Google believes that artificial intelligence (AI (opens in new tab)) and data analytics are the key technologies that will be the impetus behind their cloud computing (opens in new tab) business going forward.
In an interview on the sidelines of the Qatar Economic Forum, Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat shared the company’s excitement about its investments and the opportunities they bring to their cloud business.
“Our cloud business really is benefiting from extraordinary data analytics, the AI behind that, and then we’ve brought in talents to focus on very industry-specific solutions,” said Porat, adding that the company is well on its way to powering 100% of their data centers using renewable energy by 2030.
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Major focus
Google Cloud (opens in new tab) along with the rest of the major cloud players, registered a sizable jump in revenue (opens in new tab) in Q1 2021, thanks in part to the pandemic accelerating the digital transformation plans for many businesses.
Porat is of the opinion that the current digital trends that businesses have adopted through the pandemic “will continue to endure.”
“I think it’s really important for each one of us to consider how we can embrace digital tools and technology to support both revenue opportunities and efficiencies in our own business,” Porat told Bloomberg.
Porat noted that Google’s cloud business distinguishes itself from its competition mainly Amazon’s AWS (opens in new tab) and Microsoft’s Azure (opens in new tab) by its focus on clients in the financial services and retail.
Notably, earlier this year it launched an AI recommendation engine (opens in new tab) for online retailers to bolster personalized online shopping.
In the same vein, at Google I/O 2021 (opens in new tab), Google Cloud announced the general availability of its new managed machine learning (ML (opens in new tab)) platform Vertex AI (opens in new tab). The new platform allows businesses to accelerate the deployment and maintenance of AI models using the same AI toolkit that powers Google.
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Via Bloomberg (opens in new tab)