Google Cloud: AI Agents in Action | Piyush Saxena, HCLTech

Piyush Saxena, HCLTech

Check out Felix AI Agentic for Gemini Enterprise: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/agentfinder/product/888b2241-722d-4426-b635-2553cb29e42d In this Google Cloud AI Agents in Action interview, Quantum Metric CEO Mario Ciabarra joins theCUBE’s John Furrier from the NYSE studio to explore how enterprises are shifting from digital self-service to autonomous, agent-driven experiences. Ciabarra explains how agents are beginning to complete tasks end-to-end on behalf of users – and why “getting digital experiences perfect” matters more than ever as agents have no brand loyalty and will abandon friction instantly. He shares how Quantum Metric is “releasing a new product” to show what agents are doing on company websites, and why precise data is essential to prevent hallucinations as teams use agentic AI to improve customer journeys across banking, airlines, telco, healthcare, gaming, retail and more. The discussion connects directly to Google Cloud’s ecosystem – covering the AI Agent Marketplace, Felix AI built on Google Cloud and how BigQuery and Gemini Enterprise underpin openness, technical depth and trust for agent-to-agent orchestration. The conversation dives into real enterprise outcomes: moving from probabilistic to deterministic answers (e.g., “Why are sales down today?”) by orchestrating signals across marketing, merchandising, APIs and even weather; evolving employee experiences where a single interface (Gemini Enterprise) executes tasks across multiple back-end systems; and a mesh-style agentic platform that integrates systems such as Quantum Metric and Salesforce while routing through agents instead of point-to-point integrations. Ciabarra shares noteworthy marketplace metrics – about one-third of overall revenue flowing through Google Cloud Marketplace, faster collections for the CFO, and nearly 60% of net-new revenue influenced by GCP – highlighting co-sell momentum. Looking ahead, he describes how websites will personalize and improve themselves autonomously, powered by data on both human and agent interactions, with governance and privacy as core design principles.

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Piyush Saxena, HCLTech

Piyush Saxena

SVP & Global Head, Google Cloud Business Unit HCLTech

TheCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Piyush Saxena, SVP and global head of the Google Ecosystem Business Unit at HCLTech, for the “Google Cloud: AI Agents in Action Series.” Saxena shares how enterprises move from isolated models to coordinated, autonomous agents. The conversation centers on model choice, orchestration and full-stack integration.

Saxena explains that enterprises are no longer experimenting, they are demanding maturity and measurable return. He points to tight integrations across Gemini Enterprise, Agent Development Kit, Vertex AI and ... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What are customers looking for from partners like HCLTech and Google Cloud when adopting AI/agentic solutions, and what industry-specific challenges affect adoption? add

What collaborations, integrations, or initiatives are being pursued with Google? (Yes—the excerpt answers this by describing work as both a customer and partner, product integrations, and the partner ecosystem.) add

How does Google Cloud support enterprises in adopting and scaling AI agents, and which products and capabilities does it provide for agent development, deployment, orchestration, and integration with data platforms? add

How has collaboration with Google Cloud and use of the Google Cloud Marketplace enabled the release, distribution, and customer deployment of agents? add

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Piyush Saxena, HCLTech

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John Furrier

>> Hello, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, co-host here in our New York Stock Exchange studio. In this series we are exploring AI investments. Are they delivering insights and are they driving action? This conversation is shifting in AI from models and tools to outcomes and autonomy. We're moving beyond the applications, not just informed to intelligent agents that perform. Welcome to the AI Agents Action Series brought to you by Google Cloud, where leaders go beyond the hype to talk about where the leaders are investing, building autonomous agents, solving real world business problems. Piyush Saxena, SVP of global head of Google Cloud Business Unit HCLTech is here. Thanks for coming on the program. Piyush, what's your point of view on the agentic opportunity for your customers in the industry? We see a lot MCP, we're seeing a lot of agents, a lot of autonomy. Some of it's not so much trusted. How are enterprises and customers reacting? What are they working on? What are their keys to success?

Piyush Saxena

>> Let me start by introducing my organization. I am representing HCLTech. We are a leading partner for Google Cloud from the solutions and execution capabilities point of view. We have the privilege of spending a lot of time with the customers globally in terms of defining their agentic journey. A lot of these customers are looking at HCLTech and Google Cloud as a partner in this journey. And there are essentially three things they're focusing on. Now they're looking for a partner who brings a very mature AI stack. Wherein you have the AI model, which is what they're betting on to keep pace with the ever-changing market dynamics. And they're looking at how these models can help them keep pace with these changes. The second area they're looking for is full stack competency and solution capabilities, and also how these models can extend to the partner ecosystem. Which is where I believe Google Cloud has a very strong differentiation compared to some of the other models which are available in the market today. I think the third critical area is, they're looking for technology that enables measurable outcomes and delivers a very clear return on investment. So in summary, AI maturity, comprehensiveness of the solution, and outcomes and return on investment is what customers are expecting. If we talk about the industry, it is not too different. A lot of customers are investing dollars with the expectation that they will be able to define very clear outcomes, which will result in very clear return on investment. But if you see, and let me just talk about some of the industries, financial services, life sciences, healthcare customers, there are security, governance, compliance requirements, which they have to keep pace with for looking at the agency deployments. If you look at manufacturing customer at the Edge, the deployments are not happening at the pace at which they are expecting. But as we move through, I will talk about how Google Cloud and HCLTech are helping us address a number of these issues.

John Furrier

>> I love the Edge. I love the AI applications, AI native applications coming on. Can you share how you're partnering with Google? They have a lot of AI growth. Obviously Gemini, everyone's seeing the results of that. What else are you working on? What are some of the product integrations? What are some of the cool things you're doing with Google?

Piyush Saxena

>> Look, we work with Google both as a customer, as well as a partner. There are two essential things which we look at from both these angles. very interoperable and open stack integrated products to help accelerate outcomes. And second thing is, the extended partner ecosystem that is open to feedback and has the will to act fast. A lot of times we can see challenges, we are able to communicate to partners, but the partners are slow in terms of acting on these. So these are the two key things which Google has been addressing at a very rapid pace. Let me talk about the first one, which is integrations which Google has enabled across their products and how it impacts outcomes which we are delivering for the customers. Google Cloud, as we know, is offering full stack products and solutions which can help customers accelerate their agentic journey. Let me start with the Gemini enterprise, which is the front door for agents, as we call it. It's kind of an agent consumption platform. As organizations start adopting agents at scale, they will face the challenges of things like agent discovery or agent access controls or ability to leverage agents from a single platform. Now these are key things. When we are working with the customers, these are the use cases which are coming. And Gemini Enterprise offers extremely powerful multimodal search and summarization capabilities with its associated connectors. It is also further complemented by an out of the box agents provided by Google. So service providers like HCLTech, we can further enrich these agents by developing custom-made agents for specific business personas when we are engaging with the customers. And all these agents can be surfaced using Gemini enterprise as an interface. There are a lot of other capabilities which Google Cloud offers solutions like agent development kit for agent orchestration, which is extremely critical if we have to deliver an industry use case, which is multi-agent ticket nature, agent orchestration becomes very core to that solution. Gemini Enterprise for customer experience, which is conversational multimodal agent, Vertex AI agent builder or agent engine for agent deployment. I think one of my most favorite is the generative media suite for media creation. A lot of our media customers are extensively utilizing this product. And of course, the super powerful Gemini LLM. All these agentic capabilities built on top of Google Cloud data capabilities ranging from products like BigQuery, Bigtable, AlloyDB, provide seamless integration into the Vertex AI platform and agent runtime environment. This creates a very comprehensive solution to deliver industry outcomes to our customers. Let me talk about the second aspect, which is the product feedback which I talked about. We have the privilege of working mostly with the Google product teams on a number of products that I talked about. We are working extensively on products where we are launch partners like GDC, A2A, DK, Gemini enterprise. And a lot of times when we are working with customers, there are improvement areas which we are able to provide as a feedback back to the product teams. And we have seen very strong action being taken in terms of incorporating those product feedbacks into the product roadmap at a very fast pace. So those are the two things which differentiate Google as a partner for us.

John Furrier

>> That's great stuff. We're seeing a lot of acceleration of value creation in the market. How are you guys in the combined Google Cloud solutions creating that value to customers? What's unique about it? What specific use cases do you see with Google Cloud? And what does that unlock for value extraction?

Piyush Saxena

>> Look, we are going to the market with joined Google Cloud solutions, there are two areas which we are targeting. First one we call the value stream transformation, where we focus on the industry use cases and outcomes. And the second one is service transformation with the focus on horizontal use cases, typically service improvement or cost takeout. Those are the two areas where we are engaging extensively with our customers. Now, let me take a couple of examples across these two streams. Value stream transformation, we have been working with a manufacturing customer in North America to deliver one of these value stream use cases. We developed an interactive conversational AI assistant. We have named it AskHub. All the factory floor engineers, and this is powered by Gemini Enterprise. What this does is, this gives easy access to the factory floor engineers to ask questions like... And these engineers are on the factory floor, right? So they can ask questions like, are the talk fluctuations indicative of gearbox failure? Or are there temperature readings in the factory environment suggestive of future breakdown in the critical machines? Right now, without AskHub, it is very difficult for these engineers to get answers to these questions. They have to make multiple calls and it takes a lot of time and reduces the efficiency. But AskHub, powered by Gemini Enterprise, has helped us address this skill gap where the engineers are now more empowered. This has also helped us reduce the machine downtime because they can take quick actions, do faster root cause analysis, and has also increased the engineer efficiency. They are more productive now and therefore reduce the overall factory operations cost for the customer. The second use case is the predictive defect detection which uses Google Cortex manufacturing data engine at the backend, Vertex AI and the agentech framework. What this does is, it helps identify any predictive defects and also provides corrective actions, which then the engineers can evaluate and implement in the environment. For this particular customer, it has helped us save 120,000 US dollars per factory per year by implementing this kind of a solution. You can imagine the kind of savings which we are able to bring in for these customers. That was value stream transformation. Another area is service transformation, which I talked about. There are multiple use cases around service improvement, things like root cause analysis, effective financial operations, we call it FinOps, or even IT chatbots to optimize manual efforts of the operations team. These are the areas where we are utilizing Google products extensively to deliver outcomes.

John Furrier

>> I love that operational efficiency. You have some opportunities to create those applications. We've been seeing the rise of agents in production, a lot of enterprise execution going on right now, also the rise of the AI agent marketplace. How are you guys extending your reach to your customers with Google Cloud's AI agent marketplace?

Piyush Saxena

>> Interestingly, we have been working with the Google Cloud team since last April. We have released 300 agents on Google Marketplace, focused on a combination of industry and horizontal use cases, which I earlier shared. And you know what this has helped us effectively, is the customers have been able to get easy access to these ready-to-use agents through marketplace. This has also made this purchasing very convenient for the customers through their Google Cloud accounts. And a lot of non-technical users have now no-code low-code access, and they can create and deploy these agents in their environment just by going and reviewing these agents on the marketplace. Also, Marketplace is a very secure compliant and controlled environment. So our customers are very comfortable downloading and deploying any agents which are pre-verified, pre-validated by Google Cloud team along with the partners like HCLTech. We continue to build and release a number of agents on Google Marketplace based on the demand patterns we are seeing across industries. One more thing is that the marketplace uses A2A protocol, and this allows agents from different vendors to work together. So it's not only that I have to work only on Google Cloud technology, I can bring in agents from other partners and create industry use cases led agents. One of the customers we partnered with recently purchased and deployed a customer chatbot agent to address the end user queries from the marketplace. And similarly, a number of other customers are leveraging service transformation agents, which I earlier talked about, root cause analysis, FinOps agents, and number of more agents. At Google Cloud next, interestingly in April, we are showcasing a number of these agents jointly with our customers and Google Cloud team. So we'll be happy to engage there.

John Furrier

>> I really love the agents in the marketplace where you can get agents ready to go. It increases adoption, but it's also complimentary to the classic marketplace of systems and software. How have you guys been able to grow your business? And we've been following HCLTech for a generation in the cloud. Now you got the systems and the software, that's on the marketplace, and you got the agents you can buy. How has that changed your growth, your go-to-market? Obviously more adoption of agents creates that flywheel. How has it changed and what's some of the impact?

Piyush Saxena

>> Look, we have an existing base of our customers where we are proactively taking these solutions, but what marketplace enables and offers us is the accelerated sales cycle and easier procurement for our customers. This opens up a broader market for us. The more agents we publish, the more market share we are able to get through the Google Marketplace, which is a big differentiator. It effectively reduces our cost of sales. For the customers, it is easier purchase. They already have budgeted consumption, and therefore for me as a partner that also opens up the extended budget of the customer. Those are the two areas where my sales team is pretty excited in terms of taking this to the market. Also, when we work with the partnered teams, we are able to bring in co-marketing, co-selling with Google field sales representatives. We are able to do a lot of workshops and events where we are able to educate the customers and their employees to discover the potential solutions in this space. I think those two aspects where customers are getting direct access to marketplace, expanding our market coverage and extended collaboration with the Google field sales team, is really what is benefiting us.

John Furrier

>> Piyush, I love this story because we saw the greatness of cloud, now you got the greatness of agents and data coming together. The flywheel comes in, you get adoption with agents, they connect systems together. It's highly accelerated. It's like a product market fit and you get more revenue out of it. So it's a win-win. Any learnings that you have from this experience? Because I think this is going to be a standard execution, more product market fit with agents, agents get more adoption, adoptions drive more data, data drives more software. What's your reaction?

Piyush Saxena

>> I think the journey has been not so easy, I would say, both for the customers as well as for us as a partner. A couple of learnings which are top of my mind. One, we need to select a partner who is open to feedback and is agile enough to make these changes. Because the customers are very demanding, the market is unforgiving for organizations who are not willing to make these changes at a fast pace, and therefore a partner who's as nimble as Google Cloud always helps. They're very proactive in taking feedback both from the customers as well as partners and incorporating that in their product roadmap. Two, I believe for faster outcomes, one needs to align with the partner who has the full stack, and that makes things easier from the integration point of view, from the time to market point of view, and also in terms of making some of these changes to align with the customer expectations. I think those are the two key learnings.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. The HAA also gives you the security across domains, across workflows. Certainly a great example of ages in action, Piyush, great to have you on and congratulations for being a VIP partner at Google. Again, better together, combined value and the full stack, things go faster.

Piyush Saxena

>> Thank you so much, John, for having me.

John Furrier

>> Thank you for coming on. This is the Google Cloud series. AI agents in action, the game changing ways are here. It's not just tools and technology, it's outcomes, meaningful impact agents are having with the cloud scale, Google Cloud. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.