Bharti Airtel has formed a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud to deliver cloud and generative-AI solutions to Indian businesses. Through the collaboration, the telecom company will adopt a suite of solutions from Google Cloud to fast-track its cloud adoption and modernisation. Airtel will also provide a suite of cloud-managed services to its business customers, comprising more than 2,000 large enterprises and about a million emerging businesses.
Through this collaboration, the two companies are targeting India’s large and growing public cloud services market, which is expected to be worth $17.8 billion by 2027, according to International Data Corporation (IDC), a global market-intelligence firm.
Gopal Vittal, managing director and CEO, Bharti Airtel, said, “As India accelerates its digital transformation, cutting-edge cloud and AI solutions will be at the heart of this change. We are happy to partner with Google Cloud and jointly address this market opportunity with secure and scalable cloud solutions for government, enterprises, and emerging businesses. Together, we will also accelerate the deployment of generative AI in the country and unlock its potential to solve problems."
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Airtel will also leverage Google Cloud’s generative AI capabilities to transform its customer experiences and interactions across mobile, broadband and digital TV, and to streamline its internal processes and operations. Airtel will also extend these capabilities to its B2B customers in India and around the world.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said, “Our strategic collaboration with Airtel marks a significant milestone towards our commitment to accelerate cloud and AI adoption in India. Through this partnership, we aim to explore and build transformative solutions that can enhance Airtel’s customer experiences."
The two companies will bring together their strengths – connectivity and AI technology – to develop artificial-intelligence and machine-learning solutions that Airtel will train on its large dataset.
These include geospatial analytics solutions with advanced location intelligence for trend-spotting, predictive capabilities, market assessment, site selection, risk management, and asset tracking; voice analytics solutions for superior conversational applications trained across languages; and marketing technology solutions to forecast consumer behaviour, perform tailored audience segmentations, and streamline content creation with high-precision contextual ads at reduced costs.
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In addition, Airtel has developed an end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) solution designed for the utility sector that combines connectivity, Google Cloud services, and application software under a single offering for rapid, seamless and hassle-free deployment.
To power its cloud solutions business, the company has set-up a managed services centre in Pune with more than 300 employees who are being trained to champion Google Cloud services and develop tech solutions.
India's public cloud services market
According to IDC, the Indian public cloud services market clocked revenues of $3.8 billion in the first half 2023 (January-June). It said the overall Indian public cloud services market is expected to grow to $17.8 billion by 2027 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.9% from 2022 to 2027.
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"Public cloud services in India have evolved beyond just cost savings and flexibility," said Rajiv Ranjan, associate research director, cloud and AI, at IDC India. “Enterprises are increasingly investing in modernising applications, developing cloud-native solutions, and exploring artificial intelligence. While enterprises are ramping up investments in generative AI, chatbots, and conversational AI tools, generative AI tools are specifically used for cost optimisation, application development, and workload testing use cases. In the future, generative is expected to help more in cloud security and cloud infrastructure management as well. All these investments will drive public cloud services growth in India," he added.