While the relentless waves of technology rolling out of the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) industry might themselves be highly complex, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says that what businesses expect from all that innovation is not: magical customer experiences, new opportunities, simpler and faster processes, and better business outcomes.
Now entering his sixth year as CEO, Kurian has presided over extraordinary growth at Google Cloud, which he said has grown its revenue 5X in five years and is now the world’s fourth-largest enterprise-software company. And he is quick to cite the key factor behind that growth: “Our success is reflective of the trust that customers are placing with us for providing the foundation for innovation.”
That hard-earned trust has helped spark optimism among Google Cloud’s customers, including “huge interest in all the new things we’re introducing around AI” as business leaders in every industry are joining the generative AI (GenAI) Revolution not just to cut costs but to recreate themselves for the digital future.
“With the cloud and with what we offer for data, what we offer for cyber, and what we offer for AI, there’s a convergence of capability that lets customers go faster than they would by making significant investments on their own to find ways to differentiate and leapfrog and grow their market presence,” Kurian said in a 1:1 interview for this Cloud Wars CEO Outlook 2024 series. (You can watch the full video interview here.)
“And so they’re starting projects at significant scale with us, which is why our revenues and customer growth are so strong. And we are bringing all of these technologies together and simplifying it all for them so they can go faster.”
For the quarter ended Dec. 31, that customer trust and confidence translated into $9.2 billion in revenue for Google Cloud, up 25.7% and representing a big jump over its Q3 growth rate of 22%. And there’s no question that the powerful AI models and solutions that Google Cloud is rapidly creating on its own and with partners played a big part in that acceleration.
“There’s lots of discussion about what AI is and what it isn’t,” Kurian said, “but we always say that if you look at how customers are actually using AI, it’s very simple. They’re doing four things with it:
- “One, they’re transforming the way that they engage with their customers. The work we’ve done at Wendy’s, the work we’ve done at L’Oreal, the work we’ve done at many companies in automotive and telecommunications, at Orange, at Carrefour, is changing the way that retailers, telecommunications companies, quick-serve restaurants, and hospitality organizations serve the customer.”
- “Some companies are using AI to transform their operations and make themselves more efficient. We’re super proud of the work we’ve done at the Home Depot to help them make their employees have a much better experience by being able to answer questions and automate internal operations.”
- “Some are transforming the very nature of the products that they’re building with AI. You’ve seen our recent announcement with Samsung, a smartphone leader, that is now using AI to provide magical experiences for hundreds of millions of consumers around the world.”
- “And some are using it to make their people have, you know, make them much more productive at work, the work we’ve done at DoorDash and Instacart. And, you know, at Victoria’s Secret, that’s about making their people more capable, and more productive.” (You can watch the full video interview here.)
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Google Cloud’s ability to deliver on those four strategic areas of interest among customers did not just come about by accident — instead, it’s the result of relentless effort by Kurian to have the entire company focused obsessively on customers and what they want and need, rather than on isolated lab-based projects that might have little or no relevance in the real world. In my view, before Kurian arrived, Google Cloud was trapped in that lab-centric mindset and was struggling because its research and development (R&D) efforts were overly focused on technology rather than on customers.
But here in early 2024, the reason it’s become one of the fastest-growing companies in the Cloud Wars Top 10 is that the entire organization has fully embraced the priorities Kurian has evangelized since his first day at the company: build not for where the outside world is but rather for where it is headed, stay maniacally focused on the customer, and expand the market for everyone.
“Our growth is a testament to three very simple things and the principles we’ve always focused on,” Kurian said.
“First, create and invent the technology that customers will need, so that you’re helping them in an area they need to go to.
“Second, keep your focus on the customer so that you’re very customer-centric in the way you’re bringing that technology to them.
“And third, make sure that you’re making the pie larger for everybody, which is in the way we work with our partner ecosystem.”
And here’s why he feels those three “simple” things have been and continue to be so vital to Google Cloud’s success, which has taken it to the #2 spot on the Cloud Wars Top 10 behind #1 Microsoft and ahead of #3 Amazon.
A large customer explained to Kurian that it was facing 50,000 threats on a daily basis and was simply overwhelmed. The customer needed to come up with a better way to evaluate, prioritize, and manage those extremely dangerous potential attacks, and Kurian explained to the customer how its Mandiant threat-intelligence unit had been built to precisely help with that.
“So we applied AI to help do a couple of things: one, at the severity of the threat, and second to map it to the customer’s configuration to see which of all these threats are going to most likely affect them by looking at what is the attack path the person may take to come into your environment,” Kurian said.
“That hugely reduces the number of threats that you have to look at, and helps you prioritize. We then helped them use AI to find what changes they need to make, and to remediate.”
While that example is vital in itself, the even more-important insight about the power of AI is one that Kurian mentioned a couple of times during our conversation: “It took something that felt overwhelming, and made it practical.”
Final Thought
In that all-important category of understanding the pain-points of today but building solutions that will endure into tomorrow and beyond, Kurian expanded on that approach of how AI can help customers make the leap from “overwhelming to practical” in how he described the company’s ambitious new Gemini model.
He began by saying, “It’s relatively simple,” which I took as a valuable and certainly comforting first step. (And you can get Kurian’s full overview of Gemini and much, much more by watching the full interview.) Gemini is, he said, “the first model that lets you reason across all of the different modes of information.”
And the significance of that breakthrough, he said, is this: Gemini is, therefore, “a model that behaves and understands information the way people do.”
Which ties elegantly into the overarching strategy embraced by Google Cloud and Kurian in these crazy times.
“You don’t have to hire a million people to build your own AI model, and you don’t have to have thousands of cybersecurity people because our technology can keep you secure. You don’t have to have a million people who know how to do very complex database things,” Kurian said.
“And by simplifying, we’re making it accessible to more people. So more people can do analysis, more people can do customer segmentation, more people can use AI.
“And this is all meant to assist people to do more by making the technology easier.”
(You can watch the full video interview here.)
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