The Secrets Inside Google Cloud’s Growth with Sarah Kennedy, Vice President Google Cloud Marketing

Is cost a big issue for AI at a meta level? And what I mean is, a year ago, we're like, oh my God, we're never going to be able to afford everything, anything so expensive. But everything, not only is everything getting cheaper, but we're getting better as developers, as users. We are actually less wasteful of resources.

Bingo.

So like the scale-ups I work with, the ones at $100 million or above, honestly, I don't hear a lot of worries about cost anymore. But what are you hearing in general or at the CISO office around cost versus ROI?

Cost is always obviously top of mind for CIOs, but I don't think they're as worried about that as they are falling behind and making sure that they've got the right resources to experiment and to build and learn and test because they're relying like at least a lot of our customers, they're relying on us to figure out how do you optimize the compute, the storage and the processing power and the cost of the TPUs that are powering a lot of these models. We are obsessively worried about that in a good way.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another SaaSter recording of our SaaSter What's new podcast. We're so excited to be joined by Sarah Kennedy, who's the VP of Google Cloud Marketing. We have been long-term, long-year partners with Google Cloud. Excited to see them back at SaaSware Annual again this year. You guys have Next coming up. You guys are growing like crazy. There's a lot going on at both Google Cloud and Google. So one of the very first things we want to dive into for today between you and then Jason M. Lemkin, who's here, our SaaSware CEO and founder as well, is Google Cloud has been on a tear, right? Jason has written it up on Saastr.com. You guys are growing 30% just in the last quarter alone at the time of this recording. Might be more by the next time we do a check-in. Can you share with us just for the Saastr community and audience what's driving a little bit of that growth from your perspective on the inside?

What have you seen?

Awesome.

Thanks, Amelia. Thanks, Jason, for having me. First of all, it's great to be here and to chat with you all today, but Yeah, gosh, Google Cloud is growing fast. I'm actually— it's my 5th year at Google, and I think when we started, we were at a $12 billion run rate, and now, as you said, it's more than tripled. And it's an incredible journey right now that we're in the middle of, and especially in just the AI wave that has taken over all of our worlds and lives. But it's the core components really of Google's AI stack that set us apart. And that's everything from the world-class infrastructure that we have at our data centers all over the world. I just got to visit one for the first time a few weeks ago, and it was magical. And just seeing the incredible cooling technology and some of the ways that we drive efficiency, it's just— it's hard to appreciate until you're physically in that venue in that moment. But it's also then the powerful platform that we provide hundreds of different AI models through, from world-leading models. And it's not just Gemini models, it's Anthropic, it's Llama, it's so many of the other models out there to give people choice and access to everything through a single platform that's Vertex AI for us. And then also our Gemini models. Obviously, we want to have the world's very best and most powerful models, and we're doing that. But we're also doing that all with the privacy and security protections that are true to who Google is, built in very much from the start. So I think when we combine really that level of just innovation, the choice and flexibility we're giving our customers, it's a recipe for growth. And that's why we've seen that massive tear over the last— really in the last few years.

Sarah, can I push on that a little more? Just because you are thinking about it from a marketing perspective, I would say the vast majority of startups I work with are running part of their infrastructure on Google Cloud, right? For sure. But sell a little harder, but more specifically, what I mean is you're gaining market share. And yes, there's AI and I want to spend the rest of our time talking about AI because honestly, it's the only thing anybody wants to talk about, but be both objective but a proponent. Why are you gaining share? But there's, you don't gain share at this scale, right? Unless there's there's 2 or 3 core reasons folks come in and they just pick Google, at least for more of their budget, if not 100%, because we are in a heterogeneous world. But why are you gaining share?

A lot of times, Jason, we have customers who will come in and move one workload over, and we— because again, we started out with our core tenets of who Google Cloud is, we wanted to provide choice and we didn't want it to be this all or nothing. You have to move everything to Google on day 1 or not. And so a lot of what happened over the years is that especially in the last 3 to 4 years, we won a lot of business just with single, mostly like modern app workloads. For example, people would come over and build a net new app on Google Cloud, start to work with us and see how powerful actually that relationship was. And what you're now seeing in the last 1 to 2 years are all of those who 3 to 4 years ago took a bet on us and then have started to migrate more and more workloads over the like more recent 18 to 24 months. And with AI, they're looking at it. We, we were the, we were the third place player for a long time in the cloud space, but we really are the first choice when it comes to AI. So now when all of those CIOs and CTOs had started to consider, now what do I do? They're getting pressure from their boards. Who is the player that actually can keep me the farthest ahead of the curve? Almost all of them came to us, whether they were already working with us for their cloud infrastructure, compute, storage, et cetera. They came to us to actually ask the question first, what should I be doing with AI? And I would say, if you think about the power of what's happening across all of Google. We run some of the most sophisticated compute infrastructure in the world, answering billions of search queries, having streaming millions of hours of YouTube videos. We have 7 products that reach more than 2 billion users. That's just like crazy. And the answer to our customers is very simple when they look at who they're wanting to partner with. And as we're infusing AI into YouTube, into search, they want to come to use all the same technology and infrastructure that's been available to Google for the years. And so that, that's where I think We're winning business, we're building credibility, but we're most importantly keeping them ahead of the curve. And that's how we're winning and growing right now.

Can I ask you one nerdy tactical GTM question? And I know that your team's big, but when I look at the public folks that talk about migrating workflows over, we often see it's like a 7 to 10 year journey. Yeah. Because you'll migrate one workflow and then two, and then you'll often see some of the pure play infrastructure players, it'll be like 8 years until they maximize out an account. So question for you, having seen all of it. With the sales team and the GTM team? Like, how do you get it just right so you remain super customer-centric? Because if you're in sales, I might love to— I might push a little too hard. Bring everything up for tomorrow, Sarah. How do you help the team manage that? Because it could be the better half a decade, right?

Yeah. I honestly think we're playing the long game, and I think the sales team fully appreciates that. And we think about our investment and time spent with customers as the payout doesn't happen immediately, nor should it, because they have to build trust. They also have to learn, and we have to figure out what it is that we have to help support them with to learn to then migrate. And so there's a ton of work we do right now that's around just training and how do we think about investing in their developer community within those companies? How are we educating them? How are we bringing them along on the journey? Because it's one thing to sell something to a CIO or a CTO, but it's a darn big nother to go deep into the org and figure out how you actually get a lot of those developers may— many of them are certainly certified in using other cloud platforms if they're not already using Google. So it's a long game and it's actually something we talk about this a lot. It's— you don't see this immediate return necessarily from investing in students, but it's the right thing for the future of where cloud and AI are going.

You talked about the CIO and together with Google Cloud training the developers on the team, which actually I haven't lived too much versus the classic developer bringing it in and saying to the boss and the CIO, I've made this decision, please approve it. How has that changed the buying pattern there? We go back to the old Twilio billboards, pre-everything on the 101, ask your developer, right? That was— yeah, it was, it was a powerful message, right? And it's really interesting to me how the CIO empowers the developers, right? And educates them versus, versus the other side.

It's so— it's especially apparent in the last couple of years that we've seen most CIOs, just like most CMOs, are going and looking to— it's whether it's your developer, like your most passionate developer who actually was already— has been working in AI and ML for a decade.

Yeah.

Now all of a sudden when your board's calling you, you're like, what the— they're going straight and it's a bottoms-up conversation where they're the ones bringing in which models are we going to test, how are we going to experiment with which AI platforms. It's almost primarily a developer-led motion in pretty much every environment. CIOs have to be accountable and responsible, but they're learning, they're being taught by their developers the things that they've been distant from for quite a while. And so that's a very—

it's—

for us, marketing to developers has always been important. It's never been more important though right now in this moment because that is a truly bottoms-up moment. And so That is— it's different from like the traditional historical approach of compute and storage when you're dealing with 8-digit, 9-digit deals in some cases of a massive— it's like procurement, the CFO, the CIO, they're the ones out there making some of those choices about their long-term cloud strategy and who's going to provide security, stability, and that, that, that runs so many different facets of their organizations. And that is not just a developer-led decision or motion, but AI frankly is. And that's an exciting actually time to be, I think, both a developer but also the CIOs who are learning from them. And they're probably also seeing a different path for succession planning based on just the passionate people leaning in. I mean, so we're seeing that shift and I think that's true in almost every function.

So it's interesting just from a marketing perspective, you're seeing a resurgence in the power of the developer making the decision in AI, right?

Absolutely.

And maybe if we're just talking about cloud in general outside of AI, maybe that's migrated to the CIO. These are big decisions, right? And the CIO So if I'm going to put more money into Google Cloud, just generically, that's a CIO-level decision. But if all the budget's going to AI, it's an interesting— it's not a tension, but it's a huge dynamic because so much budget's going to AI, right? So I guess it's empowering the developers more in the org.

It is. And I think, and I think they were empowered already with the cloud decision. I do think they were weighing in a lot and I think they were heavily weighting that. But it's when it's a 10-year, 5 to 10-year contract and commitment, it just it just gets bigger and the influencers and the decision makers that are involved in that buying decision just balloons versus AI is all— it's all experimental. And then yes, there's going to be the larger, bigger enterprise deals over time. We've got many of those too, but the developer usage is what's teaching us what the future of this platform and our product set and our models and our infrastructure really needs to look like.

Yeah, I can't— I'm sure there are many that are able, but I can't imagine most CIOs can keep up with the pace of change of models. It's fast, right?

I work at Google and it's hard.

Even at Google it's hard, right? Even in Google it's gotta be hard, right?

It is.

What came out yesterday?

Literally. And I, we have, fortunately we use AI to summarize AI news and announcements. It's just like such a, like a meta environment in that respect. But it's the pace of change is, it's cool though. It's what a time to be working in tech and AI and what an exciting time for everybody to figure out how can you leverage this to your benefit in your job, in your personal life. It's just the possibilities are endless.

Yeah. Can we tie it for a minute? Let's tie it to B2B and SaaS. Yeah. And maybe the big deal with Salesforce.

Yeah.

But how big was it on— $2.5 billion or something like that?

In the big B's. Yes.

Before we get there, I just want to— when I was watching the earnings call with Marc yesterday, or maybe it was CNBC, just to your point, he was so excited.

Yes.

Oh my God. I haven't seen him like this in a decade.

And that's saying a lot because Marc gets excited about a lot of things.

But it was authentic. But the thing going to your point, like people at Google are excited. Yeah, he can get up there and sell, even if they shrink this quarter, he's going to get up there and tell you it's the best thing that he's ever seen. But you can smell off this, smell the authenticity in someone that's been doing it for 2 decades. And it was rejuvenating for him, right? Rejuvenating.

It's an exciting deal when he's placing a massive bet and we are too. Like, it's— yeah, I love these kind of partnerships because there's so much good that can be brought to the world, frankly, whenever 2 companies of this size and scale come together with that authenticity. And that's what it's all about. And I Listen, this, it's been a journey with Salesforce to get to this point, but the deal that we announced, it spans everything from cloud infrastructure to Agentic AI, customer service, collaboration, everything. And now all of the CRM as well as Agentforce inside of Salesforce are going to now be available on Google Cloud. But this is actually, a lot of this came from, it's like a customer-led thing for both of us. A lot of the enterprises who were already working with Salesforce and already working with Google demanded and said, this is where that demand came from. It's we want to run Salesforce on Google's infrastructure because of the security features that we offer, because of the compute and storage and the efficiency and all the other things that are the goodness of it. And when we come together, we bring them more value in doing that. But also them adding Gemini models to AgentForce is going to be a huge unlock. I think everybody's really excited with the potential of that. And I have been from day one when I saw Mark announce AgentForce. Okay, what are we going to do together? Because this is really— the potential there is endless. But having access to Google AI to power their agents for all the companies that work with Salesforce already, that's going to be a big unlock. But also it's— this is all about letting customers work where they want to work. For— we were just talking about this with Workspace, like for years, like large enterprises have had a lot of different opportunity and choice when it comes to collaboration and productivity platforms, but typically only two of them people really want to use, and that's Google Workspace and Slack. And so to create a better experience for our joint customers there, we're going to be integrating those platforms. I personally I have been waiting for this for a long time. Accessing Google Drive files inside of Slack, accessing Google Calendar within Slack, bringing Slack and Google Chat together. I think this is like a marriage in heaven, those two products, because most of the users who are passionate about user experience, those are the two products that they already use and want to use more of. And so bringing that together for the first time is going to be really cool.

Oh, just— I hadn't realized things like application integrating chat in Slack is pretty interesting, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it is funny as, uh, as the world has changed over the last few years, I live more and more in Google. I always did, but more. I don't want to go to— honestly, I don't want to go to Slack. It's a tax on my time. It used to be wonderful and there's no knock on Slack. It's a great business, but it's become another browser or another app I have to do. And I just, I want to simplify my life. So running that, even that integration would actually be a game changer for us. Yeah. Okay, let me ask you one other nerdy question on this, but just my— I'm interested but ignorant. The first point, the Google Salesforce application integration, we could spend a whole bunch of time on. I'm interested, but at the first one, when you talked about running Salesforce on Google Cloud, if I've got that right, and that— what does that mean? And then I'll ask you a follow-up question, but I get— you get— I'm running on Google Cloud. It's highly secure. I've got my data, but Salesforce is pretty secure. There's some pretty good enterprises running Salesforce. I haven't heard a lot of complaints, right? So how— I'm just very interested. I've purchased both, right? I have a massive commitment to both. I see why I might want to pool my data, but what's the real driver? Like, why am I waking up and this is like a P1 priority to, to not have isolated clouds?

I do think security is at the heart of it. I'm going to be honest.

Is it? Okay.

Yeah. And listen, it may be different for very large enterprises versus small businesses that are thinking about different problems that they're solving when they're, when they're actually asking for this. But we've seen this in a lot of places. It's number one, where your data lives and how secure it is going to be even more important in the next year. And that'll be true. I'll say that every single year until I retire. Yeah, but it's never been more important than right now. Number one. Number two, everything you do with AI is built around where your data estate lives. And so that is the— that's the heart and soul of what companies are going to be able to do to unlock even more value. And when you think about the kind of data that lives inside of Salesforce and then powering that with the superpowers of Google's infrastructure, even being able to train custom models and using BigQuery for that, and that being your storage layer of your cloud ecosystem. Yeah, it's just much more seamless. And again, the security layer around what you do with AI will become— those two things cannot be separated anymore. And so that's, I think, a big part of the choice and the decisions a lot of these CIOs are making is Who do I really trust from here forward to secure my data and to be the foundation of everything in every application I'm going to leverage, whether it's through Agentforce or whether it's building their own custom agents on top of Google Cloud? That's never been more critical.

Yeah, it is. It is. First of all, security is more important in the age of AI, right? At the end of the day, I think half the CIO's decisions are about security one way or the other.

They are.

Half, right? If CIOs are looking and saying, listen, AI is changing the world. We've standardized a lot of our work on Google Cloud and yeah, we're investing mass amounts in Salesforce, but we want that data to reside on Google Cloud. AI is the big driver here, right? It's heightening the concerns here, right, of where my data lives. Let me ask you just one follow-up on that. When you're talking with CIOs and senior folks in the office, are they asking about agents? Are they asking about workflow? What's their language for AI at the application level? Are they all talking about agents the same way we are on LinkedIn and X, or are they describing this in other ways?

It widely varies. They're, they're, some of them are still talking about it the way that they have been because they've been deeply investing in this for years, like automation, because a lot of it was just standard automation, but the intelligence layer on top of it and the autonomy of agents and how they think about the, some of them are more advanced than others and their competitors are driving them to be, and that's actually a healthy thing that they're talking about it in the language of agents. Giving them that language as a CIO to partner with their peers is a really important part of the value we bring, and we do that behind the scenes with them and educate them on— it's not just about what language they want to use, it's about the language they need to use to be able to communicate with less technical peers who are all the business case, use case drivers of a lot of the investment they're making in AI right now.

Got it. Yeah, maybe one last question on the CEO, and then maybe we can just have a little fun and talk about Google Next and anything else you want to hit. Is in the real world, when you're talking with CEOs and stuff, I have my own opinions here, but I'm not talking to CEOs.

Yeah.

Is cost a big issue for AI at a meta level? And what I mean is a year ago we're like, oh my God, we're never going to be able to afford everything, anything. It's so expensive. But everything, not only is everything getting cheaper, but we're getting better as developers, as users. We are actually less wasteful of resources. So like the scale-ups I work with, the ones at $100 million or above, honestly, I don't hear a lot of worries about cost anymore. They've gotten good at it. But what are you hearing in general or at the CISO office around cost versus ROI?

Cost is always obviously top of mind for CIOs, but I don't think they're as worried about that as they are falling behind and making sure that they've got the right resources to experiment and to build and learn and test because they're relying like, at least a lot of our customers, they're relying on us to figure out how do you optimize the compute, the storage and the processing power and the cost of the TPUs that are powering a lot of these models. We are obsessively worried about that in a good way. That's why when I visited the data center that I mentioned, I learned so much about the way that we are— we have the most efficient data centers in the world and specifically the way that we're training models and using TPUs and the cooling systems provide less power surge and power pull for us to our data centers. That makes it just cheaper and it allows us to actually do more. And that's something that we don't talk about it that much, but it's so central to the future of cost optimization for AI.

When you get the AI that's that accessible, I feel like we're going to enter an era maybe next year where there's no limits. It's at the application level. I'm not saying that ML engineers can't consume every CPU and GPU, but what I mean is at the application level, I think an era is going to come where it's going to be so cost effective that we can do almost anything we want at the application level, as long as we're smart about how we use it. Like no limits.

Totally.

No limits. Why can't my app do everything? Not just a little bit, right? No limits. Okay. One last nerdy marketing question, just because you brought up, I'm curious now, YouTube. Yeah. So YouTube is now, I mean, I live in YouTube. Okay. I live in YouTube as a consumer. Like I've moved off pretty much everything, but honestly, the quality is so high. Does that help your brand in the enterprise? And, or does it help it with developers that want to pick AI? How do you tie, and we're creators, like right now we're doing a podcast and actually YouTube is the number one outlet for podcasts now. It's past Apple and Spotify and everybody else. So how does that tie into developer choices? The fact the fact that we live in YouTube.

A lot of the conversation we have internally across, as we call them, PAs, but YouTube is our product areas. So YouTube and Cloud, we spend a lot of time together thinking about that. And YouTube running on Google Cloud and all the elements that go into that are really important for us to learn about scale for a lot of our other customers that are at the same scale. It's crazy. It's crazy.

No one has that. Yeah, no one has that in this country. No one will touch it.

Super cool. But to your point, like, We've actually dug a lot deeper into who are developers that are out there. They're talking about our technology and just on their own because they're just advocates that aren't official. They're not a part of some necessarily program, but they're the ones that are teaching people how to use technology and especially in AI. Like, we just started to see this explosion of new influencers in that space. And so we think about the creators and how we're able to actually build and bring value to them. Just like they're doing the same for us. And I think even, I take it even to the small business landscape. We just did a really cool, I say we, it's my peer and I've got envy of him because it was one of the coolest campaigns I think we've had in the 5 years that I've been here. But it's, it was called 50 States, 50 Stories, and it was a Google Workspace campaign where for the Super Bowl, they essentially went out and filmed 50 different small businesses, and they then in their local markets put them in that state's local media market. They put them on in the Super Bowl. So they all had their own Super Bowl ad. But the cool thing, I was actually looking in the last few days, all the YouTube, like, sharing that we did across all of those stories has picked up even more after the Super Bowl because those owners, those small businesses started sharing it, and now their stories are being told and being amplified through YouTube. And that was a, that was something that we worked on behind the scenes with that team as well as figuring out how do we basically take the massive spotlight that's on Google and give that stage to our customers as well as the developers who are the ones out there actually building the future of AI and tech.

I love it. I love it. Okay. Google Next 2025. When is it?

It is April 8th to the 11th.

April 8th to the 11th. Okay.

Yep.

So I want to talk about Google Next, but before we talk about it specifically, I got a couple of questions. It's not what it was, the commitment to events and field. Is the ROI still there? Is it better? Is it worse than a couple of years ago? What have you learned at a meta level? What have you learned about the ROI?

Listen, I was wrong, uh, 3 years ago is what I will tell you. I did not think that physical events were gonna come back with the roar that this one has. And what I will tell you is I think there's a few different variables at play. We were, I think it was in 2022, it was our first attempt to come back to any even small-scale audience. We had about 250 people in our New York office, and we did a 24-hour live broadcast. That was our first foray back into a physical but hybrid digital moment. And next year, Thomas had a vision. Our CEO of Cloud was like, listen, I don't think that we can miss the opportunity to bring our partner ecosystem into the fold even more than we ever have before. So we went to Moscone, we did that there, and that was about 18,000 people. And then we decided the next year we were going to double the size of the event because the demand was there and people were actually like clamoring for it. People are hungry for connection. People are hungry to actually come and like actually learn in a collective shared space because you just don't get that. Everything's so transactional online these days and video conferences, etc., just being in rooms with humans even for a few days, even in Vegas, it is, it's actually really special. It is, I would say, a distraction. It's the most worthy distraction I could imagine for my team. And it's actually a rallying moment. And Salesforce does this beautifully. They use Dreamforce as their forcing function for new product launches. The hilarity of this moment we're in right now, there's no such thing as an annual or a quarterly launch. We're launching and shipping weekly, like biweekly. It's crazy, but it's also a great rallying cry to bring so much to the momentum and making sense of it for people in a room together. And that's what Next is really all about. And I think we're going to have 32,000 people on site this year. We're going to have 4,500 customer meetings. So if you can do the math on that, that's actually the biggest beast. But that's one of the largest investments we make is the space where we have our customer engagement center and people can come and ask questions, talk to our sales leaders, talk to our engineering leaders that they don't really have to see in person as much. All of our partners coming together, we're going to have well over 350 partner sponsors on site. Our expo show floor is like insane, but I just get really excited. It's going to be really a magical few days.

Just two questions. One, a nerdy marketing question, then one meta follow-up on, on Google Cloud Next. 4,500 customer meetings, you said, right? By customers, do you mean prospects and customers or existing? And how do you think about load balancing at a huge event? You're spending probably— you spend more than a year to plan Next, right?

Yep.

What ratio of the energy is into keeping our customers together versus helping to close deals?

It's every customer is also a future deal is better than anyone. When with a portfolio as big as Google, we've got a ton of people that come in that have been existing, quote, existing customers in the traditional marketing definition who are greenfield or prospects in the AI space. Most people are, right? Because it's so new. And so we're, it's like people we have deep relationships with that we've been working with for years and could have massive investments already with Google, but they're all, they're coming into it with fresh eyes, a new approach to now what do we do together when it comes to AI? That's the majority of the conversations that we have on site. We don't like subselect and carve out things just for prospects or customers in that way. We want to, we treat everyone as though they're on an educational journey and we meet them where they are in that moment. I would also say developers are the most important thing for us this year on site, more than ever before. We had, I think, 9,000 or 10,000 last year, and this year we're going to have about 15,000 to 17,000 on site as a part of the 32,000. Google interestingly has no— we have overwhelming demand from business decision makers and CXOs, and we want them there, but we want even more to have their developer teams join them and be on site and be a part of that experience. So you'll see even more this year space that's carved out for hands-on labs, training, learning, all of that. Startups are almost like they're a huge driver of attendance for us just organically, because that's where— that's one of the few times they can all come together in like large scales. We'll have thousands of startup founders and leaders as a part of those organizations be there on site together. We have a very a dedicated startup program as well for them.

Yeah, that was the penultimate question I was going to ask you was whether the attendee composition has changed, but it's interesting. You're going to have 50% developers, right? That's, it harkens back. I remember going to the first Google I/O. Again, I'm dating myself. I felt like everyone was a developer except me there, but if you're going long, you want it to be half your folks, right? All right. The one question I thought, I didn't want to run too long. The one question I would, the tech, the quantitative version I was going to ask you is how content's changing, like what percent of Your content's going to be AI next. But tell me about trends.

Yeah. So a big trend that I'm loving right now, and I'm obsessed, like I tell my team all the time, put your hands on the tech every day and you'll, and it reveals to you what's possible in a way that's impossible to just study, right? But art, the thinking models and the deep research models, that's, I'm nerding out on it right now. And even the live interaction with Gemini is fascinating. So In AI Studio, like, I kid you not, for this podcast, I go into— there's the streaming feature inside of AI Studio. I basically show it what's happening on my webcam, and I ask Gemini, what do I need to adjust about this for recording for a podcast? It's, huh, okay, I would adjust actually the— right now the lighting is making it look like you're tired. And I'm like, rude, but okay, thanks, Gemini. It goes, is move the— move your lighting like over to the directly in front of you. And then it's, your background is too cluttered or whatever. And it was just like I actually had a conversation. I was like, okay, I go, what? I was like, where should I put this versus that? And it's, I don't know, I'll wait till you decide. But it's actually giving me tips on different things. And it's fun because it's like me actually talking to anybody else on a live, like, broadcast in a sense. It's a really interesting interaction. But the thinking and deep research models, like, I recently, we had a table read for our keynote, and I ran the recording of that through our thinking model, and it was fascinating. So what it tells you, you click down and you see basically in the thinking model, What is it doing? It's more of the how and the why, not just the what. And so it gives me this list of stuff it's going through. I'm going to understand the persona and the task. I'm going to do an initial pass-through of the video and give you the big picture of what, what's my general impression, what's the tone, the style. Then it does another pass and says, I'm going to do focused viewing and I'm going to give you tips on structure, flow, content, delivery, stage presence, all that stuff. So that's like a big trend right now that I'm digging into with my team and I'm using it heavily leading up to Next.

Yeah, it's crazy. Google was so early to AI to the extent that we almost had to hide it, right? And if we go back in time, one of the most magical AI apps, not really generative, is Photos.

Oh yeah.

What Photos could do early at mass scale, 'cause there's so much data, so many images.

Totally.

But you, the, the thinking was hidden, right? But all of a sudden, any photo you want, any, and it will automatically create your album, automatically find the right photo from years ago, automatically detect things, right? Now today, we wanna see the thinking. We want every app to be responsible. Responsive. We want to talk to every app. Like, every app has to listen to us today, doesn't it?

Totally.

But we— Google, there's Google and so much AI, but we used to have to hide it because we were scared to talk to our apps.

I know.

We want to see how they think. We don't just want to talk to them, we want to see how they think.

100%. And I think what's fascinating right now too is that AI tools are simultaneously getting more capable and also easier to use. And that live interaction, making them feel more human and almost you feeling more human in that interaction is a really special, magical thing. It's a user experience challenge, but it's also just the deep technology that has to exist behind the scenes to make that possible and the power of the models behind it. I'm blown away every day.

Yeah, I think we're missing— AI is moving so quickly. Like, we've been talking a lot the last year about firing customer success agents and automation there. It's not that. It's that I want to talk to my app. And I, sometimes I want to talk to a human, right? Because the talking gets— every app should be responsive. I should be able to talk to every single app and I should be able to talk to humans when that's appropriate in escalation. Right. But we're missing the point. It is great. It is finally now great to talk to apps.

Yeah.

Way better.

I love it. Okay. Sarah, thank you for so much time. Bring your developer to Google Next along with you. It's the 50/50 rule. So if your business people are going to come, you got to bring your developer. It will be great. You'll see Google Cloud at SaaS Annual once again, which is terrific. And I'm looking forward to doing this again in 12 months, and AI is going to be like, it's going to, we're going to almost laugh at this conversation because it's going to be so different in 12 months.

I can't even imagine where we'll be, but I'm super excited to see where it takes us.

All right. Thanks again, Sarah.

Thanks, Jason.