(Late last year, I chose Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian as the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2024. For my current CEO Outlook 2025 series, I’ve excerpted a compelling portion of the video interview I did with Thomas in December at Google Cloud headquarters, and you can see that portion of the interview here.The analysis below for this CEO Outlook 2025 is based on that portion of my interview with Thomas where he speaks about customer priorities for the coming year. If you’d like to see Thomas’s full interview from our CEO of the Year coverage, please click here.)
While 2025 holds great promise for new levels of AI-powered business innovation, productivity, and growth, CEOs are simultaneously grappling with unprecedented levels of uncertainty in geopolitics, the global economy, and technology.
And the antidote to those challenges, according to Cloud Wars CEO of the Year Thomas Kurian of Google Cloud, is the powerful pairing of speed and agility.
“When we meet with CEOs, the biggest things they’re worried about are geopolitical uncertainty, technology uncertainty, and then economic uncertainty,” Kurian told me in a recent interview at Google Cloud headquarters.
“Uncertainty means the great CEOs want action, meaning you control the controllable, and you do that by improving speed in your organization.”
To make those aspirations more tangible, Kurian shared examples from some key Google Cloud customers:
- UPS: help improve “the way they look at their trucks and their routing and their infrastructure”;
- Hanes, Macy’s: “Improving search so products can be found much more quickly and easily”;
- AT&T, British Telecom: “Improving customer service so people can find answers to questions much more quickly and easily”;
- Developers: “Helping developers build new products — if you look at how AI is being incorporated, like what we did with Samsung to bring AI to mobile phones”; and
- Snap: “Helping them build basically a ‘coach’ that’s inside the application to help people who are applying AI and creating new business models for these organizations.”
Powerful Synergy Across Cloud and AI
For many customers, the seamless collaborations across Google Cloud’s cloud services and its AI services are helping those businesses move more rapidly into production, Kurian said. And that’s one more way in which customers are requiring that their primary cloud/AI partners help those businesses move at the speed of the world around them.
“AI has an interesting relationship with cloud, in the sense that AI simplifies cloud even further, and cloud simplifies AI,” Kurian said.
“Cloud simplifies AI by giving you either a model or an accelerator as a service, meaning you get to use either GPUs or TPUs as a service — you don’t have to manage all of it, repair all of it, etc.
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“At the same time, there are thousands of people — millions of people — building applications against our models, so you get the model as a service, if you will. So that helps you use AI faster and easier.
“At the same time,” Kurian said, “AI is also simplifying cloud. When you look at what we’re doing with our packaged Gemini for Workspace or Gemini for Google Cloud, it’s about simplifying access to the technology, and we’re seeing great stories. I mean, we’ve had Hiscox, for example, a large insurer, they used AI and our data platform to streamline how they do risk calculations and quoting for complex risks.
“If you look at AI moving outside the realm of the IT organization and going to line of business, we’re super proud of the work we’ve done with Puma and Radisson, helping them improve not just the way they create advertising, but also the way that they increase conversion rates because it’s highly tailored advertising, and that means they’re seeing real returns and that changes in the way that existing things are done.”
These themes of speed and simplicity have been uppermost in Kurian’s mind since he took over as Google Cloud CEO six years ago, and those capabilities are becoming increasingly essential as the evaluation of and decision to buy AI solutions transcends the IT organization.
“So we really see that as AI is simplifying cloud and cloud is simplifying AI, it’s really important that AI is bringing technology outside of the realm of the IT department into other areas such as manufacturing,” Kurian said.
“At Ford, we’ve helped them streamline how they do air-flow simulation by replacing or complementing a traditional wind tunnel by now using AI. That’s in the engineering side of the car, it’s not really in the IT department, and we’re seeing a lot of these changes, and it’s a continuation of the pace with which technology is permeating companies.”
Helping Customers Infuse AI into Products
This is an area of particular emphasis at Google Cloud, and it doesn’t hurt that its parent company has several products with more than 1 billion users and four with more than 2 billion — that’s a pretty good set of experience to build upon. For Google Cloud’s customers, this presents the opportunity to forge more intimate relationships with their customers.
“Think about how you book travel,” Kurian said.
“When you go to a travel site, you typically look at it and say, ‘Can I find a hotel? Can I book a flight? Can I get a car rental?’ But those aren’t the reasons you’re traveling, right? Nobody says, ‘I want to go to New York to stay at this hotel today,’ but that’s all that they can express when they look at a travel site.
“Or if you look at a furniture site and decide you’d like to buy a sofa, how do you know which is the best sofa for my living room? I don’t know — the size is important, and the color and the design, so there are many, many ambiguous questions that you could not ask before.
“But AI is now allowing you to ask those questions, which means you can get better customer service and better top-line conversion.”
Kurian then described the massive disruptions taking place in “the mundane area of call centers,” where he said business leaders are now starting to look at their operations and also their opportunities in different ways because of the potential of AI.
“They ask, ‘Can I digitize all the interactions I’ve never touched?’ We have a retailer handling close to 2 million calls a day — that’s the equal of 10,000 people that they never touched because they just didn’t have the ability to hire thousands of people to handle those calls,” Kurian said.
Ensuring AI Remains Affordable
While the business innovations being spawned by AI are staggering, the costs of generating all those real-time capabilities and insights looked like they were doing to be equally staggering. But Google Cloud and others have attacked that challenge in a variety of ways, and Kurian explains a handful of those approaches in the video interview that accompanies this article.
Final Thought
All of those innovations and all of those efforts to make cloud and AI easier for customers to adopt have enabled Google Cloud to post five straight quarters of accelerating growth rates. And in a couple of weeks when Google Cloud parent Alphabet releases its Q4 and full-year financial results, we’ll see if Kurian’s company was able to maintain the torrid 35% growth rate it posted in Q3 and position itself to approach revenue of $60 billion in 2025.
So it’s clear that Kurian’s focus on helping customers harness the power of speed and agility has been a vital component in making Google Cloud the world’s fastest-growing major cloud provider throughout 2024 and into 2025.
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