The AI Advantage: How Google Cloud is Propelling Partners to New Heights

AI is reshaping industries and becoming a must-have tool for businesses looking to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. In an exclusive interview with CRNtv Host Sydney Neely, Colleen Kapase, VP of channels & partner programs at Google Cloud shares how they’re leading the GenAI revolution and helping their partners every step of the way. Q: Can you tell us what sets Google Cloud apart in the AI space, and how that’s especially advantageous for partners? AI is Google's birthright. We’ve been working on this for well over a decade. All the way from the chip to the networking to the large language models, it's what we've been focused on as a company for quite some time. I'm excited to share we have almost 90% of all generative AI unicorns actually on Google Cloud, we’re a great home for large language models. But we really have three opportunities where we could be differentiated as an organization. One is on the innovation side. We of course have our own large language model with Gemini, open source models from a Google perspective with GEMA. In addition, faster time to market. We've got pre-built models and APIs that are really streamlined for AI development, and it really reduces our time to market and increases our agility. And third, but certainly not last, security. You know, security, scalable performance is so important. I think security is something that just wowed me from a platform perspective, and we apply it all the way through, from an AI and a platform perspective here at Google and a true differentiator. Q: How exactly is Google Cloud putting AI to work across its services to enhance the overall user experience? We take using our own technology and sort of dog fooding it if you will, really seriously here at Google. And, one of the very first things that we're doing is we are using AI, for our own partners in what we call partner hub, which is where our partners come and see all of our discounting, all of our rebates and incentives and how they're earning money with Google so they can now use AI to determine what have I earned in this period of time or in this specific product, or what can I do to earn more? In addition, we have Delivery Navigator and that's where we put a lot of our own professional services content in a tool that allows our partners to build their AI services practices using all of the best in class content that we have developed. And there's an AI overview on that that allows them to ask questions, what should I do in a specific use case or in this specific industry, so that they can interact with the content and get to developing AI services faster. Q: Let’s talk about how Google Cloud is helping partners get the most out of AI. What kind of resources does Google Cloud offer to help partners master AI? We're all on a learning journey when it comes from an AI perspective, and our goal is to meet the partners at where they're at in this journey. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, we have content for you from the 100 beginning from a sales level to the 400 technical level. We're also really developing and making available proven use cases and industry specific success stories, because customers want to hear about what have you done in my industry where AI has been an advantage. In addition, we have these amazing technical bootcamps. I love a good bootcamp. There's nothing better than getting your hands on the technology and getting real world experience. and that's what these are set this launch all around the globe. Last but not least, we have our AI services specialization. This is really important because this is our 400 best of the best, really showing technical proficiency and experience with AI. This is going live now, and it really shows our partners who have leaned in. And it's something for all of our partner community to strive to achieve for. Q: How is Google Cloud enhancing its incentives to better support partners in leveraging AI opportunities? We are really ten axing our incentive investment in AI because it's so strategic and so important for us. And we're providing incentives all the way through the life cycle. So whether it's at the beginning when we're doing proof of concepts and how can we make sure we have funding for that for our partners, content to make it simpler and easier and faster to get these proof of concepts out there, if you will. And then, okay, we do all this great work with proof of concepts and we sell the solution. Now we have to implement it. So again it can be costly to implement AI so we make sure we have funds out there for our customers and partners alike. That helps us drive implementation and most importantly, usage, usage and consumption of AI. Our main goal we’re all striving for is happy customers using our technology. So we have rewards out there for partners to make sure we're having consumption of the technology and use of GenAI, because that's why we're all here and that’s what we're all about.