Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, stated 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, contains 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 knowledge units.
As a part of the collaboration, Airtel and Google Cloud will present companies with merchandise like geospatial analytics, location intelligence for recognizing traits, predictive capabilities, market evaluation, website choice, threat administration, and asset monitoring.
Additionally within the offing are voice analytics for conversational purposes skilled throughout languages, and advertising expertise to forecast shopper habits, carry out viewers segmentations, and streamline content material creation with contextual adverts. Airtel stated it has arrange a managed service heart in Pune crewed by greater than 300 “consultants” to supply help.
Tech behemoths Google, Microsoft and Amazon are more and more setting their sights on the telecommunications trade, looking for to capitalize on the huge troves of knowledge generated by the sector’s billions of shoppers worldwide. The three corporations 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 service in 2022. The search large has additionally backed Jio Platforms, which operates India’s largest service. Jio maintains the same long-term partnership with Microsoft, too, as a part of which the Indian service 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.