Google Cloud Next '24: Gen AI will help Indian small business in gaining access to market, says CTO Will Grannis

Google Cloud VP and CTO Will Grannis at Next '24 in Las Vegas on March 9

Generative AI will help Indian small businesses by eliminating barriers to access to market and in creating inventory, Google Cloud's vice president and chief technology officer Will Grannis said on April 9.

Grannis who was addressing a media roundtable at the Google Cloud Next '24 in Las Vegas, said, "I think that the impact of generative AI, especially in India, especially for small companies, is going to be very productive. So from eliminating the barriers from wanting to sell into a market to having to create the inventory -- because that's the risk a business can take is building ahead of demand."

Grannis recounted his visit to India in 2023 as part of Google I/O, and observing how small businesses in India were taking to cloud adoption.

"I had a chance to go see some of the initial use cases for really small companies, even just individual artisans who are thinking about, like how to build in an age of AI... In the past, someone like that would have to build inventory. And they'd have to try to guess, at what their customers want. And then they'd hope to sell it in some marketplace," Grannis said.

"With generative AI, you can actually give an instruction to a model and it can generate images of a potential bag for sale in every color, in different designs with different backgrounds, without that company needing to have any data of its own. And without having to understand computer science at all, I can literally just give natural language instructions to a multimodal model to generate content," Grannis explained.

Google Cloud is hosting the Next '24 in Las Vegas from March 9 to March 11, showcasing AI, gen AI capabilities, along with customers, partners and others.