COVER STORY
GOOGLE CLOUD CEO: AI MSPs Are The Future Thomas Kurian is leading the charge to build an ecosystem of AI life-cycle partners, providing them with financial incentives, lead generation and training and ensuring Google Cloud’s products have AI built in.
By Mark Haranas
T homas Kurian sees the need for a next-generation solution provider that is the tip of the spear for Google Cloud’s aggressive generative AI charge, where partners will becomeAI life-cycle MSPs tasked with transforming the business of every customer. “Our vision forAI is very simple,” Google Cloud’s CEO told CRN . “Our view of what AI models do is take every role in a company— marketers, customer services, salespeople, etc.—they now have a digital expert that can collaborate with them. …A partner can build an entire business, a brand-new business, usingAI models to do that.” Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Cloud is “meeting the AI moment,” with partners being the critical ingredient to the $33.6 billion company’s success in the GenAI era, Kurian said. “Every role will transform over the coming years in every organization. It’s an opportunity for partners to think about, ‘How can I use this technology to reimagine that role? And what are the software packages and services I create for it?’” said Kurian. “As AI model capabilities evolve, customers constantly want to iterate what are the new things that the model can help them do, either in the existing department and solution they have, or elsewhere in the company. Leading partners are saying, ‘We’re going to build you a structure where we can just engage with you as a client. We can stay with you for multiple months or longer, delivering more and more capability. And we’ll take care of all the pieces that may be complicated for your company.’ … That’s what we mean by a full AI life-cycle partner. Many of them are now starting to say to clients, ‘You can give us a problem and we’ll solve it.’ We call that a new type of managed services partner.”
GoogleAI partners said they are no longer talking to customers about cloud spending commitments and consumption. Instead, they are explaining how AI can potentially solve business chal- lenges—changing their relationships and total addressable market. “The conversation is going beyond the Google technology and has moved from, ‘How much do you want to consume?’ to ‘Forget about consumption. Let’s look at the problem you’re going to get solved. Consumption will happen automatically,’” said Ifan Khan, president and CEO of Google Premier partner Cloudsufi, which specializes in AI and data analytics. “That is a very powerful change of dialogue that is happening right now,” Khan said. “[Kurian’s] vision wants to move away from that [consumption] discussion, and he wants to say, ‘Look, how much value do you want?’ It’s a very big transition to create [Google Cloud’s] partner model on.” San Jose, Calif.-based Cloudsufi’s revenue is up 50 percent in 2023, while its AI customer pipeline has jumped 1,200 percent. “Out of our massive pipeline growth, I would say at least 6X has come from areas which we never thought customers would explore,” he said. “AI is the new electricity. If we think about when electricity was formulated, it’s a general-purpose technol- ogy, which means it can be used for not one thing but a lot of different applications. That’s exactly what GenAI is.” Kurian: GenAI Is ‘All About Changing The Customer Experience’ Partners cite a wide variety of successful customer GenAI use cases in production today, including helping pharmaceutical com-
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DECEMBER
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