as well as a lot of the change management that’s required in your organization. And so we’re really excited about this new AI ecosystem and opportunity.”
In that same conversation, Ichhpurani talked about the buying patterns among customers are shifting — and no doubt the AI phenomenon will accelerate those changes. From that same article, here’s how Ichhpurani described Google Cloud’s broad ecosystem position.
“When we talk about the evolution of the ecosystem over the last couple of years, it starts with how are the buying patterns shifting. Two years ago, a lot of customers were largely buying elastic compute infrastructure at a lower cost, and plenty of that still exists,” Ichhpurani said. “But more and more, customers today are buying on a digital transformation agenda: they want to better target their customers with unique offerings, they want to optimize their supply chain, and — particularly in today’s market — they want to understand their cost structure better,” Ichhpurani said. “So they’re either improving a business process or rethinking their business model entirely. You take a customer like Ford, we’re working with the ecosystem to help them do better pricing, better product-lifecycle management, better supply chain, and we’re helping them create more intelligent targeting of their promotions for extended warranties are new trading options. Plus we’re working with our sister entities at Google to create a new vehicle experience together with our partners… So it’s fundamentally about a transformation agenda now, together with the partners, which represents a big opportunity for partners to go beyond the lift-and-shift and migration work of the past and really help with very high-value and high-margin services. But it really brings together business process with industry knowledge, in order to be able to achieve this, it’s a different skill set that’s required.”
