Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, mentioned on Monday it has entered right into a long-term partnership with Google Cloud to develop and ship cloud and generative AI merchandise to Indian companies.
The partnership goals to faucet Airtel’s intensive buyer base, which, based on the corporate, consists of 2,000 giant enterprises and one million rising companies. The businesses plan to supply AI options, together with generative AI, which Airtel will prepare utilizing its huge information units.
As a part of the collaboration, Airtel and Google Cloud will present companies with merchandise like geospatial analytics, location intelligence for recognizing developments, predictive capabilities, market evaluation, web site choice, danger administration, and asset monitoring.
Additionally within the offing are voice analytics for conversational purposes educated throughout languages, and advertising and marketing know-how to forecast shopper conduct, carry out viewers segmentations, and streamline content material creation with contextual adverts. Airtel mentioned it has arrange a managed service middle in Pune crewed by greater than 300 “consultants” to offer help.
Tech behemoths Google, Microsoft and Amazon are more and more setting their sights on the telecommunications business, looking for to capitalize on the huge troves of knowledge generated by the sector’s billions of shoppers worldwide. The three companies have signed offers with telecom operators globally, together with within the U.S. and UK. The businesses are additionally aggressively trying to promote their generative AI choices to companies internationally.
Google is already an investor in Airtel — it dedicated to investing as much as $1 billion within the Indian provider in 2022. The search large has additionally backed Jio Platforms, which operates India’s largest provider. Jio maintains an identical long-term partnership with Microsoft, too, as a part of which the Indian provider cross-sells Workplace 365 and Azure to native companies.
Google and Airtel didn’t disclose the monetary phrases of the deal.
Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, described the partnership as “a big milestone” in direction of the Android-maker’s dedication to speed up cloud and AI adoption in India.
