India is a key area of startup innovation, with rising GenAI adoption: Google Cloud execs
In a candid chat with YourStory, Google Cloud executives Chen Goldberg and Subram Natarajan discussed the growing trend of Indian startups harnessing GenAI to drive value and the challenges that come with it.
Tech giant recognises India as a crucial centre for startup innovation, driven by its vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem and rapidly growing tech talent, including the developer community, according to Google executives.
“We see India as a key area of startup innovation, and we are investing accordingly,” Chen Goldberg, General Manager and Vice President, Cloud Runtimes at Google Cloud, said in an interview during her recent visit to India.
Goldberg highlighted Google’s large engineering base in the country, adding, “I have a team here that builds important parts of the product portfolio. From Google’s perspective, this is important because we are a global company.”
India as a market, including its rapidly evolving startup ecosystem, offers the scale and opportunity for ‘Make in India’ products and services designed for the world.
“You build for India scale, you build for the world,” remarked Subram Natarajan, Director of Customer Engineering at Google Cloud.
In a candid chat with YourStory, Goldberg and Natarajan touched upon the rising trend of Indian startups harnessing the power of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to drive value, while also recognising the challenges of applying AI in India.
In India, people are working on creating use cases that leverage GenAI models, shared Natarajan. For example, startups like Fitterfly and Cropin are coming up with very unique use cases to solve some of the problems that they have not been able to solve 3-5 years ago, he added.
Natarajan pointed out that GenAI has “broken the barrier of solving some of the tough problems” that were traditionally faced in India.
He explained that within India’s startup community, two things are happening simultaneously that are linked to GenAI.
One, there’s a new breed of startups that are basing their entire product and value proposition around GenAI or GenAI-based startups. The second is a very strong pivot towards some of the core services being offered based on GenAI by existing startups such as Meesho.
AI application challenges
As Google’s customers experiment with AI to explore its potential and discover new value, they also face various challenges along the way.
According to Goldberg, one of the challenges for more mature companies with large workforces and many developers is getting their talent skilled in and experimenting with GenAI.
To tackle this challenge, the tech giant is developing its Vertex AI platform, which provides access to a wide range of models, including Gemini, Llama, and other open-source options. It also allows customers to build agents, experiment, and enhance the accuracy of their results through grounding techniques.
Additionally, the company is hosting workshops where its experts engage directly with customers to understand their needs and help them determine how to effectively apply these technologies to their specific domains.
Another set of challenges arises for technology companies and startups that possess the expertise and talent but are facing new issues with AI workloads that didn’t exist with other types of workloads, explained Goldberg.
For instance, scaling becomes a concern. Training a large language model may introduce new scaling challenges that previous solutions were not designed to handle.
Another challenge is cost, noted Goldberg, adding that resources can be very expensive, and as a technology company or startup, it’s crucial to be strategic about managing these costs.
Google is innovating across the stack to address these challenges. For example, it has developed its own Tensor Processing Units that deliver high performance for training AI models. It is also integrating specific storage capabilities, like checkpointing, and improving monitoring systems to detect and resolve issues quickly, ensuring smooth operations.
“These solutions are not only powering our customers as technology companies but also our own,” remarked Goldberg.
Indian developer community
The duo highlighted India’s role as a hotspot for innovation and collaboration, delving into the vibrancy and scale of its developer community. A lot of the company’s tech solutions are built by the growing developer community.
“Super excited about the size of the developer community here in India. There’s nothing like that anywhere else in the world,” Goldberg said.
She highlighted the enthusiasm within the developer community, noting that people are eager to learn, experiment, and contribute. She emphasised their strong passion for open source and the value they place on flexibility.
“That’s important because open source has actually influenced technology a lot in the last decade-plus,” she added.
According to the duo, India’s vast scale makes it unique, leading to distinct solutions that are both exciting and innovative.
At Google I/O Connect Bengaluru 2024 on July 17, the tech firm launched a nationwide GenAI Hackathon, a three-month event in collaboration with MeitY Startup Hub and Startup India.
Initiatives like this provide a unique platform to bring together multiple parties—government, developers, individuals, and even businesses—for co-innovation.
“In the past, most of our hackathons were either organically conducted within enterprises, focusing on domain-specific or company-specific problems. Now, we are expanding these events so that innovation can occur on an even larger scale,” Natarajan remarked.
Goldberg believes that it’s a “great time to be a developer” because there are some very interesting and challenging problems to solve.
(The lead image was updated.)
Edited by Jyoti Narayan