The future of cloud is being driven by REAL business outcomes. ☁️
At Google Cloud Next 2025, hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are joined by Hayete Gallot, President, Customer Experience at Google Cloud, to share how the company is structuring its approach to empowering businesses to effectively leverage AI. From the strategic significance of customer experience to the critical role of partners, the three explore exciting prospects for the year ahead!
Key takeaways include:
🔹Customer Co-Creation is Key: Google Cloud is actively partnering with clients to co-create AI solutions, ensuring that technology is tailored to specific industry needs and challenges.
🔹A Holistic Approach to Customer Success: Google Cloud is bringing together its solutions, industry, customer engineering, partner, and learning teams to streamline the customer journey and accelerate time to value.
🔹Driving Real-World ROI: The emphasis is on helping customers move beyond experimentation and achieve tangible ROI from their AI investments, with a focus on practical applications and measurable outcomes.
🔹Empowering Customers and Partners: Google Cloud is committed to an open ecosystem, providing partners with the tools and resources they need to build and deliver AI solutions that address diverse customer needs.
Learn more at Google Cloud.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here in Las Vegas at Google Cloud Next 2025. It is hopping here. Things are still going on here. And unsurprisingly, Daniel, we have talked a lot about infrastructure, we’ve talked a lot about agents, a lot about enterprises deriving the value out of AI.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s been a really great conference. I mean, the momentum that Google Cloud has is pretty incredible. Pat. You think about what? Just at the time when Thomas Kurian took the helm, it was about $5.8 billion of revenue, passing $50 billion. And over the last several quarters, you and I analyzed this very closely. Been largely the fastest growing cloud.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right.
Daniel Newman: So it’s catching up. It definitely stood out and kind of won its position in the marketplace. And one of the things that has stood out to me at this conference has been how much the company’s been putting forth their customers.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes.
Daniel Newman: And I think that’s one of the things you and I always ask for, the ground truth. It’s like we’re the analysts, we think we’re the ground truth. The second ground truth is the customer. Absolutely.
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly. No, they’re the grand purifier. And AI brings its own unique challenge. I mean, listen, enterprises are dealing with a lot, right. They’ve got to take care of the current business. There’s a ton of technical debt. Some of these companies have been in business and at it for 40 years. And to really make the magic happen, the technology is one thing, but customer experience is the other part, which is really okay, I love your technology. I made the sale. How do I now implement this and derive value for the enterprise? And on day 10 is here with Google’s head of customer experience, Hayete. Welcome to the Six Five.
Hayete Gallot: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes, very brave. I mean, day 10, I’ll tell you.
Daniel Newman: Day one on the job, actually. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Patrick Moorhead: Started on the 1st.
Hayete Gallot: Day 10, day 9.
Patrick Moorhead: I mean, it’s getting later in the day.
Daniel Newman: Nobody counts April fool day. So it starts on the 2nd, and ends on the 10th. It’s nine days. But either way, welcome aboard.
Hayete Gallot: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: I mean, you heard us in the preamble. We really do love that Google is so explicit about the customer. You bring the customers to the rooms, you put them in front, you have them sharing their experiences. And when you share case studies, it’s not like some bank or some. It is the specific company, the GSI. It is all the parts and pieces.
Patrick Moorhead: I like the challenge part too. They actually talk about the challenges that they had, which, by the way, is refreshing for an analyst to get.
Daniel Newman: Oh, yeah. I mean, this is the again, because in the end, when you have three or four cloud companies that have very compelling offerings, sometimes it is the experience that really does make the difference of where they end up landing. So talk about Hayete. What drew you to this job? What drew you to Google Cloud?
Hayete Gallot: Well, you know, for me, I worked in AI for a while and one of the things I realized is it is a very different journey for our customers and we really need to help them understand what are the scenarios, what they need to go after so that they can realize value. And so I was looking for a company who was interested in this and a company who had the technology and it all came together at Google. So I’m very excited to be here today.
Patrick Moorhead: Now, there we go. And I read through the release, I read through your biography, talked to you a little bit in the green room and you’re actually coming in to build a team. There’s pockets of CX inside of Google Cloud, otherwise you wouldn’t be where you are today. But can you talk a little bit about why this group is being formed and what do you want to accomplish?
Hayete Gallot: Well, I think what we’re thinking about is I think you guys started with that. AI is all about deriving value and business outcome. But it is not easy because with AI you can do so many things. And so customers are like, where do I start? How do I go about it? I’m going to build an MVP. I’m going to try to go to production. This is actually a very complicated journey if somebody is not helping you along the way. And so what we’re doing is we’re bringing our different teams along this journey so that we can actually help our customers get to value faster. So we’re bringing our solutions and industry teams. These are people who build solutions just for those industries and those challenges you mentioned and the problems. Second is we’re bringing our customer engineering folks who are designing those solutions. Then we’re bringing our partner and consulting team and then we’re bringing our learning team. And so we feel like as we’re bringing all those teams together, we can really think about how we stitch together that journey for our customers and help them move very fast through the journey, but also move fast to a success. And that’s what we’re going to try to do.
Daniel Newman: So let’s drill into that a little bit more. I know you’re just getting started, but one of the great things about getting started right ahead of an event like this is there’s so much customer density here, right? Customers across all the industries, large and small, those that are kind of more serviced more directly versus those that work more closely with GSI’s and smaller partners. What are you hearing? What’s top of mind for your customers? And maybe specifically as you sort of answer this question, what is on top of your, your customers minds with AI? Because we know that is the big inflection everyone’s trying to get to value.
Hayete Gallot: So I think you said it by industry, it’s business value. What process do I focus on? What do I go after? I mean, they’re really trying to get to value quickly and they’re trying to understand what they should start with because it’s not easy. The second thing I’m hearing is speed is critical. And so one of the things that is top of mind for them is they don’t want us to come and say, let me tell you how I’m going to rip and replace everything. They want to know how you’re going to interconnect to their existing environments, so that they can focus their dollars on the value and creation of value. The second thing is they don’t want to be locked in, right? As part of the speed to value, they want to know that whatever they put in place, they can start with you, they can bring the other guys. So they’re asking us, please make sure that you support 1P and 3P so that we can get the best out of the ecosystem. I think with all this comes the security and the sovereignty conversation. So security, if you think about AI, it’s really creating vectors of attack that are new and sophisticated they’ve never faced. So we’re getting a lot of questions from them on how to deploy AI, but how do I mitigate my risk, right? And now in the current environment, sovereignty has come back. They all ask, okay, how is that going to work? What configurations do you have? Can you serve me depending on what my government decides. And so for us, it’s very important that we get that done. The other thing I would say that is important is its cost. So it’s very easy what customers are saying, it’s very easy to get to an MVP. But when it comes down to production and getting this to scale, there is a real anxiety on how I manage my costs. So they’re asking us a lot about Fin-Ops and what capability we’re putting in so that they can control the cost and can stop things. And the last piece but not least is change management and scaling. They really want to understand how we’re going to help them because you may have great solutions, but if nobody’s using it doesn’t matter. Right.
Patrick Moorhead: By the way, we could talk about a half an hour about what you just rolled out there, but I won’t go for it. But it was really refreshing for you to talk about essentially multi-cloud. And there’s companies that we cover that just. They don’t talk multi-cloud. Google was one of the first. The other thing I appreciated was the sovereign cloud. Dan and I were in Davos and pretty much the talk of Davos was the sovereign cloud.
Patrick Moorhead: Right, I want to have my cloud. Oh, by the way, for some of it, I wanted air gapped, I wanted it disconnected. And I was very pleased to see what you’re doing along those lines with GDC.
Daniel Newman: By the way, she’s picking it up quickly.
Patrick Moorhead: No, I know.
Daniel Newman: I mean, I listen to that. She’s like, 10 days, I’m like, how many meetings did you have? No, that’s fantastic. No, exactly, you’ve got it. The talking points are in place and you seem to have a good understanding.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So it takes a village to do something complex. Right. There’s partners. I’ve heard in your talks, you’ve talked a lot about partners. How do partners fit into your strategy for CX? What’s your vision for this?
Hayete Gallot: I’m telling everybody there is no success without partners.
Patrick Moorhead: Okay.
Hayete Gallot: So for us, it’s all about partners. So the first thing we are doing.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s clear, by the way.
Hayete Gallot: That’s good. Then I’m sending my message. We’re focusing first on incentives. We’ve changed all of our incentives and in particular on AI. We’ve made sure we put dollars towards proving out the technology. But the business case for our customers, because that’s what they’re asking, that’s the anxiety they have. So we shifted a lot of the dollars we had on transaction to making sure we can give dollars early in the cycle as people are developing those ideas. The second thing we’re doing is making sure that we deepen our partnership with all the BCGs of the world.
Patrick Moorhead: And the front end of the process.
Hayete Gallot: Exactly. Because customers want this roadmap. They want to understand what process I go after. We really need to partner deeply with them. We bring the technology, they bring the understanding of the business process, and we need to work with them on that. And then the other thing I would say is, look, we want our partners to be our first customers. Because if they’re our first customers, then they can paint the possibilities to our customers. And so you may have seen a lot of announcements with KPMG as an example or Deloitte, they are actually using Agent Space as an example internally and now turning that into hundreds of agents for their customers. And they learn firsthand what it takes to do that.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Hayete Gallot: The other thing we want to do with partners is make sure they get, they help us get the value fast in our customers hands. The first thing we’re doing as well is ISVs. For us, it’s not about let’s make sure we ask everybody to come back to what we are creating. We want people to experience AI and the application they know and they love and they use every day. So you may have seen the announcement with Salesforce, Workday, Gemini, we’re building and bringing AI in their experience. If you want to use Agent Space, you can, but there are scenarios where you want to be in the flow. And so that’s what we’re acknowledging, that’s what we’re doing. The second thing is we’ve introduced an agent marketplace and this is a program where we’re helping actually our partners to understand where is the TAM, what is the demand. We help them build them and then we help distribute them so that our customers can find anything anywhere and think through who can help me to go to market and actually implement those solutions. So let’s go it on. And then the last piece but not least is in the customer experience team. I have consulting, so I’m asking my partner team to make sure that everything new that we do, we learn first. We document all that. And we’ve just launched, I think, our delivery solutions for partners and we’re giving them our runbooks, our playbooks, our architecture, everything so that they can build our practice and not have to spend all that money trying to learn it. We’ve learned it. We’re going to give it to you.
Patrick Moorhead: Are you buying that? She’s only been here for 10 days.
Daniel Newman: She got a study guide.
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t know.
Daniel Newman: She got the briefing book.
Hayete Gallot: You know what I got? I got the notebook LM. Notebook LM for like weeks at a time. It helped me.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: So first of all, I love that you sort of have an approach for the front end, the middle of the process and then the back end, because that’s really what. And you’re going to have to be so tightly coupled to the partner group as well. You know, the go to market, the partner group, the customer experience and then of course the technology group. So it’s going to be a great journey. But before we let you go, what are you most excited about as you sort of come out of this event? You’ve spent the time, you’ve clearly got the notebook LM working. By the way, is she an AI? I don’t know. She’s doing great. She is, yes. What has you fired up about this gig? What are you most excited about over the next few months as you really take this under your belt?
Hayete Gallot: I would say two things. First of all, through the week as I was talking to customers, they kept telling us what we need from you is your tech, but we want you to collaborate with us on co innovating. So knowing that I’m building that org is just exciting because I feel like, okay, I didn’t miss the bit, right, so it’s exciting. The second thing is, I think yesterday we announced like 600 customers. I hope next year we’ll have thousands of customers. Right? That’s my job. And I hope we’re going to be able to take all this IP and make it repeatable and extend it to every customer and across industries.
Daniel Newman: More customers consuming more services, expanding their spend, but getting value because as they expand their spend, they’re getting, getting that efficiency, they’re getting that productivity gain and we’re finally kind of seeing the consumption match, the build out of all this Capex.
Daniel Newman: I want to thank you so much for spending some time with us here on the six five. Congratulations. Welcome aboard.
Hayete Gallot: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Daniel Newman: And thank you everybody out there for joining us for this episode of The Six Five. We are on the road at Google Cloud Next 2025 in Patrick’s second favorite place to be, Las Vegas, Nevada. Hit subscribe. Join us for all the coverage here at Google Cloud Next. And of course, join us for all of The Six Five content. We appreciate you being part of our community. We’ll see you all later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
