Airtel, India's second-largest telco, on Monday announced a long-term partnership with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and generative AI products to businesses in India.
The partnership aims to leverage Airtel's extensive customer base, which the company says includes 2,000 large enterprises and 1 million startups. The two companies plan to offer AI solutions, including generative AI, which Airtel will train using its vast datasets.
As part of the partnership, Airtel and Google Cloud will provide businesses with products such as geospatial analytics, location intelligence to identify trends, predictive capabilities, market assessment, site selection, risk management, and asset tracking.
Also coming is voice analytics for conversational applications trained in a variety of languages, and marketing technologies that predict consumer behavior, perform audience segmentation, and streamline content creation with contextual advertising. It's a schedule. Airtel said it has set up a managed service center in Pune that will be staffed by over 300 “experts” to provide support.
Technology giants Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are increasingly setting their sights on the telecommunications industry, seeking to tap into the vast trove of data generated by the industry's billions of customers around the world. The three companies have contracts with carriers around the world, including in the US and UK. Both companies are also actively working to sell their generative AI products to businesses around the world.
Google is already an investor in Airtel, pledging to invest up to $1 billion in the Indian airline in 2022. The search giant also backs Jio Platforms, which operates India's largest airline. Jio also maintains a similar long-term partnership with Microsoft, as part of which the Indian carrier cross-sells Office 365 and Azure to local companies.
Google and Airtel did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the partnership is a “significant milestone” in the Android maker's efforts to accelerate cloud and AI adoption in India.