Clive D'Souza: Agentic AI and the Power of Google's Ecosystem

Speaker 1  0:01  
Hey everyone, Chip Rodgers, coming to you from day I guess it's officially day two, but it's first day was day zero, so it's so here we are in Las Vegas at Google Next, and I am so excited to be joined by Clive D'Souza. Clive, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. So Clive is head of of partner engineering for for Google Cloud. And that is, my gosh, you guys are the Navy Seals of of technology for partners.

Clive D'Souza  0:39  
You have been kind. We are the last line. And the way you look at it, if you really look at Google's entire cloud business, we are a partner led partner, first entity. Unlike the other hyperscalers, we don't have 1000s of professional services organization by design. We truly believe that we're a cloud company, and our focus is on cloud. So all our scaling, all our customer implementations, and everything we bring to production, so to speak, is predominantly partner lab right across the ecosystem, be it via GSI or all the way to a third party integration from the models on the marketplace.

Speaker 1  1:12  
Well and and your team has done some amazing things and lifted, lifted some heavy, heavy weight getting, you know, Google, the whole Google AI go to market and really bringing it to life. So tell me about that.

Clive D'Souza  1:27  
Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm coming up a little over two years now, and I distinctly remember joining in January of 2023, within a few weeks, you know, in seat, we had this new mandate. We are launching back then, it was called Bard and Gen AI, and we sticking true to our ethos of being a partner led partner first company, the direction from top was we are going to go and enable the partner ecosystem. So we ended up a small tiger team, so to speak, working with the wider global team, with the international team. And I would say, within a week's time, we spun up an entire motion. And in the months, you would say, the weeks and months, we ended up training north of 1000s of partners globally, and true to their you know, the Creed partners have pretty much led most of our Gen AI and deployments globally, including, if you look at some of the announcement Thomas made and Amin May the nandes and we make shortly all our agents. When we have hundreds of agents, which all are being developed by S size and third party, on our on our agent garden, which are right now, while behind as a private offer, they are coming to market very rapidly and again, going down the path. This is where my team has worked very actively with the partners, with the customer engineers and the product and engineering of Google to very rapidly come to market. And we're talking weeks in terms of how quickly we ideate and bring a product to market.

Speaker 1  2:45  
Yeah, that's amazing. Some really exciting announcements this, you know, this week, from around around AI and agents, and agent, agent, and all of those capabilities are really phenomenal. Yeah, it

Clive D'Souza  2:59  
is. And, you know, we made so many announcements today. You know, we brought a seven generation of TPU. We talked about the agent to agent protocol, which is bringing up. We brought the agent development kit, which is the first truly open source framework, so to speak. We made announcements in CES, which is our customer engagement suite. You know, we actually heard from one of our, a lot of our customers, that, to paraphrase the entire summation together, we launched more in that few hours of Thomas and some of the leaders in that time frame than most startups do in a year. Right? That is how quickly and rapidly we have done so very excited about it. At the same time, we know the 2025 in general will have a rapid inflection point for pretty much across the spectrum. I don't believe there's a single industry vertical out there, be it, be manufacturing, retail, financials or plain vanilla data center migrations, every single on them will see value and advantage in getting on the Google Cloud Platform.

Speaker 1  3:54  
I mean, the use cases are unlimited. Yeah, you know, yeah. And

Clive D'Souza  3:57  
this is where, you know the best example, and it's getting one of the largest European automobile vendors. They shared with us how they actually built an agentic model for in car infotainment use, and how the individual humans were driving the car, interacting with the car and having an experience inside the car with the car, which is truly not related to buying an automobile, but feeling the automobile right? And the talk about experience, yeah, it is. It is and, and it's all agent driven. And these are things which can be updated over the wire, through the cloud. And, you know, the next version of agents come in, but it's, it's a completely new, you know, way to utilize technology and blend it with the human experiences, things of that you would never imagine, buying a car and then talking technology with it. That's where the new use cases are coming. And I don't believe there's any single segment, so to speak, regardless of the industry vertical, at every single point along the value chain, there's going to be new value creation because of the way agents interact, agents to agents interact. Then you. I have a cloud of agents, a system of agents. All of this is coming, right? And this is built on the Google Cloud Platform,

Speaker 1  5:05  
yeah, well, and for Google to lead the way and build that, you know, the framework and the protocol, so that, yeah, you know, to put that together so that, then that that is the driver for innovation, for partner, yeah?

Clive D'Souza  5:18  
And it's not only just for partners. You know, we have opened it up for third party ISVs too. In fact, if you look at our tier one ISVs in the marketplace, 75% of them are in different stages of deploying an agent built on Gemini or vertex, depending upon which route they go, and coming to market with it. So they see the value in it. They're seeing the uplift in what value creation is doing for the customers and also the use cases. Is unlocking right? And we're doing it very ethically. We're doing it with all the trust. We're doing it with all the governance, while we might be slow in the models, but we are firm in how we bring it right. We're not exactly fast in that, but we know that we bring it to the market, we bring it to, you know, with the right set of guard rails on it. So that's what we are really passionate about and happy about.

Speaker 1  6:02  
That's amazing. So as a partner, what? What should partners be thinking about? I

Clive D'Souza  6:08  
think the partner should be thinking about, basically, when they look at the customer, the conversation needs to start going up the stack, like, yeah, sure, there's the data and analytics, there's going to be the infrastructure migration, there's going to be the database migrations, all of that still sold, but it's the end. What? Going to end up all happening on top. If you look at a plain vanilla database migration coming in from a traditional database to Google Cloud, it's what are the agents you can build on top of that database, once you bring it and then disambiguate the data into BigQuery or alloydb or alloydb Omni, you can now create agents which will actually go and drive the next level of automation. And these are agents which can reason, they can think, and you're talking complete autonomous, right? This is where the partners start thinking and how they can add more value to the customers. It's the same data set, right? But now you're completely having abstraction in a conversation at a much different level, at a much higher level, right? You're adding the experiences much closer to what a customer needs and wants, and you're adding productivity to them. So that's where I think the 2025 2026 majority of that focus will happen. That

Speaker 1  7:13  
that's exciting. Really exciting. Yeah. So what? Where? Where is it going? Where does it go? Ah,

Clive D'Souza  7:22  
you know, literally, I mean, that's that's such a wide and open ended question. This point, it is limitless, and we are finding use cases. I mean, just yesterday, we officially did our partnership announcement with sphere. We did Dorothy on it with a visitor. Of visitor was, and just give an example, you know, we use AI view and Gemini to actually create the unseen aspects of the movie, The Hidden actors, which we know they are in the narrative because you hear them, but you don't see them. But this is something which is recreated based on the inputs given to the model, on a story which is decades old. So the art of the possible is real, right? And when you look at the workflows, we are seeing be it be in automation, in business process, in optimizations, we are seeing the level of productivity gains. Be it be content creation, content moderation, going to new levels, and the customers are themselves generating this for us based on the platform we bring to bear, right? So we are bringing the platform. Most CISOs and CXOs don't want to be in the business of running a data center. They want to be utilizing what technology can unleash for them. And I'm super pumped that we are there today, that we can say we have the platform now let your imagination run wild on it.

Speaker 1  8:41  
That is, that is amazing. It's, it's it's Google with the platform. It's partners creating innovation, but it's customers creating innovation as

Clive D'Souza  8:48  
well. Yes, it is, and customers are now getting unleashed too, right? And they're being able to use technology for truly what they want, not worrying about, Do I need to be a technologist? Now you're during natural language, you're talking to the prompts, you're talking to Gemini, or the console we have built in, and you you are doing an iteratively and you're seeing the results and the outputs and the productivity in real time. So you can very quickly fine tune it, and it's your insight, it's your data. So as opposed to waiting for weeks and months between emails and meetings, you can do that in minutes right now. That's how quickly it's turning and super economically, too amazing.

Speaker 1  9:22  
Clive, thank you so much for taking some time and sharing the amazing things that Google and that your team are doing with partners. So it's fantastic. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, and thank you all for joining and we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody. You.

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