Google Cloud
Find out how you can leverage Google Cloud's expertise to help drive your own business success in the AI-first economy.
Learn moreHow Google Cloud drives business strategy
Summary
- Generative AI is a key driver of cloud investment, especially among top performing companies, with scalability and custom apps also boosting cloud budgets.
- Google Cloud leads in sustainable solutions and offers flexibility for AI model customization and data modernization.
- Data modernization is crucial to leverage AI effectively.
The ability to leverage generative AI is driving cloud investment today. PwC’s 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey found it’s the No. 1 driver of increasing cloud budgets. Other top drivers — the need for scalability and flexibility, the need for custom cloud apps, a desire for more advanced and more personal analytics — show just how crucial cloud service providers (CSPs) are going to be in helping their clients build sustained outcomes.
The future is overwhelmingly multi-cloud. Seventy-two percent of executives tell us that they use multiple CSPs, with more than half (56%) considering one in particular their primary provider. When selecting a primary CSP, chief information officers (CIOs) should work with their finance functions to consider the type of workloads they’ll need handled, as well as how different providers are equipped to handle their data.
Some businesses already lead their peers by a wide margin. These Top Performers — the upper 12% of respondents in our study — are further along in their cloud development and are already achieving more value from their investments in cloud and AI.
How Google Cloud drives business strategy
Summary
- Generative AI is a key driver of cloud investment, especially among top performing companies, with scalability and custom apps also boosting cloud budgets.
- Google Cloud leads in sustainable solutions and offers flexibility for AI model customization and data modernization.
- Data modernization is crucial to leverage AI effectively.
The ability to leverage generative AI is driving cloud investment today. PwC’s 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey found it’s the No. 1 driver of increasing cloud budgets. Other top drivers — the need for scalability and flexibility, the need for custom cloud apps, a desire for more advanced and more personal analytics — show just how crucial cloud service providers (CSPs) are going to be in helping their clients build sustained outcomes.
The future is overwhelmingly multi-cloud. Seventy-two percent of executives tell us that they use multiple CSPs, with more than half (56%) considering one in particular their primary provider. When selecting a primary CSP, chief information officers (CIOs) should work with their finance functions to consider the type of workloads they’ll need handled, as well as how different providers are equipped to handle their data.
Some businesses already lead their peers by a wide margin. These Top Performers — the upper 12% of respondents in our study — are further along in their cloud development and are already achieving more value from their investments in cloud and AI.
Transforming business operations
Cloud service providers are instrumental to your success as they continue to invest in and develop next-generation cloud and AI capabilities. With an abundance of providers and advanced tech offerings to choose from, how you manage your CSP strategy, contracts and interactions is key. As energy needs and ecological impact increase with the development of AI technologies, the need to reevaluate your current positioning will only become increasingly critical. Thirty-nine percent of Top Performers say they’re already changing their relationships with third-party CSPs by assessing the sustainability impact of the CSP’s carbon footprint.
Google Cloud, for example, is an industry-leading pioneer in sustainable cloud solutions, aligning innovation with environmental responsibility, something that can impact business as companies continue to wrestle with their upstream and downstream emissions. Google Cloud's initiatives to reduce carbon footprints, such as building energy-efficient data centers and increasing renewable energy investments, can bolster reporting requirements while helping achieve long-term sustainable growth and value creation. This isn’t just a “nice-to-have,” it’s a necessity.
GenAI capabilities also enable companies to customize AI models for unique products and services. Rather than building a wall around its own AI, Gemini, Google Cloud enables businesses to use practically any large language model (LLM) and platform they prefer, creating a one-stop shop for customers to set up GenAI and process flows. Tool sets like Vertex AI can give diverse teams access to unified data for analysis, machine learning and scaling applications. Additionally, Google upgrades enterprise productivity by bringing the power of Google Search and its agentic AI framework to users with its new AgentSpace. As a launch collaborator, PwC helps our clients stand up, secure and implement AgentSpace environments.
How are relationships with CSPs changing?
Top performers
Other companies
Source: PwC's 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey
Q: In what ways, if any, are you changing your relationships with third-party cloud service providers? (Select all that apply.)
Base: Top performers 124, Other companies 906
Q: In what ways, if any, are you changing your relationships with third-party cloud service providers? (Select all that apply.)
Base: Top performers 124, Other companies 906
Data modernization: A foundation of innovation
To take advantage of the latest AI tools and agents, companies should make sure that their foundational systems and datasets are thoroughly up to date and accessible in their cloud. Sixty-nine percent of Top Performers say they’ve already implemented data modernization to take advantage of GenAI, compared to less than a third (31%) of other companies.
Google Cloud’s holistic modernization strategies help enable seamless data integration and accessibility, powering instant insights at any scale with a serverless, fully managed analytics platform. Seamless AI integration in every product then allows Google Cloud to facilitate the ingestion of data by LLMs, helping drive efficiency and innovation at your company. For instance, Google Cloud customers can deploy Oracle Database services directly within Google Cloud data centers. This integration simplifies cloud migration and enables organizations to utilize Google Cloud's infrastructure, tools and AI services alongside Oracle's powerful database capabilities.
By modernizing data infrastructure with Google Cloud, organizations can better position themselves to take advantage of the transformative potential of AI technologies. Google Cloud's data modernization solutions not only support the integration of existing technologies but also provide a robust foundation for future innovations, enabling companies to remain agile and competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
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