Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
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This Cloud Wars Minute comes to you from the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco, where I had the chance to speak with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Highlights
00:12 — At a Google Cloud Next Q&A session with CEO Thomas Kurian, I asked whether, in addition to getting short-term productivity gains from generative AI (GenAI), he’s heard from CEOs and boards about using it in the longer term to fundamentally change the entire nature of their business.
00:50 — In his answer, Kurian used the example of a used car site limited by the number of physical assessors it could hire to do things like take photos and make appointments to see cars. With GenAI tools, the company is able to expand into many new states and shrink processes that used to take 10 days down to about 30 seconds.
02:07 —As we move more into this digital world, there’s going to be a lot of people who just aren’t going to sit and wait to see “Well, when is it convenient for one of these limited number of assessors to come out and take these pictures of my car.” GenAI will go beyond short-term productivity gains.
03:00 — It’s not going to be long before the GenAI revolution kicks into a new, higher gear. At a panel discussion, a Google Cloud executive said that in his 30 years in the tech go-to-market space, he’s never seen such an opening up of opportunities. His sales organization is fired up. Instead of having to knock on doors, they’re being asked to come in and present how to use these new capabilities to reimagine what’s possible.
04:21 — Yes, we should eagerly go into these productivity-enhancing initiatives with GenAI, but also be ready to get our heads up and look for these long-term GenAI things now because, certainly, if we don’t, our competitors will.
