The Exchanges

Q migrated to the CIO. These are big decisions now, right? And the CIO, if I'm going to put more money into Google cloud, just generically, that's a CIO level decision. But if all the budgets go into AI, it's an interesting, it's not a tension, but it's a huge dynamic because so much budget It's going to AI, right? So I guess it's empowering the developers more in the org.

A It is, and I think, and I think they were empowered already with the cloud decisions. I do think they were weighing in a lot, and I think they were heavily weighing that, but it's, when it's a ten-year, five to ten-year contracting commitment, it just, it just gets bigger, and the influencers and the decision makers that are involved in that buying decision just balloons, versus AI is all, it's all experimental, and then yes, there's going to be the larger, bigger enterprise deals over time. We've got many of those too, but the developer usage is what's Teaching us what the future of this platform and our product set and our models and our infrastructure really needs to look like.

AI assessment note: “It is, and I think, and I think they were empowered already”

Q question for you, having seen all of it with the sales team and the GTM team, like how do you get it just right? So you remain super customer centric, because if you're in sales, I might love to, I might Push a little too hard. Bring everything up for tomorrow, Sarah. How do you help the team manage that? Because it could be the better half a decade, right?

A Yeah. I honestly think we're playing the long game and I think the team fully appreciates that. And we think about our investment and time spent with customers as the payout doesn't happen immediately, nor should it, because they have to build trust. They also have to learn and we have to figure out what it is that we have to help support them with. To learn to then migrate. And so there's a ton of work we do right now that's around just training and how do we think about investing in their developer community within those companies? How are we educating them? How are we bringing them along on the journey? Because it's one thing to sell something to a CIO or a CTO, but it's a darn big another to go deep into the org and figure out how you actually get a lot of those developers. Many of them are certainly certified in using other cloud platforms if they're not already using Google. So It's a long game and it's actually something we talk about this a lot. You don't see this immediate return necessarily from investing in students, but it's the right thing for the future of where cloud and AI are going.

AI assessment note: “we think about our investment and time spent with customers as the payout doesn't happen immediately”

Q the only thing anybody wants to talk about, but be a, be both objective, but a proponent. Why are you gaining share? But there's, you don't gain share at this scale, right? Unless there's two or three core reasons folks come in and they just pick, at least for more of their budget, if not a hundred, because we are in a heterogeneous world, but why are you gaining share?

A A lot of times, Jason, we have customers who will come in and move one workload over and we, because again, we started out with our core tenants of who Google Cloud is, we wanted to provide choice and we didn't want it to be this all or nothing. You have to move everything to Google on day one or not. And so a lot of what happened over the years is that, especially in the last three to four years, we won a lot of business just with single, mostly like modern app workloads. For example, people would come over and build a net new app on Google Cloud. Start to work with us and see how powerful actually that relationship was. And what you're now seeing in the last one to two years are all of those who three to four years ago took a bet on us and then have started to migrate more and more workloads over the like more recent, 18 to 24 months. And with AI, they're looking at it. We, we were the, we were the third place player for a long time in the cloud space, but we really are the first choice when it comes to AI. So now when all of those CIOs and CTOs had started to consider now, what do I do? They're getting pressure from your boards. Who is the player that actually can keep me the farthest ahead of the curve? Almost all of them came to us, whether they were already working with us for their cloud infrastructure, compute storage, etc. They came to us to actually ask the question f…

AI assessment note: “we won a lot of business just with single, mostly like modern app workloads”

Q April eighth to 11th. Okay. So I want to talk about Google Next, but before we talk about it specifically, I got a couple of questions. It's not what it was, the commitment to events and field. Is the ROI still there? Is it better? Is it worse than a couple of years ago? What have you learned at a meta level? What have you learned about the ROI?

A Listen, I was wrong, uh, three years ago is what I will tell you. I did not think that physical events were going to come back with the roar that this one has. And what I will tell you is I think there's a few different variables at play. We were, I think it was in. It was our first attempt to come back to any even small scale audience. We had about 250 people in our New York office and we did a 24 hour live broadcast. That was our first foray back into a physical But hybrid digital moment. And next year, Thomas had a vision. Our CEO of cloud was like, listen, I don't think that we can miss the opportunity to bring our partner ecosystem into the fold even more than we ever have before. So we went to Moscone. We did that there. And that was about 18,000 people. And then we decided the next year we were going to double the size of the event because the demand was there. And people were actually like clamoring for it. People are hungry for connection. People are hungry to actually Come and like actually learn in a collective shared space because you just don't get that. Everything's so transactional online these days in video conferences, et cetera. Just being in rooms with humans, even for a few days, even in Vegas, it is, it's actually really special. It is, I would say a distraction. It's the most worthy distraction I could imagine for my team. And it's actually a rallying mome…

AI assessment note: “I did not think that physical events were going to come back with the roar”

Q So like the scale ups I work with, the ones at a hundred million or above, honestly, I don't hear a lot of worries about cost anymore. They've gotten good at it, but what are you hearing in general or at the CIO office around cost versus ROI?

A Cost is always obviously top of mind for CIOs, but I don't think they're as worried about that as they are falling behind and making sure that they've got the right resources to experiment and to build and learn and test because they're relying, like at least a lot of our customers, they're relying on us to figure out How do you optimize the compute, the storage and the processing power and the cost of the TPUs that are powering a lot of these models? We are obsessively worried about that in a good way. That's why when I visited the data center that I mentioned, I learned so much about the way that we are, we have the most efficient data centers in the world and specifically the way that we're training models and using TPUs and the cooling systems provide less power surge and power pull for us to our data centers that makes it just cheaper. And it allows us to actually do more. And that's something that we don't talk about it that much, but it's so central to the future of cost optimization for AI.

AI assessment note: “I don't think they're as worried about that as they are falling behind”

Q like everyone was a developer except me there. But if you're going long, you want it to be half your folks, right? All right. The one question I thought I didn't want to run too long. The one question I, the tech, the quantitative version of the actually was how content's changing. Like what percent of your content is going to be a next book. Tell me about trends. Yeah.

A So a big trend that I'm loving right now, and I'm obsessed. I tell my team all the time, put your hands on the tech every day and you'll, and it reveals to you what's possible in a way that's impossible to just study. Right. But art, the thinking models and the deep research models, that's I'm nerding out on it right now. And even the live interaction. With Gemini is fascinating. So in AI studio, like I kid you not for this podcast, I go into, there's the streaming, um, feature inside of AI studio. I basically show it what's happening on my webcam. And I asked Gemini, what do I need to adjust about this for recording for a podcast?

AI assessment note: “So a big trend that I'm loving right now, and I'm obsessed.”