Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the company is increasingly monetizing AI based on consumption models, volumes of data and selling agents to line of business executives over IT.

Speaking at Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology conference, Kurian touched on a big theme in software and cloud services: AI monetization. Many technology companies are pondering consumption models for AI agents, say $2 per customer service inquiry resolved. Other tech vendors are pondering value-based models.

As AI has been integrated throughout the Google Cloud portfolio, Kurian said the company has altered its model. Historically, cloud projects were controlled by IT, but AI adoption is driven by business initiatives.

"We monetize it in different ways, and we're focused on three important things: winning new customers, winning more projects within the customer, upselling new products," said Kurian, who added that the company is focused on industries and line of business. "Many of these solutions are not bought in the IT organization. They are bought by the Head of Customer Service, the Head of Commerce, the head of Finance, and so you have to learn to sell outside of the IT organization."

Here are some of the monetization comments from Kurian.

Security. Google Cloud is monetizing volumes of data used to detect and respond to threats. "We're seeing growth because we have helped people speed up how quickly they can use our tools to detect and respond to threats. We've seen a 4x increase in customer adoption, 3 times the volume of data ingested, an 8 times increase in threat hunting. We monetize this based on the volume of data we're processing and the number of threat hunts or queries that are happening on the system," said Kurian.

Democratizing analytics. Data agents have become popular as a way to "migrate data, stage it, aggregate it, visualize it, it even builds you charts and spreadsheets," said Kurian. As a result, BigQuery has 80% more machine learning operations in the last six months with 13x growth in multimodel data due to Gemini models. "Because we've opened up analysis from being the domain of people who know SQL, Python, etc. It also drives a lot more end user subscription growth because we can sell more seats in an organization," said Kurian. "We see growth in our analytical platform BigQuery."

Google Workspace. Kurian said Google Cloud is introducing new applications for customer experience and customer service. "Think of it as you can go on the web, on a mobile app, you can call a call center or be at a retail point of sale, and you can have a digital agent, help you assist you in searching for information, finding answers to questions using either chat or voice calls," said Kurian.

The bet with Google Workspace is that it will stand out because it can handle web, mobile point-of-sale and call center in one system with multimodal data. These call center use cases are monetized based on value, said Kurian. He said:

"We monetize based on the value we save for users, either the costs we're displacing or the reach expansion we're giving their agents. We've seen growth across all the dimensions, the adoption of agents, digital agents, the volume of traffic going to these agents, etc. Examples of customers using our customer experience platform. If you call Verizon, you're talking to our chat system and our call system, 60% containment rate, high rate of call deflection.

If you drive a General Motors vehicle and you hit OnStar, you're talking to our conversational AI system."

Partner led deals. Google Cloud's recent Accenture expansion is an example of how the company is leveraging integrators. "We're not a big consulting shop. We're not a services organization. So, we work with a broad partner ecosystem. Because we don't conflict with the partner ecosystem, we've invested in them. We've invested in technology, commercial incentives, training and certifications, as well as go-to-market incentives," said Kurian.

AI Agents. AI agents will be specialized with different models. "We have people building insurance agents, research analysis agents, customer service agents of their own," said Kurian. "We've also provided packaged agents, a data agent, a cybersecurity agent, a collaboration agent for helping you write things and increasingly, we are specializing in them by industry. So, for example, an insurance agent is different than a nursing agent. All three monetized in different ways."

Other items from Kurian on Google Cloud include:

  • Google Cloud now offers close to 1 gigawatt of water cooling in its data centers.
  • Google Cloud has seen 10x growth from a year ago in AI training workloads.
  • Ford Motor is using Google Cloud's deep learning services to build simulations for virtual wind tunnels to replace computational fluid dynamics.
  • 45% of the Fortune 500 projects with Google Cloud and Accenture have gone live.

Business Research Themes

Data to Decisions, Digital Safety, Privacy, and Cybersecurity, Innovation and Product-led Growth

Roles

Chief Data Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Technology Officer

Tags

@googlecloud, #AI #artificialintelligence #machinelearning #ML #generativeAI