Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator, said on Monday that it has entered right into a long-term partnership with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and generative AI products for Indian businesses.
The partnership goals to tap into Airtel's extensive customer base, which the corporate says includes 2,000 large enterprises and a million emerging businesses. The firms plan to supply AI solutions, including generative AI, which Airtel will train using its extensive data sets.
As a part of the collaboration, Airtel and Google Cloud will provide firms with products equivalent to geospatial analytics, location intelligence to discover trends, forecasting capabilities, market assessment, site selection, risk management and asset tracking.
Also within the pipeline are voice analytics for cross-lingually trained conversational applications, in addition to marketing technology to predict consumer behavior, perform audience segmentation, and optimize content creation with contextual ads. Airtel said it has arrange a managed service center in Pune staffed by greater than 300 “experts” to supply support.
Tech giants Google, Microsoft and Amazon are increasingly turning their attention to the telecommunications industry, attempting to capitalize on the vast amounts of information generated by the industry's billions of shoppers worldwide. The three firms have signed deals with telecommunications operators around the globe, including within the US and the UK. The firms are also aggressively attempting to sell their generative AI offerings to firms around the globe.
Google is already an investor in Airtel – the corporate has committed to investing as much as $1 billion within the Indian provider in 2022. The search giant has also backed Jio Platforms, which operates India's largest provider. Jio also has an analogous long-term partnership with Microsoft, under which the Indian provider sells Office 365 and Azure to local firms.
Google and Airtel didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian described the partnership as “a big milestone” within the Android maker's commitment to speed up cloud and AI adoption in India.