Airtel Partners Google Cloud To Fuel India’s Cloud, GenAI Adoption

Telecom giant Bharti Airtel and Google Cloud have entered into a long-term partnership to deliver cloud solutions to Indian businesses and accelerate the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technology across the country.

“In addition, Airtel will provide a suite of cloud-managed services to its customer base of more than 2,000 large enterprises and 1Mn emerging businesses,” Bharti Airtel said in a regulatory filing.

This collaboration will pave the way for Airtel customers to accelerate cloud adoption and modernisation while leveraging Google Cloud’s solutions.

“The two companies will bring together their unique strengths of connectivity and AI technology to develop industry-leading AI/ML solutions that Airtel will train on its large data set,” the filing added.

These solutions will include geospatial analytics solutions with advanced location intelligence, voice analytics solutions and marketing technology solutions to forecast consumer behaviour, perform tailored audience segmentations and streamline content creation with high-precision contextual ads at reduced costs.

“As India accelerates its digital transformation, cutting-edge cloud and AI solutions will be at the heart and centre 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,” said Gopal Vittal, managing director and chief executive officer, Bharti Airtel.

Besides, Airtel will also use Google Cloud’s GenAI solutions to enhance its customer experience and interaction across its mobile, broadband and digital TV offerings and to streamline its internal processes and operations.

Airtel will also extend these capabilities to its B2B customers in India and globally.

With this partnership, both companies are targeting the Indian public cloud services market which is projected to reach $17.8 Bn by 2027, growing at 22.9% CAGR between 2022-27. 

To power its cloud-based solutions business, Airtel has set up a managed services centre in Pune with 300+ experts who are being extensively trained to champion Google Cloud services and develop world-class tech solutions. 

Microsoft Azure, Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and Others are among the top cloud service providers in India. 

This collaboration comes at a time when there is a lot of buzz around the cloud solution offerings in India. 

For instance, Nandan Nilekani-backed non-profit people+ai people+ai  announced a consortium of 24 global tech companies and organisations (including Oracle Cloud) as part of an open cloud compute (OCC) project. These companies will offer services for Indian customers who have a growing need for such computer power.

Just a few days ago, Bhavesh Agarwal, founder of unicorn startups Ola Cabs, Ola Electric and Krutrim AI, said that Ola would stop using Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure and migrate to Krutrim’s cloud.

Last year Bharat Airtel’s competitor Reliance Jio also initiated discussions with major manufacturers like HP, Acer and Lenovo for a cloud laptop rollout.