Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, said on Monday it has entered right into a long-term partnership with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and generative AI products to Indian businesses.
The partnership goals to tap Airtel’s extensive customer base, which, in response to the corporate, includes 2,000 large enterprises and one million emerging businesses. The businesses plan to supply AI solutions, including generative AI, which Airtel will train using its vast data sets.
As a part of the collaboration, Airtel and Google Cloud will provide businesses with products like geospatial analytics, location intelligence for spotting trends, predictive capabilities, market assessment, site selection, risk management, and asset tracking.
Also within the offing are voice analytics for conversational applications trained across languages, and marketing technology to forecast consumer behavior, perform audience segmentations, and streamline content creation with contextual ads. Airtel said it has arrange a managed service center in Pune crewed by greater than 300 “experts” to offer support.
Tech behemoths Google, Microsoft and Amazon are increasingly setting their sights on the telecommunications industry, looking for to capitalize on the vast troves of knowledge generated by the sector’s billions of shoppers worldwide. The three firms have signed deals with telecom operators globally, including within the U.S. and UK. The businesses are also aggressively seeking to sell their generative AI offerings to businesses the world over.
Google is already an investor in Airtel — it committed to investing as much as $1 billion within the Indian carrier in 2022. The search giant has also backed Jio Platforms, which operates India’s largest carrier. Jio maintains an analogous long-term partnership with Microsoft, too, as a part of which the Indian carrier cross-sells Office 365 and Azure to local businesses.
Google and Airtel didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, described the partnership as “a big milestone” towards the Android-maker’s commitment to speed up cloud and AI adoption in India.
