When IDC recently asked CEOs what single word most reflects what their organization needs to thrive in 2022, the overwhelming response was “technology.” CEOs want to acquire greater digital know-how as they recognize that technology will underpin the business model of the future.

Digital transformation, already well underway, is becoming digital first. 

In fact, an astonishing 95% of CEOs see the need to adopt a digital-first strategy, according to IDC, and the majority of organizations are down the path of executing their plans. Currently, they report that about 30% of their organization’s revenue comes from digital products, services and experiences, a figure that will reach past 40% by 2027. 

But what will power this digital-first enterprise? Successful large-scale digital transformations are executed by a diverse set of partners and vendors—including a cloud partner, valuable channel partners and resellers, independent software vendors (commonly called ISVs), and services partners; multiple cloud partners are even becoming quite common.

These networks of experts are increasingly the driver behind enterprise transformation. They help companies and organizations to establish an actively managed and governed cloud ecosystem that integrates native and third-party solutions, which can create shared value for all partners from the latest digital technologies. In fact, 85% of CEOs told IDC that actively participating in digital ecosystems is important to their revenue growth.

The new digital agenda is built on cloud ecosystems

Recently, I sat down with the author of the IDC CEO survey, Philip Carter. He’s the group vice president, European chief analyst, and worldwide C-suite tech research lead at IDC, and I wanted to better understand from him how executives are approaching their digital-first mission. 

He explained that CEOs are turning to cloud platforms as a primary partner to put in place new, industry-specific digital business models. These platforms are at the center of “industry value networks” that accelerate time to value and benefit from cloud architecture’s ability to deliver scale, extensibility, and AI-driven experiences to create new revenue streams. 

At Google Cloud, we have made building such industry value networks a priority, comprising of: 

• Google Cloud, which provides the infrastructure and develops industry-specific data and analytics capabilities using artificial intelligence.
• Broader Google product areas like Google Shopping, Ads, Maps, Pay, Assistant, Android and Chrome.
• Independent software vendors (ISVs) relevant to a specific industry, who co-innovate with Google to provide end-to-end solutions to industry problems.
• System integrators (SIs) with deep industry knowledge who build the strategy and implement the business transformation for customers.

As an example, Google Cloud customers across multiple industries are looking for digital transformation to reinvent their core functions, such as supply chain. They might be identifying new distribution channels or restructuring their inventory. Google Cloud understands how to link the enterprise ecosystem with the consumer ecosystem. We can help enterprises access this broader ecosystem while leveraging AI-driven insights from data to help inform decisions in real time, at the point of engagement.

Google Cloud’s partner ecosystem can help achieve multiple items on the C-suite tech agenda such as improving customer experience, powering enterprise intelligence, building trust, supporting a distributed workplace, driving innovation, and streamlining operations. 

According to IDC, 75% of all organizations will be completely digitally transformed by 2030. Google Cloud has been working hard with our partners to create an extensive ecosystem that can help your organization achieve its digital transformation ahead of competitors. This includes co-developing and co-innovating industry-specific solutions with a host of partners in key areas such as operations, enterprise intelligence, customer experience, workplace productivity, innovation, security, and trust. 

And over the next few years, Google Cloud will double its investment in its partner ecosystem with increased co-innovation resources, more incentives, and co-marketing campaigns and funding. We’ll also offer greater integration into the Google Cloud Marketplace and a larger commitment to training and enablement. 

For more insights on the C-suite “Future of Enterprise” agenda, you can watch my full IDC interview. You might also download our ebook featuring IDC data on the future of enterprise with ecosystem examples from partners like AMD, Confluent, Fortinet, Genesys, Informatica, and Workspot.

Our goal is to provide comprehensive best-in-class support for our mutual customers’ digital transformations. As we look toward that goal, one thing is for sure: Our ecosystem of partners will continue to grow, adding solutions to meet the needs of digital-first enterprises. Care to join us on that journey?

Gone are the days when technology was relegated to the sidelines of a business, only considered essential for industries and professionals directly dealing with it. Today, it is not just a value-add, but an integral part of every enterprise’s operations and ultimately, its success. This has wrought many changes in the way we work, the most noteworthy of which is creating the necessity for every executive – not just the CIO & CTO – to familiarise themselves with the technologies of the future.

Among these is cloud computing, which is essential to doing business in the 21^st century. As the IT infrastructure needs of enterprises grow, and we inch closer to true mobility, it’s no surprise that cloud adoption is increasing by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, too many C-suite executives dismiss cloud computing as being outside of their area of expertise. And while ignoring the technology aspect may have been possible for CEOs and CFOs in the past, it has now infiltrated every aspect of work, and arguably life itself. This makes it essential for executives across different functions and departments to familiarise themselves with at least the very basics of up-and-coming innovations.

One myth that has followed cloud computing is that it is a one-size-fits-all solution that businesses can merely install and use for storage. And while cookie-cutter solutions do exist, they end up doing more harm than good in the long term. To avoid this pitfall, it’s important for enterprises to understand the range of offerings at their disposal, and pick the one that most closely aligns with their needs.

Most people associate cloud deployment with subscribing to a third-party cloud service provider, which owns and manages all the resources that a firm might require. Known as the public cloud, this is the most popular option, especially for small and medium businesses that cannot bear the cost of IT infrastructure. Cost-effectiveness isn’t the only upside of this technology, though, since public clouds offer the added benefits of increased security, greater scalability, maximum uptime and ease of setting up.

Though the public cloud is the most widely used, it’s far from the only option that a business has. Enterprises seeking an added degree of customisation might find private cloud solutions to their liking. These offer an added layer of privacy, which may be mandated by the industry or jurisdiction that they operate in. Moreover, private clouds can allow access even in cases where geography or connectivity is unreliable. One of the factors that has held people back from switching to the private cloud has been the fact that they might need to buy and maintain the requisite infrastructure. In such cases, the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) lets businesses tap into resources stored on a public cloud, within an isolated environment, with more granular control over virtual networks.

A fourth solution, known as the hybrid cloud, also offers the best of two worlds by utilising resources that are on-prem as well as on the public cloud. It is ideal for companies that already have money invested in IT infrastructure, but still want to make the most of the emerging technology. It can also serve as a stepping stone for ventures that are looking to make the switch, but have their reservations about the public cloud.

Each of these offerings comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The key lies in evaluating your needs against the options at your disposal, and making sure that the two align. Only then will you be able to reap all the rewards of cloud implementation.

When moving to the cloud, many organizations concentrate their focus on the change in technology, and overlook an area just as complex: cultural change. 

At Google, we’ve spent years nurturing our culture and workforce to best operate in the cloud, and the Google Cloud Professional Services team leverages the lessons we’ve learned for the benefit of enterprise customers embarking on their own cloud journeys. 

While it can be tempting to believe in a universally ‘correct’ strategy for change management, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Every organization will have its own unique considerations. But with that said, there are some core strategies we’ve found to be relevant and useful across a broad range of businesses. 

1. Define your purpose for moving to Cloud
While pockets of cloud use and experimentation can evolve independently and in parallel across an organization, it’s important to make some deliberate decisions before starting a larger migration. At this stage, we recommend having a detailed answer to two key questions to ensure a successful cloud migration:

• Where do you want to go? (Or “What’s your cloud vision?”) 
• How do you plan to get there?

Start by having a conversation with leaders and those who will be key to the journey about how far you want to push your cloud vision. This alignment ensures everyone is on the same page—and will provide greater direction, allowing more deliberate action. 

2. Find the change path which is right for you 
Whether a ‘lift and shift’ approach to the cloud is right for you, or a more transformative approach with a lot of re-architecting—the most important thing is to find the flavor of change which is appropriate to your context and level of ambition.This will both shape your key migration activities, but also the level of impact to be managed within your organization.  

There are many ways to embark on a change journey for cloud migration (which one can find in the chart below). It is important to deeply understand the needs of your business and its people and determine what strategy makes the most sense.

3. Learn from best practices
Based on the lessons we’ve learned along our own journey, and the work we’ve done with customers, there are a number of recommendations we can share that can make a cloud migration more successful. We go into these in more detail in our new whitepaper, but below you can find the ones we think are most relevant: 

• Share the vision—and measure, measure, measure. Once you’ve crystallised your cloud vision with leadership and key stakeholders, share that vision widely. Set success goals and communicate them to hold yourself accountable.  
• Be clear about the capabilities you will need in the future—and where you’ll get them. For example, if your vision is to become a cloud-first, data and AI-led organization, ensuring you have the right data science skills and machine learning capabilities in your organization to achieve that vision becomes a critical step—be they home-grown or bought-in.
• Find the right balance between capabilities that should be under central control, and capabilities that should be decentralized, or agile. For example, should machine learning be something that sits centrally, or should it be spread across your organization? For every business, the solution will be a little different, and there’s no “one true answer.” There’ll be lots of different opinions about this, so the sooner the conversation starts, the better.  
• Start thinking about the needed tech and non-tech skills now, and how you’ll fill the gaps. Building the tech skills will take time, and not everyone will feel comfortable with the future picture of collaboration, innovation, and agility. 

To help businesses navigate their own cloud journeys, Google Cloud Professional Services has released a new whitepaper that can help guide organizations. “Managing Change in the Cloud” is closely aligned with the Google Cloud Adoption Framework and is a practical guide for organizations looking to maintain momentum in their cloud adoption. You can download the whitepaper here.

Kohl’s is an omnichannel retailer focused on driving traffic, operational efficiency and delivering seamless omnichannel customer experiences.

Ratnakar Lavu is Kohl’s Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. He, and Kohl’s, are at the forefront of retail technology innovation, focusing on a frictionless customer journey across digital, mobile and more than 1,150 stores.

As part of this journey to more closely unify its online and offline experiences for customers, the company was looking for supporting cloud services that would continue to drive  best-in-class data center infrastructure; the ability to manage data at a very large scale; and industry leading analytics and machine learning tools to continually understand real time data streams and help personalize experiences for their customers.

Kohl’s recognized the opportunity to take on a cloud partner to help drive the improvement of the speed and reliability of their operations, while they focused on a number of innovations to deepen customer experiences.

“At the time, I was looking for an open and scalable platform to partner with our Kohl’s technology team as we transform our business by shifting to the cloud,” says Ratnakar.

“Google has great engineering talent as well as demonstrated experience solving stability and scale in its own Ads and Search business. At Kohl’s, we need to be bold and innovative in today’s retail environment, and therefore need partners who deeply understand how to manage risk.” 

Kohl’s leveraged several capabilities of Google Cloud. For example:

• They built applications to automate deployment, scaling and operations.
• They used monitoring capabilities to monitor for things like response time.
• Scalable technology provided an infrastructure to elastically scale to site traffic.
• They ran their infrastructure across multiple regions for high availability.

In 2017 and 2018, record-setting numbers of customers visited Kohls.com during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and the digital platform experienced high double-digit growth both years.

The capabilities provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google’s data center infrastructure supported Kohl’s servers and systems during these key timeframes.

In addition, the Kohl’s team partnered together with Google’s core engineering team and services organization to optimize applications and make them more reliable.

Google Cloud’s Customer Reliability Engineers (CREs) worked with them in advance of their peak time frames to test the infrastructure for performance, scaling, and fault tolerance.

“Google CRE and services teams collaborated with us as we ran drills and exercises during each phase of preparation for peak time frames,” Ratnakar said. “As we continued to understand better how to scale, monitor, and support our applications in GCP and we are pleased that we worked with the CRE team as partners on monitoring services, alerting teams, and triaging work.”

Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of people using messaging to connect with businesses. Whether it was checking hours of operation, verifying what was in stock, or scheduling a pick-up, the pandemic caused a significant shift in consumer behavior.

• 45% of users are spending more time on messaging services because of the pandemic 
• 85% of consumers would like to message brands directly

With the rise in demand for messaging, consumers expect communication with businesses to be  speedy, simple, and convenient. For businesses, keeping up with customer inquiries can be a labor-intensive process, and offering 24/7 support outside of store hours can be costly.  

To help businesses seamlessly deliver helpful, timely, and engaging conversations with customers when and where they need help, we introduced AI-powered Business Messages.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcgP3RHjBLY%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

What is AI-powered Business Messages?

With AI-powered Business Messages, you can connect with your customers in their moment of need, in the places they’re looking for answers—such as Google Search, Google Maps, or any brand-owned channel. For instance, check out how Walmart customers in the US are able to receive real-time information on product availability, straight from a search results page.

People turn to Google when they are searching for answers to their questions, looking to buy something, or trying to accomplish a particular task with one of our many tools. In fact, 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine.

At Google, we know how important it is for interactions with a brand to be personalized, helpful, and simple. With AI-powered Business Messages, customers are able to chat with virtual agents that understand, interact, and respond in natural ways.

We are also combining smart automation with the ability for customers to chat with live agents when it’s really needed. This approach saves your customers precious time, while also saving you money. And with Business Messages automatically handling many customer inquiries in the background, businesses have the option to distribute their human customer service agents to address other needs. 

Getting started with conversational AI is easy with Bot-in-a-Box

We know it can be difficult to get started with AI. That’s why we are utilizing existing Google AI tools like Dialogflow—part of Google Cloud Contact Center AI—to create the capability within Google’s Business Messages called Bot-in-a-Box, which makes getting started with Conversational AI easy. Bot-in-a-Box allows for fast and effective adoption of automation for businesses of all sizes. 

Enabling Business Messages with Bot-in-a-Box can be as simple as leveraging an existing customer FAQ document you already have, whether it’s from a web page or an internal document. And since the conversational AI is powered by Business Messages and Dialogflow working together, your chat bot is able to understand and respond to customer questions automatically without the need to write code. 

Bot-in-a-Box also supports other critical journeys like “Custom Intents.” That means that your bot is able to understand the different ways customers express a similar question and respond accurately by using machine learning capabilities.

Finding success 

In April 2021, Wake County courthouses in North Carolina partnered with Tango Technology to implement Business Messages when it became apparent that being able to provide the public and attorneys with around-the-clock access to information would significantly reduce the pressure on courthouse staff. Using Bot-in-a-Box, Tango Technology was able to customize a solution for Wake County Courthouse, Justice Center, and Clerk of Superior Court in just four days.

“With the combination of Google’s Business Messages, GCP, and Dialogflow, we were able to spin up an AI-driven bot for the courts in days. And the technology stack allows us to continually improve by adding functionality in an agile process.”— Mike Lotz, Co-Founder, Tango Technology

With Business Messages, North Carolina courthouses saw a 37% decrease in the call volume handled by courthouse staff.  With 398,298 fewer phone calls during the first year of operation, the AI-based messages helped Wake County Courthouse work more efficiently and productively.

We’ve seen many brands benefiting from AI-powered Business Messages. For instance, Levi’s saw a 30% increase in off-hours shoppers and surpassed 85% customer satisfaction scores after implementing Business Messages. They also drove 30x more store-related questions than Levi’s website chat. 

Bring Google’s conversational AI to your storefront with Business Messages

Google’s Business Messages makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to engage their existing or potential customers in a virtual conversation, when and where they need it. 

To learn more, watch our Cloud Next session here or visit us at g.co/businessmessages. We have specialized services to help you get started  and can share the wisdom of our channel partners and dedicated experts who specialize in unleashing the potential of conversational AI.