Despite being an increasingly common presence in homes and businesses across the world, the wider benefits of AI are still being viewed with suspicion by some.
In the enterprise world, the opportunities are perhaps much clearer, and Google Cloud is among the firms looking to show off these benefits to all.
At the recent Google Cloud Summit London, I got to speak to Mauren Costello, Vice President UK, Ireland, and Sub-Saharan Africa, Google Cloud, to find out how the company sees the current state of the market – and what can be done going forward to encourage these opportunities even further.
Leaning into AI
“I think we’re starting to see, across all industries, AI being used in a very ‘everyday’ way for customers,” Costello notes, ahead of speaking at her keynote at the event.
“We’ve seen customers are really leaning into AI…moving from experimentation, and really leaning into using AI as a proactive collaborator.”
A large part of this is AI agents, which offer a lot of promise in streamlining processes and freeing up time and resources for over-stretched human workers.
The company unveiled a host of agentic AI tools and services at its Google Cloud Next 25 event earlier this year, including several upgrades to its Agentspace platform to make agent discovery and adoption easier.
Among the announcements were a new Agent Gallery to find and deploy new agents quickly, as well as a tool to create agents with the new no-code Agent Designer platform, and Agent2Agent, a new interoperability protocol which will allow AI agents to communicate with each other.
“Customers are really leaning into the agentic AI era and figuring out what this means for their business,” Costello notes, “and they’re looking to us to provide them with the tools and the technology around that…(so) we really provide them with the full toolkit around AI.”
Top of the agenda for many at Google Cloud Summit London was a new partnership between the company and the UK Government, which will see up to 100,000 civil servants receive training on using AI effectively.
But the event was also a chance for Google Cloud to show off the wealth of customers it has across the region, and how they are using its tools (and AI) to grow and prosper.
“It’s a strong partnership with the UK government and UK businesses,” Costello notes, “as AI is changing the way that work gets done, we want to make sure that we’re also leaning in to work with both businesses and the government in terms of uplifting the workforce capability.”
“We are investing heavily in helping the UK put in place that digital foundation…it’s making sure people are able to focus on what they really want to be doing at work, or as jobs change, making sure they have the capability to change that…we see it as getting the collaborator into the workforce.”
This is not just talk either – Costello notes Google’s own developers and engineers are using its AI-enabled Code Assist tool internally to help them write code, a boost she says has helped change how these workers are doing their jobs – as she notes, it’s collaboration, not opposition.
Open, trusted, and secure
With AI dominating the news agenda, it can be tricky for businesses to choose which provider to go with – but for Costello, there’s unsurprisingly only one choice.
“Our approach to cloud is fundamentally different – it’s built on a foundation of being open, trusted, and secure,” she notes, “we want to give our customers the freedom to innovate without locking them in to particular vendors – but also being able to protect their data and make sure that they’re doing that with the very best security on the planet.”
“It’s really important to us that customers are able to have freedom through the open cloud, so our commitment to openness is around open source technologies such as Kubernetes – that means businesses can run our cloud, but they can also run on their own data centers and other clouds, because we want our customers to choose us because we’re the best cloud, rather than them feeling that they’re forced into a commercial contractual reason.”
“From a security point of view, we believe that we have the best security on the planet – we protect from a consumer point of view, we have so many people using Gmail, YouTube every day – and this is the security we bring into our enterprise products,” Costello adds, “and we continue to invest – if you look at our current acquisition of Wiz, that will allow us to be able to help our customers, protect their full environment regardless of which cloud they’re using, and bring the intelligence that Mandiant gives us as well.”
“So we’re really looking to help our customers protect their full estate, regardless of whether they’re using us, or other clouds – we recognise customers want to have control of their data, and access to their data – so for us, it’s all around making sure the relationship we continue to have with our customers is about openness, trust, and security.”
So going forward, the message from Google Cloud seems crystal clear – AI is here to stay, and your business can realise much more potential the more you embrace it.