Airtel Partners with Google Cloud to Revolutionize AI and Cloud Solutions in India
Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, said that it had entered into a long-term strategic partnership/collaboration with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and generative AI products to Indian businesses.
However, the partnership aims to use Airtel’s large customer base. This includes 2,000 large enterprises and a million emerging businesses, to provide AI solutions, including generative AI, trained using Airtel’s extensive data sets.
Public cloud services in India have evolved beyond just cost savings and flexibility; enterprises are increasingly investing in modernizing applications, developing cloud-native solutions, and exploring artificial intelligence.
Rajiv Ranjan, Associate research director of cloud and AI at IDC India
Additionally, the collaboration also aims to tap into India’s rapidly growing public cloud services market, projected to reach $17.8 billion by 2027, according to IDC, the company said in an exchange filing.
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The partnership between Bharti Airtel and Google Cloud will leverage their respective strengths in connectivity and AI technology to develop industry-leading AI/ML solutions.
Innovative Tools and Technologies from Airtel and Google Cloud Collaboration
As part of the collaboration, Airtel and Google Cloud will collaborate to offer businesses tools like geospatial analytics, location intelligence for spotting trends, predictive capabilities, asset tracking, risk management, site selection, etc.
Also in the offing are voice analytics for conversational applications trained across languages and marketing technologies to forecast consumer behavior, perform audience segmentations, and streamline content creation with contextual ads.
The two companies will bring together their strengths- connectivity and AI technologies to develop artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions that Airtel will train on its large dataset.
Airtel’s IoT Innovations for the Utility Sector
In addition, Airtel has developed an end-to-end Internet of Things(IOT) solution designed for the utility sector that combines connectively. Google Cloud services and application software under a single offering for rapid, seamless, and hassle-free development.
To power its cloud solutions business, the company has set up a managed services center in Pune with more than 300 employees who are being trained to campion Google Cloud services and develop tech solutions.
Amazon and Microsoft are increasingly setting their sights on the telecommunications industry, seeking to capitalize on the vast troves of data generated.
The three firms have already signed deals with telecom operators globally, including the US and the UK. The companies are thus aggressively looking to sell their generative AI offerings around the world.
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Google had invested in Airtel, committing up to $1 billion in 2022. Moreover, Google has also supported Jio platforms, which operates India’s largest carrier. Jio, in turn, manages to maintain a similar long term partnership with Microsoft, offering Office 365 and Azure to local businesses.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian described the partnership as “a significant milestone” towards the Android-maker’s commitment to accelerate cloud and AI adoption in India.
Our strategic collaboration with Airtel marks a significant milestone towards our commitment to accelerate cloud and AI adoption in India. Through this partnership, we aim to explore and build transformative solutions that can enhance Airtel’s customer experiences.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud
While enterprises are ramping up investments in generative AI, chatbots, and conversational AI tools, generative AI tools are specifically used for cost optimization, application development, and workload testing use cases.
In the future, generative is expected to help more in cloud security and cloud infrastructure management as well. All these investments will drive public cloud services growth in India”