Six Five Media’s Post

Transcript

The 65 is on the road here in Las Vegas at Google Cloud Next 2025. It is hopping here. It is. Things are still going on here. And unsurprisingly, Daniel, we have talked a lot about infrastructure. We've talked a lot about agents, a lot about enterprises deriving the value out of AI. Yeah, it's been a really great conference. I mean, the momentum that Google Cloud. As is pretty incredible, Pat, you think about what just at the time when Thomas Curran took the home, it was about $5. 8 billion of revenue assing $50 billion. And over the last several quarters, you and I analysts analyze this very closely been largely the fastest growing cloud. That's right. So it's catching up. It's definitely stood out and kind of won its position in the marketplace. And one of the things that has stood out to me at this conference has been how much the company's been putting forward their customers. And I think that's one of the things I always ask for. The ground truth is like where the analysts, we think we're the ground truth. The second ground truth is. The customer, absolutely no, they're the grand purifier and AI brings its own unique challenge. I mean, listen, enterprises are dealing with a lot, right? They've got to take care of the current business. There's a ton of technical debt. Some of these companies have been in business and that it for 40 years and to really make the magic happen. The technology is one thing, but customer experience is the other part, which is really OK I love your technology. I made the sale. How do I now? Implement this and derive value for the enterprise and on day 10 is here with Google's head of customer experience Hyatt. Welcome to the 6/5. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yes, very brave. I mean day 10. Jolly, I don't know I don't know started on the 1st and didn't I mean it's getting it's getting later in the day nobody counts April Fools Day so starts on the second ends on the 10th. It's 9 days but either way, welcome aboard. Thank you. I mean you heard us in the preamble. We really do love that Google is so explicit about the customer. You bring the customers to the rooms you put them in front. You have them sharing their experiences and when you share case studies, it's not like some bank or some it is these specific company, the GSI, it is all the parts and. Says I like the challenge part too they actually talk about the challenges that they had which by the way is refreshing for an analyst to get. Ohh yeah I mean this is the again because in the end when you have 3 or 4 cloud companies that have very compelling offerings sometimes it is the experience that really does make the difference of where they end up landing so talk about what drew you to this job what drew Google cloud. Well, you know for me I worked in AI for a while and one of the things I realized is it is a very different. Journey for our customers and we really need to help them understand what are the scenarios what they need to go after so that they can realize value and so I was looking for a company who was interested in this and a company who had the technology and it all came together at Google so I'm very excited to be here today there we go and I read through the release I read through your biography talked to your talk to you a little bit of the green room and you're actually coming in to build a team there's pockets of CX inside of. Google Cloud, otherwise you wouldn't be where you are today. But can you talk a little bit about why this group is being formed and what do you want to accomplish? Well, I think what we're thinking about is. As I think you guys started with that AI is all about deriving value in business outcome, but it is not easy because with AI you can do so many things. And so customers are like, where do I start? How do I go about it? I'm gonna build an MVP. I'm gonna try to go to production. This is actually a very complicated journey if somebody is not helping you along the way. And So what we're doing is we're bringing our different teams on along this journey so that we can actually help our customers get to value faster. So we're bringing. Our solutions and industry teams, these are people who build solutions just for those industry and those challenges you mentioned and the problems. Second is we're bringing our customer engineering folks who are designing those solutions, then we're bringing our partner and consulting team and then bringing our learning team. And so we feel like as we're bringing all those teams together, we can really think about how we stitch together that journey for our customers and help them move very fast through the journey, but also move fast to a success. And that's what we're trying to try to do. O let's drill into that a little bit more. I know. You're just getting started, but one of the great things about getting started right ahead of an event like this is there's so much customer density here, right? Customers across all the industries, large and small, those that are kind of more service more directly versus those that work more closely with Gsis and smaller partners. What are you hearing? What's top of mind for your your customers and maybe specifically as you sort of answer this question? What is on top of your customers minds with AI? Because we know that is the big inflection. Everyone's trying to get to value. So I think you said it by industry, it's business value. What process do I focus on? What do I go after? I mean, they're really trying to get to value quickly and they're trying to understand what to do. They start with because it's not easy. The second thing is I think that I'm hearing is speed is critical. And so one of the things that I stop with mine for them is they don't want us to come and say, let me tell you how I'm going to RIP. To replace everything, they want to know how you're gonna interconnect to their existing environments, that they can focus their dollars on the value and creation of value. The second thing is they don't want to be locked in right as part of the speed to value. They want to know that whatever they put in place, they can start with you. They can bring the other guys. So they're asking us, please make sure that you support 1P and 3P so that we can get the best out of the ecosystem. I think with all this comes though the security and the sovereignty conversation. So security is you think about AI, it's really creating vectors of attack that are new and sophistication they've never faced. So we're getting a lot of questions from them on how do I deploy AI, but how do I mitigate my risk, right. And now in the current environment, sovereignty is Quebec, they all asking, OK, how is that going to work? What configurations do you have? Can you serve me depending on what my government decide? And so for us, it's very important that we get that done. The other thing I would say that is important is it's cost. So it's very easy, what customers are saying, it's very easy to get to an MP, but when it comes down to production and getting this to scale, there is a real anxiety on how do I manage my costs. So they're asking us a lot about fin OPS and what capability we're putting so that they can control the cost and can stop things. And last piece but not least, this change management and skilling, they really want to understand how we're going to help them because you may put great solutions, but if nobody's using it doesn't matter, right? By the way, we could talk about 1/2 an hour about what you just rolled out there, but I won't go for it. But it was really refreshing for you to talk about essentially multicloud and there's companies that we cover that just they don't talk multi cloud. Google was one of the first. The other thing I appreciated was sovereign cloud. Dan and I were in Davos and pretty much the talk of Davos was sovereign cloud, right? I want to have my cloud now. By the way, for some of it, I want an air gapped. I want to disconnect it and. Was very pleased to see what you're doing along those lines with GDC by the way, she's picking it up quick. No, I know I'm listening to actually like 10 days. I'm like, how many meetings did you have? No, exactly. You got it. The the talking points are in place and you seem to have a good understanding. Yeah, so. It takes a village to do something complex right there. There's partners. I've heard in your talks you've talked a lot about partners. How do partners fit into your strategy for CX? What's your vision for this? I'm telling everybody there is no success without partners. OK. So for us, it's all about partners. So the first thing we are doing is clear, by the way, that's good. Then I'm bending my message. We're focusing first on incentives. Exchange all of our incentives and in particular on AI, we've made sure we we put dollars towards proving out the technology, but the business case for our customers because that's what they're asking, that's the anxiety they have. So we shifted a lot of the dollars we had on transaction to making sure we can give dollars early in the cycle as people are developing those ideas. The second thing we're doing is making sure that we deepen our partnership with all the the BCC's of the world, you know veins and why the front end of the process. Exactly because customers want this road map, they want to understand what process do I go after? And we really need to partner deeply with them. We bring the technology, they bring the understanding of the business process and we need to work with them on that. And then the other thing I would say is, look, we want our partners to be our first customers because if they're our first customers, then they can paint the possibilities to our customers. And so you may have seen a lot of announcements with KPMG as an example or Deloitte, they are actually using agent space as an example. Internally and now turning that into hundreds of agents for their customers and they learned first hand what it takes to do that right. The other thing we want to do with partners is make sure they get, they help us get the value fast in our customers hands. And so the first thing we're doing is well is Isvs for us, it's not about let's make sure we ask everybody to come back to what we are creating. We want people to experience AI and the application and know and they love and they use every day. So you may have seen the announcement with Salesforce. Work day Gemini yeah, we're building and bringing II in their experience right If you wanna use agent space you can, but there are scenarios where you want to be in the flow. And so that's what we're acknowledging that's what we're doing the second thing is we've introduced an agent marketplace and this is a program where we're helping actually our partners to understand where is the temp, what is the demand. We help them build them and then we help distribute them so that our customers can find anything anywhere and think through who can help me to go to market and actually. Implement those solutions. So let's going on. And then the last piece, but not least is in the customer experience team. I have consulting. So I'm asking my partner team to make sure that everything new that we do, we learn first. We document all that. And we've just launched I think our delivery solutions for partners and we're giving them our runbooks, our playbooks or architecture, everything so that they can build their practice and not have to spend all that money trying to learn it. We've learned it. We're going to give it to you. Are you buying? She's only been here for 10 days. She got a study guide. I don't know. She got the briefing book. You know what I got? I got no book. No book. Kellam for weeks at a time and helped me. Yeah. So. First of all, I love that you sort of have an approach for the front end, the middle of the process and then the back end because that's really what and you're gonna have to be so tightly coupled to the partner group as well. You know, the go to market, the partner group, the customer experience and of course the technology group. So it's going to be a great journey. But before we let you go, what are you most excited about as you sort of come out of this event? You've spent the time, you've clearly got notebook LM working by the way. Is, is, is she an AI? I don't know. She's doing great. Yeah, yes, yes. What has you fired up about this gig? What are you most excited about over the next like, you know, few months, you really take take this under your belt? I would say two things. First of all, through the week, as I was talking to customers, they kept telling us what we need from you is your tech, but we want you to collaborate with us on Co innovating. So knowing that I'm building that org is just exciting because I feel like, OK, I didn't miss the beat, right? So it's exciting. The second thing is I think yesterday we announced like 600 customers. I hope next year were in the thousands. Yeah, of customers, right. That's my job. And I hope we're going to be able to take all this IP and make it repeatable and extend it to every customer and across industries. And more customers consuming more services, expanding their spend, but getting value because as they expand their spend, they're getting that efficiency, they're getting that productivity gain. And we're finally kind of seeing the consumption match the build out of all this CapEx. I want to thank you so much for spending some time with us here on the 65. Congratulations. Welcome aboard. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I thank you everybody out there for joining us for this episode of the Six Five. We are on the road at Google Cloud Next 2025 in Patrick's second favorite place to be Las Vegas, NV. Hit subscribe. Join us for all the coverage here at Google Cloud Next. And of course, join us for all of the Six Five content. We appreciate you being part of our community. We'll see you all later.