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The new enterprise stack and Google's AI play: Phil Fersht with Richard Seroter
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In the latest episode of From the Horse’s Mouth, Phil Fersht is joined by Richard Seroter, Chief Evangelist at Google Cloud. They discuss the latest developments with enterprise AI and why its impact feels different to every technology wave before it.
The conversation looks deeper than flashy press releases and hype to explore how AI is reshaping behaviours, decision-making and enterprise risk. It covers everything from the shift in how people search and interact with technology to the growing tension between speed, trust, and scale.
Phil and Richard delve into whether advantage comes from moving first with AI, what separates experimentation from transformation, and why AI adoption will be defined by outcomes.
What you’ll hear in 30 minutes
- Why Google’s move into the enterprise collided with the AI explosion
- How ChatGPT changed consumer expectations, and what it revealed about how humans want to interact
- First movers versus fast followers, and why second mover advantage matters more
- Why Services-as-Software is growing, and what it signals about the industry’s future
Guest Snapshot
Richard Seroter is the Chief Evangelist at Google Cloud, where he works across enterprises, developers, and leaders to drive outcomes with emerging technologies. Richard previously held roles at firms like VMWare, Microsoft, and Accenture.
Explore More
- Phil Fersht on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pfersht/
- HFS Research Website: https://www.hfsresearch.com/
- Richard Seroter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seroter/
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of From the Horse's Mouth podcast. I'm Phil Fosch, your host. And today joining me is a gentleman called Richard Sirota, who's a chief evangelist at Google Cloud. Welcome, Richard. Great to have you. Yeah, Phil, thank you for finally inviting me on or putting up with my request to join you someday for a chat like this. This is great.
00:00:22
Speaker
Terrific. Yeah, I know, terrific. And now we've got you on to...
Google Cloud's AI Emergence
00:00:26
Speaker
We're kicking off 2026. What's going on at Google? You guys have really come to the fore last year. You've sort of been the sort of dark horse in the world of sort of AI platforms and really challenging at the peak of the market. So what's going to happen in 2026 for Google that we should get excited about? That's a big question.
00:00:45
Speaker
I mean, last year and the like years before, i think we finally... captured some of the AI mindshare that we've been building up toward. The work that's been happening at Google for decades has been expansive, but then all of a sudden, i think we really turned it on last year in an interesting way, not just to be the most interesting AI choice for individual builders, but somehow I think we became a safe enterprise choice for this, which is great, not only because the models and the the standout models and the breadth of multimodality. I mean, how many of us were having fun with Nano Banana and things, but then also doing deep research or doing things with fine tuning with open
Enterprise Solutions with AI
00:01:21
Speaker
models with Gemma. So you're seeing a maturity of models
00:01:24
Speaker
But then some of the differentiators is, look, TPUs had a moment last year, whereas all of a sudden went from like, that's a cute thing that Google does to like, my goodness, this is a very disruptive thing in the infrastructure space, is very powerful for a lot of companies who are looking for different choices. And so you were seeing these stacks layer a Gemini Enterprise, you what was agent space, but Gemini Enterprise, like, wow, how do we...
00:01:44
Speaker
take enterprise knowledge and make this stuff more useful too. It's not just about the models, it's about the shapes of things around them that makes them useful. And how do we think about developer tools? You saw us get into Gemini CLI and developer tools and anti-gravity and tools like that. So I think what you're going to see from us this year is, think for most of us, I don't know if all of us in this technology space are going to ship a million new things as much as connect the existing million things better.
00:02:13
Speaker
So, I mean, last couple years, right? There's a a different spec every day. There's a different framework or tool or product or whatever. and that was awesome. It's also overwhelming. I don't know if we need a billion more or if now we get through, how do we use all this stuff correctly, get the outcomes that people want to actually get from them?
00:02:31
Speaker
Can we settle for a second so that we can actually, you know, figure out good practices and maybe make some bets or things like that. So I'm expecting this will be a year of outcomes and integrations as well as the usual run of innovation, but kind of excited for the other
Shift to Enterprise Focus
00:02:47
Speaker
stuff.
00:02:47
Speaker
So Google in particular, I've known, I'm a bookshift fan. I ran HFS and Google for a long time before it became fashionable. The conversation was Google was always sort of trying to get into the enterprise space, out of the consumer space, and it always felt like an uphill battle.
00:03:05
Speaker
But with the onset of LLMs, the proliferation of OpenAI and all that stuff, it feels like the market's actually come to you guys now versus the other way around. We took dominance in search and the natural evolution. Everyone's already using it.
00:03:20
Speaker
So it's easy to convert existing customers versus trying to get new customers, right? Yeah, I mean, honestly, personally, I'd rather be chased than chasing everyone else. So I'd like it when customers are coming to us, can we please chat versus me knocking on the door going, can you give us five minutes? So that has changed. I think folks are realizing it's not wise to have an AI strategy without least talking to us. Because even if you're not using our tech, what are we thinking about? Hey, Google DeepMind is what a premier...
00:03:48
Speaker
organization for for AI research at work, Google research. And so, frankly, the number one talk I've been doing for customers over the last six months has been, how is a how is Google incorporated AI in their workflows? What can we learn from you and your practices? It's not just the tools, but what are you learning with your tens of thousands of engineers? What's working? What's not? What what kind of patterns are you figuring out? And so I think folks are realizing it's not even just about the what you do, it's about how you do it.
00:04:15
Speaker
And that we're somewhat unique in that space. As you mentioned, look, some of our competitors have had good footprints in enterprise for years. And so cloud was an upsell. AI was an upsell. Google's a bit more of a disruptor. Yes, they were using search or they were using ads or using tons of parts of Google.
00:04:31
Speaker
But in the enterprise data center and the enterprise team wasn't a ton of Google stuff there 10 years ago. And so we had to come in as a net new disruptor in some cases going, look, this is just better than what you've been doing and better than it's worth the migration cost.
00:04:45
Speaker
And don't know if that resonated as much into the last three, four years as folks realize that there's real separation on the AI front that's worth the cost of doing a migration project.
AI Influence on Search
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'm ready on that. And so what's really changed?
00:04:58
Speaker
In the last couple of years, cause you know, obviously, ChetGPT opened everyone's new horizons on building a relationship with your computer that you never had before. To be honest, I was hearing the other day about if OpenAI cut off your access to ChetGPT, would you pay three, four times as much as you were to get back on there? Most people were. People are actually, this is really ingrained in people's lives now, but how has it changed Google from fairly routine search kind functionality to full singing and dancing, LLM engagement with capability. How has it changed you guys? Yeah, I mean, it's changed this, obviously the service mix, as you said, I mean, post-chat GPT, as Google really got into the first versions of things like Bar, the Gemini and other ways of how do I interact differently? I think our own search teams have talked about how much more people are right typing into the search bar. You and I, of course, grew up on searches like, what are the keywords? How do I make this machine give me back what I want?
00:05:55
Speaker
Now I'm writing sentences. I might even include a punctuation in a Google query today. i didn't feel good about it, but I was actually writing a sentence sentence to ask for for some help. So I think you're seeing that first off, the types of things that are being asked.
00:06:08
Speaker
I'm looking for not just an answer, but a synthesis of answers, which I get from AI overviews in Google search or Google AI mode or at the Gemini deep research. And so it's changing us. And what sort of things are we providing back?
00:06:21
Speaker
It's not just question answer. It's analysis in some way. It's some synthesis of information. And I think that's pretty cool.
Integration of AI in Products
00:06:29
Speaker
And it's changed in the product mix of then where do people want that in a non clunky way? I think we've all seen AI can get stuffed into experiences and feel like it's doing more work than it's actually helping me at all.
00:06:42
Speaker
So how does it fit into Gmail in a good way? think we've done some interesting stuff here. How does it fit in workspace where it's there, but it's not obnoxious? How does it get into search or dev tools or others?
00:06:52
Speaker
I think even in cloud environments, I think AI can be another cloud experience like a CLI or an API or a UI. How does AI become a cloud experience in a helpful way?
00:07:03
Speaker
So I think what you're seeing from Google is we're rethinking some of the surfaces and you've seen that change over these last year or two is whether the right services for interaction and You know, look, Google's mission, we're trying to organize the world's information to make it useful.
00:07:18
Speaker
I think this is us. Like this is exactly what this company is built to do. And we have a pretty good eye for taste in UI and experience where we don't have to make this feel clunky. This can feel like a natural part of how I use my phone, how I use my computer, how I use my hosted cloud service. So we're not going to get them all right, but i think we're getting more right than we're getting wrong.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah. I think the word natural. really rings home for me here. It's like, if you think back even just a year, you go into Google and be very much a functional thing. I'm going to ask my computer a question and it's going to give me an answer.
00:07:53
Speaker
And it's going to be maybe a fairly binary answer, but it will probably be pretty much what I'm looking for. OpenAI came in with a different concept of you're going to basically build a model. It's going to start to know you and know your habits.
00:08:09
Speaker
Um, and it became much more like, I'm not actually talking to a computer anymore. talking to ah a bot. I'm talking to something actually sounds to know my mannerisms. What was quite funny last night was my wife actually, her chat GPT knows me. It was bizarre. I go, you didn't notice me. She goes, yeah, yeah. It was all about you.
00:08:27
Speaker
I said, can I go onto your CheckGPT and start chatting to it as well? And she said, yeah, give it a go um So I think what they've done is almost, they've done the first mover thing, right? So wrote back to the show the other about first mover advantage in the market. Someone makes the first move, but often the winner is the one who,
00:08:47
Speaker
let somebody else do the research, does the follow through and then builds something bigger than that came before.
Personalization in AI
00:08:54
Speaker
Do you think Google has really got that sort of second move of advantage now?
00:08:59
Speaker
We ever first, like we're the 20 something search engine, you know, Gmail came later. Workspace came later. Google Cloud wasn't the first cloud.
00:09:10
Speaker
Android came after iPhone. And don't know if that's intentional. I think sometimes it's you do want to see what is the market. And yeah, sometimes you want to be blazing a trail. And that's amazing. And that first mover advantage is legit.
00:09:21
Speaker
I don't know how many first movers have held on to it 10 years later in most sectors. Some have, of course. But I think we do like to learn not only from our own data, but what do people actually want to do?
00:09:31
Speaker
And can we do a better version than what's always kind of a first roughish idea of like, hey, that's really awesome. But hey, are we missing this or where is there utility here? And so i think we're seeing with the Gemini app, which is, you know, it changes all the time.
00:09:46
Speaker
But like what the number one apps in the App Store now? Who in the world would have predicted that even 12 months ago? And so this is now becoming something that people are preferring after they've seen some first versions of other things which are awesome.
00:09:59
Speaker
But now it's like, hey, well, this really connects really nicely to my Google world, right? We just lit up this week. I know people will watch this at different times. But the idea of personalization in the Gemini app, where again, you are getting quasi digital twin that understands what's in your inbox and your workspace and your search and other things. and Hey, when did I get my last haircut? That was three weeks ago. you want me book it again?
00:10:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of helpful. Like I don't want to click through 20 days of my calendar to figure out where I put the haircut appointment. So there is something there where sometimes watching to see what you need is helpful to actually build a better second version.
00:10:34
Speaker
I think we've done that with cloud. I think we've built a better cloud than the first versions. I think we've done that with a number of cases. But you pay a cost because now you have to re-educate the market on why they should move from their first thing to the next thing. And that's not a trivial thing to do.
00:10:48
Speaker
Yeah, especially if it's just so personal. So, I mean, if you think about it, you've got like, I think we're getting into four different sort of leading LLMs. You've got open AI with a lot of B2C. You've got perplexity, bit more niche for research, for anthropic, for B2B and some coding and that sort of stuff. And now Google, which is almost like the Googleization of LLMs, how's Google ultimately going to be perceived in this space? Do you think people are just going to start to realize, I just might as well move everything onto one platform, which really understands me, that Google has 20 years history of me for my Gmail?
00:11:27
Speaker
Or do you think people are going to start to have multiple LLMs now and sort of start working across the the different ones and building threads
Utility Over Convenience
00:11:37
Speaker
between them? How do you think this evolves?
00:11:38
Speaker
I mean, guess all that matters is going to be utility. Is it useful? I don't think we're in a space where anyone's going to calcify on one thing purely out of convenience because we're seeing that with dev tools, right? If you and I talked three years ago, gosh, IDEs were a boring space. There's like three vendors that mattered. No one was ever going to change the development environment tool space.
00:11:58
Speaker
Cursor pops up when surf's here. All these different tools, cloud code comes out, all these, like my goodness, that is very vibrant. And so... You see developers, me, myself, I have three IDEs on my machine.
00:12:10
Speaker
I had like one for 15 years. What am I doing now? But you're seeing people say, what is the most useful thing to try right now? There's a barrier to entry that's near zero for most of these sorts of AI products. And so just...
00:12:23
Speaker
inertia I don't know if it's enough. we have a We have to continue to aim for excellence, aim to be the best experience. Do I assume just because you use Google search or user AI? Absolutely not. There's a lot of ways to get this functionality. So I think you're seeing, of course, there will be things out of convenience.
00:12:38
Speaker
My Android Pixel phone. Yeah, look, bunch of stuff's baked in. It works great. I have no incentive to try something else because it does exactly what I need. I'm good. But i think in a lot of spaces, it's more dynamic than that. As we look at, again, if I'm a builder, builder tools, super fluid right now. I've got to constantly try to push and be excellent here, not just OK. And oh, it connects to your Google stuff. I don't care. This other thing can kind of to be better. And so certain areas, it seems like you have to be pushing the excellence bar.
00:13:07
Speaker
Other cases, of course, convenience will matter. Look, you look at every company in the world who does SaaS is launching agents. They're hoping that proximity will be the reason you light up Salesforce agents or ServiceNow agents or this agent. Of course, it's right next to the platform. Same with Workspace, Office 365, whatever.
00:13:26
Speaker
But there's other areas where I don't care if it's right next to my preferred thing. It just has to be better. And I think both are playing out right now, which is pretty interesting. I like our spot in both. We're not taking either for granted.
00:13:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's fascinating. And now you're supporting the iPhone, right?
Collaboration in Tech Industry
00:13:44
Speaker
Siri, right? You're doing all this support for Siri. So how does that work? I mean, I always saw Android and iPhone as massively competing platforms. Are these now finally dropping down the gauntlet and starting to work together? i mean, what's going on here?
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's not my partnership domain, but I think you're seeing there's very few scenarios where, i mean, look, even at reInvent, we announced that cross cloud connect work with Amazon. you know, in some cases, it just makes better sense to not be dogmatic about it's our way or the highway. And so you see that with Anthropic, which we do things with. You see that with, heck, OpenAI, some partnership work. And you see, of course, that there's times with Microsoft or Amazon.
00:14:23
Speaker
Hey, we all do some open source work together, which is great. So even with Apple, Apple's like a great partner at times. And yeah, of course, we compete in different areas. I think those Venn diagrams overlap in every dimension.
00:14:34
Speaker
And if we were being our way or the highway, we couldn't play with anybody. So I think it makes sense that we want to build the best possible platform and technology. And if someone else can take advantage of it, because either a it speeds their time to market or they don't want to spend the cost to try to be as good at that, which is hard in some areas.
00:14:53
Speaker
We all do the same thing. So i think you're actually seeing a pragmatism in tech that maybe didn't exist as much a few years ago or as much more. yeah I'm going to own every part of my supply chain. I'm going to own every piece of my ecosystem.
00:15:06
Speaker
And there's certain places you could do that, but that's super tough. And I would rather most of us be good at excellent and a handful of things and trying to be average at everything. Yeah, but isn't this like convincing clients, whether it's a consumer client or a business client to change? So, however, this has worked its way out over the last 30 years, I still have to use fricking PowerPoint every day. I would love to use something better than this horrible application. And so would most other people. It's the switching cost of the amount of
00:15:41
Speaker
inconveniences is going to cause my life. I finally got off cable TV the last month. I'm on YouTube TV actually. really I finally, it was just so f freaking seamless. It was like, can I get these channel? Yeah.
00:15:54
Speaker
And it was like, I can finally stop using that box. but next And to me, that was like a massive relief. And I thought, how did we get like that YouTube TV moment hitting other areas like enterprise office apps?
00:16:09
Speaker
You know that's a big one that needs shifting. And then you're getting into other bigger enterprise applications and cloud. How do we get to that inflection? Are we finding these inflection points easier to get to? Has AI made us more open to change and trying new things? I read a book last year.
00:16:23
Speaker
year before that for the most part, you know, psychological research shows something has to be like 2.3, 2.6 times better for you to really switch. Like you don't, you wouldn't move houses because the one in another town has another 10 square feet. Like that's, that's an insane move. Like that's probably alone. It would have to be like, you know what? This fundamentally changes my lifestyle. It's close to stuff.
00:16:45
Speaker
I hate moving, but this is worth it. You and I probably aren't switching banks just because the other bank offers an extra half a percent of interest on the savings account. That's a pain in the neck. My whole life's tied into checks and bags. So enterprise IT, t of course, will be the same.
00:16:59
Speaker
We can go in and pitch like Google Workspace is unbelievable. they're like, I completely hear you. I got 20 years of stuff in a Microsoft Word doc. Like that feels like a lot of work. And so your thing is amazing, but this thing's fine and moving stinks.
00:17:13
Speaker
That's totally normal behavior. And so while there's plenty of migration tools, we've got them for clouds. We've got them for your SharePoint. We've got them for whatever. Everybody offers migration tools. AI has made it easier.
00:17:25
Speaker
Those things are all true. This still has to a come down to value. And to be you, I think sometimes it has to come down to courage. And I'm not sure a lot of people are willing to make that bet in the enterprise because these are career defining choices if it goes wrong.
00:17:38
Speaker
And so we got reduce risk. We talk about the features. I think enterprise vendors, including ourselves, sometimes they'll have to be in the feature business. We have to be in the risk business.
Cloud Technology and Costs
00:17:48
Speaker
And I have to show you that you are not going to get fired by picking Google. Instead, you've probably just changed your entire career trajectory and given your company a 10 year new lease on life.
00:17:58
Speaker
You move for that. You do not move because we offer a cleaner way to to shift a table in a doc versus word, or if you breathe on it, the whole table shifts. It's not enough to move for.
00:18:08
Speaker
So can we reduce risk? Can we show you the risk is less? And then you get to light up all the fun stuff. But I think most of us all fear loss a lot more than we acquire gain.
00:18:19
Speaker
A lot of it as well, I think, is moving into the cloud, you think about it So I think the reason why the shift from cable TV to pure streaming platform TV is so beautiful is you're getting out, you're getting rid of the hardware box.
00:18:34
Speaker
yeah Verizon made sure you had that freaking box somewhere in your house and you had to use their own. And then on top of that, It's way more expensive. Like there's the cost thing. It got to the point where it's almost like fatigue of the technology wanting to move into something that's much more cloud driven and ubiquitous, which is really what I think drove the drove that move on. And you think about it, it's the slickness and ease of moving things, which is where we're going.
00:19:04
Speaker
I mean, convenience matters as much as there will always be tinkerers who want to build their own stuff or even run on prem or run their own VPS server because cloud's expensive.
00:19:15
Speaker
I guess to me, my first question, when anyone says anything is expensive, oh, Gemini is expensive for a bunch of calls compared it to what? Like, what are we comparing this to? Are we comparing this to you creating this picture yourself and me generating it in 30 seconds for a dollar?
00:19:29
Speaker
I mean, I guess a dollar is expensive, but that would have taken me four days to draw This feels like my time is more valuable or is a cloud server more expensive than buying something from our friends at Dell or HP?
00:19:41
Speaker
I don't know, maybe over a certain period of time, but what am I comparing it to in terms of TCO and overall costs and agility costs? And do I want to have hardware in a data center? And so I don't know if we, I think we often find ourselves arguing against a straw man or ah a mythical magical future where everything's amazing. And sometimes it's, what are you really comparing this thing to, to say it's better, cheaper, easier, or harder, more expensive, more complicated? Yeah.
00:20:08
Speaker
Compared to what? Yeah, but it's like we're going through a technology evolution like we are with LLMs at the moment, people are much more open saying, you know what? This is so important. I don't mind spending hundred bucks a month on three different platforms, but that quickly changes. It's like everyone I talk to now is spending way too much on streaming media services. and People who's trying desperately to figure out how to cut this one down, that one down, and what?
00:20:34
Speaker
Why do I need to pay for HBO Max just for that one show? Right? And that sort of thing. So I think we're going to get to that point with AI and LLMs and cloud where people think, I don't really need to have four different LLMs.
00:20:49
Speaker
just want one that really works for me. Yeah. I mean, when I put my analyst hat on, I'm terrible at this. But what if I'm looking at selection process, what do people choose? We either take a product approach where we just say, I'm going to pick one thing and it's the best and I'm good.
00:21:06
Speaker
And that's usually for very mature spaces. And then we take a portfolio approach with something super
Strategic AI Adoption
00:21:10
Speaker
emerging. Like, I'm just going to do bit one of everything, get a sense for where it goes. And then sometimes we even take a platform approach going like,
00:21:17
Speaker
I want something I can bet on, but I'm also going extend it all over the place. And i think sometimes we assume that you're just picking one of those. And i think especially in enterprise IT, t you have some things that they're just awesomely boring and you should have two relational databases. No more. It's dumb to have eight different types of relational databases. That is a very mature market. Pick two.
00:21:37
Speaker
You're fine. Pick a product approach. LLMs and AI portfolio approach, probably. I should try a bunch of things and then I'm going to consolidate and compress it once I and get my use cases figured out and I understand which vendors have staying power. And then maybe for some areas, especially with clouds, I pick a platform and say, yeah, yeah, look, I'm going to use you for most of my stuff, but I want to bring on a best of breed service for this or a service for that.
00:22:01
Speaker
I think you're all of those at any point of the life cycle of something in IT, t frankly, probably our personal lives. And we just get in trouble and we think we have to be one or the other at all times.
00:22:12
Speaker
So what's the next phase for the tech industry? So we've got the hyperscalers. at one end of market, you guys, Amazon, Microsoft, et cetera. Then you've got the big tech services companies, your exchanges, IBMs, Cognizant, and this is this business.
00:22:32
Speaker
And then you've got the apps, firms like your Salesforce service now, these types of platform companies coming into play, and then your traditional ERP, Businesses, everyone's offering each other's revenue.
00:22:44
Speaker
It's all converging. we We call it services and software. How do you see this playing out? Yeah, I've used your point of view elsewhere with attribution, of course. Planning think services as software is an interesting approach. I think services work is clearly going have to evolve because i mean I even wonder, again, I'm not a complete extremist yet that everyone is going to vibe code their SaaS platforms and I can just turn off all my products so that I can just build everything.
00:23:10
Speaker
I think there will be some of that that happens because you'll look and go like, I am spending 80 bucks a month for something that's at a simple data experience that I could probably build an hour. Maybe it is worth it to build that, minimize a code base, run it in a cloud platform and and eliminate that cost. Now, again, that cost will live somewhere else.
00:23:28
Speaker
So got to factor that in. But I think we're going to see even this year, even in enterprise, that I'm talking to people who are still looking at What should I be building versus buying? That will be a different conversation this year because it has never been cheaper to build.
00:23:41
Speaker
Now, there's always, is it free as in beer or free as in puppies? And I think in some cases, some of this is free as in puppies. Like, yeah, build your thing. got to maintain this thing. Like, this thing's going to grow. It's going to have its own tech debt over time.
00:23:54
Speaker
How are you handling it? so We're going to the pendulum will swing too far back and forth this year. Guaranteed because it's just gotten so easy, even in enterprise to vibe code some stuff or vibe engineer some stuff and go projects that used to take us six months. We're doing in a week and a half.
00:24:10
Speaker
Do I need to keep buying certain things from vendors? Or am I just going to pick two or three core vendors? Yep, you know what? There's no way I'm replacing my ERP. I don't think I'm going build my own CRM. Like there's a handful of core platforms I'm going to bet on.
00:24:23
Speaker
But I do wonder the bloodbath and the sort of situation for some of these other niche software products and SaaS products of... They will all grow, I would imagine, because they can add value. But will they also see new competition from the build set?
Tech Evolution and Strategy
00:24:36
Speaker
Who goes, I don't know if I need to buy a thing that does that thing. It's just so easy to build it. So I think a lot of this sector, builders are back in charge. That's not a buy economy to me as a whole.
00:24:48
Speaker
And so what does it mean when everyone can build? We're going to make some horrible mistakes because some people will build something that they should not build or run it as production, which they shouldn't. But we're going to have to learn that together because at the same time, when the cost of code has gone to zero, the cost of generating code has gone to zero, you have to at least give a few things a shot. I think we're gonna do that a lot this year. Yeah, that's I mean, in a company your size now,
00:25:12
Speaker
You're making you in much bigger waves in the enterprise with Gemini. Do you think you have to make a services play now in terms of, i mean, you look at the Palantir model of sending in senior level experts, sort of scalable model. Is that something you see Google Cloud having to go down?
00:25:30
Speaker
Yeah. i mean, again, not my area to run professional services. We've been doing forward deployed sort of concepts, like a lot of hyperscalers for a while, where you do have tiger teams, expert teams who go in and Don't just make sure that you've bought something, but that you implement it well. I did this years ago at Pivotal because when you bought Pivotal and Cloud Foundry, you weren't just buying a product, you were almost buying a lifestyle.
00:25:51
Speaker
And so you had to follow it up with training and enablement and help. Let's get your first product to prod. I think a lot of hyperscalers do that now. A lot of others do that. Is that a large scale professional services business? i don't think we've proven that that should be our competency. We like depending on...
00:26:07
Speaker
Great, both regional SIs, global SIs, others working on them to do this at scale. But we should be keeping a lot of stuff close to us, especially for first deploys, expert access. It's my own team. I run a number of teams. One of my developer relations teams will do at least probably about once a month. We'll go on site with a customer.
00:26:26
Speaker
We'll bring people in expertise in four or five different areas. And usually in that week, we'll take an idea that they have from 20% to 80% just by putting everyone co-located in their room. You can't buy that. like That's awesome. And I like us having that capability because I don't want to play telephone with a vendor who's like, well, I heard this from the customer. That's great. And you need that at scale.
00:26:48
Speaker
But sometimes you just need that burst of quick innovation, a win, success, good patterns right from the horse's mouth. So how did you manage that? ah C-suite level.
AI Adoption Strategies
00:26:58
Speaker
So I can see you guys, you know, you're similar to AWS in some regards is that that you're very good at engaging with the developer community. Microsoft do that with GitHub and all that. What about engaging with C-suite level executives who are under massive pressure to prove an AI story that is worthy of
00:27:20
Speaker
their involvement in the company. I mean, some of them are, you know, yeah when it's not sort of the how and the why as well, it's the, you know, what are we going to do? When do we do it? and And what's the OLA here? How does Google start to engage at the C-suite level across the big enterprises to really make this happen? Yeah, i mean, there's been a lot of that for years. Our office of the CTO, our Octo team,
00:27:42
Speaker
There's been some stuff written about this quietly for years. That's a quiet team externally, but an absolute powerhouse for a lot of our customers. These are people who have often been ceo CEOs and executives elsewhere.
00:27:53
Speaker
Part of this sort of absolute expert team who often stays co-located with a customer for months and years even just to kind of help them with big decisions and working with their C-suite. Same with a lot of our executive team who's very hands-on.
00:28:07
Speaker
mean, to be honest with think Thomas Curran uses our products more than most of our engineering managers. He's all the time using products, but understanding the market, what do customers need, talking to them. So we have a very hands-on leadership team who doesn't just need the talking points, but they want to sit with the CEO of Ford.
00:28:23
Speaker
The number of Ford conversations that we get brought into now is exciting, but that's because there's a credibility, hopefully a humility, of course, but a credibility like, hey, we're seeing a lot here. We're at the absolute forefront of the actual innovation, but we're also seeing what's working and what's not for ourselves, for people in your industry.
00:28:40
Speaker
You see us at the retail event this week. You see us across other public sector opportunities.
Career Opportunities in AI
00:28:46
Speaker
It's hard to find an industry at the moment that's not pushing hard here. And so you see both our executive team, our office of the CTO team, number of others. she's I somehow get suckered into executive conversations a fair bit because many of them are figuring out, how do I actually unlock this? How do I not just buy a contract, but how do i unlock consumption and transformation? Because I see vendors promising 50% productivity improvements, and I'm picking up maybe 3%. What's going on?
00:29:12
Speaker
lot of these are those type of conversations right now that they have been overpromised what's possible with AI because it was not lying or anything, but it was very targeted. Like, hey, you're 50% better at a task you do for five minutes a day.
00:29:26
Speaker
What does it mean to be better using AI for eight hours a day? I don't think there's many companies that can talk about that besides us because we can talk about when you start in the morning until you finish your workday,
00:29:37
Speaker
There's a set of things that come together to help you do your job. A lot of them Google-based. Let's talk about where you get benefits. That's what a lot of these executives want to talk about is not just how do I buy the thing? What does this look like for real?
00:29:50
Speaker
Absolutely. It doesn't surprise I can see the hyperscalers doing a lot of organic recruiting, increasing this year so you can engage more at this level. It's fascinating to see. Well, it's been great getting a window into Google Cloud.
00:30:05
Speaker
And hearing a bit more from you, what's going on and talking across the business. Yeah. I mean, look, this is a, ah I don't know, you and I are, I don't think Gen Z or Gen Alpha here. We've been around this a little while, but at the same time, this is the most exciting time in tech I've ever been around. It's a plenty good mix of chaos, but also an innovation and an opportunity. i think most people who probably listen to this with you are sitting here wondering, is this a career moment where I'm going to look back on it and wonder if I made the choices that were actually courageous and interesting and exciting. I hope that your listeners are, I hope a lot of people in this industry find the confidence this year to do the thing they know they need to do, which is probably push.
00:30:43
Speaker
Because sometimes these are once in a career moments to change how you work and what you do. Who wants to blow that? Yeah, like that i mean I feel like a Gen Z. but
00:30:53
Speaker
Hey, i run ah I run an information business and compete with some businesses many, many times bigger than my firm. This has never been a more fun time because when you're so personally involved in yeah the change and the technology and you're using it to transform your own business, it's so much fun working but across clients because they see the enthusiasm and excitement that we get from this. And you're thinking, look, you embrace this. You build a safe space for your team to experiment and be unafraid to try new things. And, and,
00:31:23
Speaker
build relationships with technology that you've never had before. This stuff is dynamite. And this is just going to make a lot of us more successful in time. And we'll figure a lot of the kinks out. There's a lot of scary issues.
00:31:35
Speaker
I think it's becoming a political issue in some regards, but ultimately we probably wouldn't even call this AI in another year. It's going to be something else. It's just technology. But the attitude, as you say, of my colleagues, Logan Kilpatrick, had just tweeted the other day, like my competitive advantage is I'm having fun.
00:31:52
Speaker
I think that's true. Like this is, are you coming into this from an optimistic standpoint of we're trying to do amazing, the best work of our life right now? And I'm having fun doing it. I think that stuff's pretty intoxicating and a lot of reason, honestly, people are coming to Google because we're just having a good time over That's the main thing. I mean, as long as you enjoy this and hey look, we've been in this industry a long time and for it to be as exciting as it is now. And I remember back to ah you days, maybe 10 years ago, i was getting a bit boring.
00:32:18
Speaker
It was like the same old, same old trudge. And it was like the people that everyone I knew in the software business, all they wanted to do was make as much money as they could in retire. Now I work with people who generally love this stuff. They're passionate and it's a different mindset with a lot of people now. It's sort of, we're all in this together and we're learning together. It's an interesting, exciting
Conclusion and Connect
00:32:36
Speaker
time. And hopefully this year will be a great year for our industry. I really, I really hope so.
00:32:41
Speaker
Terrific. Thank you. Thank you, Richard.
00:32:48
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First. Remember to follow Phil on LinkedIn and subscribe and like on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite platform for no-nonsense takes on the intricate dance between technology, business, and ideological systems.
00:33:07
Speaker
Got something to add to the discussion? Let's have it. Drop us a line at fromthehorsesmouth at hfsresearch.com or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.