Google Cloud Next 2025 | Debashish Ghosh & Sriram Narasimhan, Wipro

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Sriram Narasimhan

SVP, Data Analytics

Wipro

Debashish Ghosh

Global Google Partnership Leader

Wipro

play_circle_outline Maximizing Business Success through Effective AI Transformation, Operations, and Delivery

play_circle_outline Google partnership and achievements

play_circle_outline AI explainability and human interaction

play_circle_outline Impact of AI on workforce and job roles

play_circle_outline Predictions for artificial general intelligence (AGI) by Google Cloud Next 2026

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Debashish Ghosh & Sriram Narasimhan, Wipro

Sriram Narasimhan

SVP, Data Analytics Wipro

Debashish Ghosh

Global Google Partnership Leader Wipro

Leverage AI Effectively: Insights from Wipro at Google Cloud Next 2025

Sriram Narasimhan, Vice President, and Debashish Ghosh, Head of Partnership, both from Wipro, discuss the future of AI at Google Cloud Next 2025. As leaders driving transformation at Wipro, they share strategic insights on utilizing Google's offerings to enhance operations and deliver superior outcomes.

In this insightful session hosted by theCUBE's Savannah Peterson and Dave Vellante, Narasimhan and Ghosh introduce their perspectives on effectively leveraging AI within e... Read more

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What strategies do you recommend for individuals or businesses looking to implement AI technology effectively? add

What achievements and partnerships has the speaker had with Google Cloud and what are the future goals for the partnership? add

What is the difference between AI and automation, and how can we ensure that the technology we are implementing truly involves artificial intelligence capabilities? add

What is the biggest transformation people who work with AI are experiencing and how will it impact their job roles in the future? add

What terms are expected to be used in the upcoming years in the context of artificial intelligence technology? add

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Debashish Ghosh & Sriram Narasimhan, Wipro

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, Google Cloud community, and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here midway through day one of our three days of coverage at the fabulous Google Cloud Next show. My name is Savannah Peterson, here with Dave Vellante. Next convo, we're going to be talking about leveraging AI effectively. I bet there's a few people curious about that right now.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, we're here in consultant's corner with the world power .

Savannah Peterson

>> We really are. We're getting a full lay of the land today. Without further ado, DG and Sri, thank you so much for coming to hang out with us today, gentlemen. Really appreciate it.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Thank you.

Debashish Ghosh

>> Thanks for having us.

Savannah Peterson

>> A very busy day. Sri, you help a lot of people on the journey of figuring out how to plan for the future, how to build for the future. I can imagine you get the question, how do I leverage AI effectively, probably 25 times a day. What are you telling people? How are you guiding them?

Sriram Narasimhan

>> See, I think first of all, while there's a lot of excitement on AI, everyone wants to do AI as well. First, I ask them to calm down. I tell them, Hey, keep taking it very simple and take it in three steps. Do you want to transform your business, which they call it has change the game? Do you want to operate better? Or do you want to deliver better? I ask them these three pointed questions that kind of brings a focus in terms of where they want to use AI. And once this clarity is there, then I go further in terms of how I can use Google to either change the game or operate better or deliver better. That is sort of, I try to simplify things for AI.

Savannah Peterson

>> Keep calm and simplify on is essentially what I'm hearing from you. We were just in London at a gig and you're definitely-

Sriram Narasimhan

>> But it's not easy. You can just say it, but it's not as easy to simplify it.

Savannah Peterson

>> So I love that you have your mantras. They're very clearly outlined, like you just mentioned. What does it mean... Well, let's break those down a little bit. What does it mean to deliver better right now?

Sriram Narasimhan

>> So deliver better is you run your IT shop. How do you apply... We saw a lot of in the keynote this morning as well. How do you automate the delivery of your IT solutions with Google? So how do you automate code, code generation, backup code generation? How do you simplify your support tasks with AI? That is what I mean by deliver AI. For example, we have this big retail client in Germany. I was in Germany last week, by the way. So I was in Germany last week and we are doing a lot of work with them. They said that they take forever. They take about 30, 35 people to deliver something, and then a ticket on an average takes about two days to resolve, and the team works in the same ticket and again and again. So what we have done in Google is we cut down a time taken to resolve tickets, the time taken to find the root cause of the tickets, and the number of people that you need actually to do this work is coming down. Now, I want to be very careful here. The people who we are bringing down, they can do something else better. That is how I use them, and the client is super happy as well. And thanks to Google, we are able to do it from a deliver better standpoint. The results are amazing from what we've done here.

Dave Vellante

>> So DG, your role is the Google partnership predominantly?

Debashish Ghosh

>> That's right.

Dave Vellante

>> So when did it start? How has it evolved? What are you hoping to see in the future in the partnership?

Debashish Ghosh

>> It's a pretty long partnership. It's been close to a decade now. And we've been, by the way, yesterday we got the Global Breakthrough Partner of the Year award for Google Cloud.

Dave Vellante

>> Congratulations.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's exciting.

Debashish Ghosh

>> So we are the top GSI partners globally, and we have a 360 degree partnership with Google Cloud. We are a full-stack player across infrastructure, data, agents and applications, Google Workspace, security, you name it. So we are a full-stack player. We are also one of the seven global SIs that got named in the agent AI development and go-to-market, joint go-to-market with Google. So that's a big deal.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a huge deal.

Debashish Ghosh

>> That's a huge accomplishment.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's got to feel pretty good.

Debashish Ghosh

>> Yeah. And thank you for our trust and partnership that Google Cloud has on us. And also, if you look at the customers believe in us and they push us every day to deliver more what Sriram was talking about. And to our team, actually, they are the breakthrough. They are making it happen with their grit and determination.

Dave Vellante

>> Thank you for that. Sri, I want to come back to what you were talking about, transform, operate, or deliver. Back in the '90, I'm going to date myself, back when I was your age, Savannah-

Savannah Peterson

>> I'll take that. That feels very generous right now. I bet that's even being a little extra generous, Dave. Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> It's true. That's how old I am. But there was a book called Discipline and Market Leaders. Tracy was the author. And you had to choose between product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy. And the premise of the book was you can only pick, you're laughing, DG, you could only pick two, you can't do all three. Your rubric, Sri, was pick one and start there. But when I look at companies like Google and Amazon and even Microsoft, and I say, wow, they do all three. So when you said you want to start with one, that's what your priority is. Let's say it's operational excellence. Can I achieve those others? Are they subsumed into that? How does that all play out?

Sriram Narasimhan

>> It's a very interesting question because we keep hearing this question all the time with clients as well. So it depends on the persona. It depends on the person to whom you're talking about. We talk to corporate executive teams, we talk to lines of businesses, and we talk to IT. If I talk to the business, I talk about change the game with Google. If I talk to lines of businesses, I talk about operate better. If I talk to IT, I talk about deliver better. So it depends on who you are. Assume that you're the CEO of a big company. So when I come to you, I don't say that I want to improve your operation efficiency. If you're a COO, I'll do that. If you're a CAO, I'll do deliver better. I'll talk about change the game if you're a CFO or a CEO. For example, I met a CFO of a leading bank two weeks back. The way that we had a change the game conversation was that how can I use Google and Gemini to have better quarterly results forecasting so that they can get a view of how was their prior earnings call and the earnings call could have been done better, or was that earnings compared to other earnings as well. So that's a conversation that resonates with a CFO.

Dave Vellante

>> So I remember that book, the premise of that book was disputed years later, maybe by consultants like yourself that basically say, no, you have to achieve all three. And it's the role, the persona that allows you to do that.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> That's something called HFS, horses for courses. So I would say I'll go with that approach. And depending on who you are, I take one of these three and talk to them. And the great thing is Google applies to all these personas in a different manner, depending on what you want to use Google for. So you have Google as the entire canvas. You just have to pick and choose from the canvas based on the persona.

Savannah Peterson

>> You've certainly got the right map laid out for it. Never more important than ever. DG, you brought up the most mission-critical part of everything that's happening around us right now, which is the people. Excuse me. I'm curious how you're getting to be on these front lines, roll these out, and truly step changes and proper full business transformations. What is the reception when you start to bring in these new technological deployments into these organizations with the people on the ground doing the work? DG, I'll start with you, but I do want to hear what you have to say, Sri.

Debashish Ghosh

>> Yeah, I think I would really thank Google Cloud for their entire training and enablement and certification programs. They really help partners and GSIs like us to be in the field working with them closely when there's a new product launch to be able to enable us to deliver the POCs, right from the POCs to the actual implementation. So there's a lot of these enablement, there's certifications, there are incentives, RAM programs, market development funds, deal acceleration funds, all of those go into enabling the teams at the front line.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> I sort of want to give a different view from what DG said.

Savannah Peterson

>> Please.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> So whenever we say we want to do this with AI, the question that comes is is it really AI or is it just automation you're talking about, and what is the real intelligence that you're bringing into? So it's very important for us to, rather than paying a lip service on it's AI or not, really talk about what is really AI about it. That's a real question that clients ask us. Well, we do all the enablement, we do a lot of transformation and outcomes. They really want to know, are you just calling it AI, but behind the scenes you're just doing automation. So for us to really say it is AI, it means that what we are building, it can think, learn, and act by itself. You don't need any additional human intervention. That's a piece which is very difficult to articulate and convince clients saying that this is AI, this is not just automation.

Dave Vellante

>> Whereas automation might be a single-purpose robot just turning a screw 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Reason is the biggest thing.

Dave Vellante

>> It doesn't really need intelligence. Maybe it needs some phone home when something's going to break, but that's not what you're talking about with intelligence.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and you brought up a good point that you have to convince the customer that this is actually an added layer of benefit. How about for those workers then who are then interacting in that environment? I mean, I know we're all positive on AI in this room probably, but I'm curious because you get to have these conversations.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Yeah, it's a very interesting question. I'm not sure if you know about this. I'm a alumni of Boston University. And in last year I-

Dave Vellante

>> Good hockey team.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> In the Frozen Four this week.

Savannah Peterson

>> Literally just thinking that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> I'm a Patriots fan as well.

Dave Vellante

>> All right. We love you even more.

Savannah Peterson

>> You're speaking Dave's language here.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Yeah. And a Tom Brady fan as well. So I was here in New England when Tom Brady was in his peak. So coming back to this, there's an interesting book I read. The book is called Why Only Us? And what it tells us that only humans can talk, humans can interact, other human beings cannot. Towards the future if you move, it's important for humans to understand how AI thinks. So the biggest transformation I see with the people who work with AI is they're not being told about AI. They're being told how AI works and how you tune your thinking to AI. That is called explainability. And this explainability itself is going to get complex. And in the future, there are going to be new rules where humans will understand AI rather than AI understanding humans. There's going to be a 180 degrees shift of the job. The jobs will remain, but the humans who receive it, they should have a completely different mindset of understanding this is how AI works, and I have to tune myself to AI. So that's a very interesting phase that we are in. It is not that yet, but in five years from now, when AI is fully mature, you'll be forced to learn, I'll be forced to learn how AI thinks. That's a different perspective to the job itself.

Debashish Ghosh

>> Yeah. And AI can automate most of the tasks, but if you lose a baggage, you still need an actual human being.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, to deliver the bag.

Debashish Ghosh

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> So I want to ask you, we had an earlier guest on earlier, and I'm curious as a company who understands the software development world, software development life cycle, the earlier guests said it used to be hierarchical. Remember this interview? And then we went to a diamond where it was two-pizza teams, and then now in the future we're going to have agents. What does that do to the software development life cycle in that map? Does it flatten the structure? How do you see the future of software development?

Sriram Narasimhan

>> DG can add more as well, but I would just say from my standpoint what I think about it. I don't think it's going to fully flatten out. Just maybe five, six years back, we used to have this multi-platform professionals, people who can work across multiple platforms. I think that's going to come in a different form and shape with AI coming in. Where the structure may not be flattened out, the rules may get redefined. So you may have a role, you may have a role called an agentic expert, you may have a human-in-the-loop expert, you may have a coder who enables AI, all of them reporting into a pod lead or a product-oriented delivery lead who can talk across these. So I think that-

Dave Vellante

>> And that's a human?

Sriram Narasimhan

>> That'll be a human, yeah. Because at the end of the day, clients want a human to be responsible for AI actions. It's a very funny thing. So maybe I might digress and talk about it.

Dave Vellante

>> Go ahead. Yeah.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> We had an opportunity where one of out clients said, "I have millions of YouTube videos. Can you use those YouTube videos to build an AI solution that can perform simple surgery without humans?" We thought a lot about it and said that no, because at the end of the day, if the AI malfunctions, there's still a human that is accountable for it, and we don't want to be accountable even for a simple surgery to go wrong. So back to my point, I think the structure will, I don't think it'll be very hierarchical like what it is today. If you have a seven-layer hierarchy, we'll still have three or four-layer hierarchy, but the rules will change and the way of building and delivering will change. And the change will happen progressively that you'll not even see that. It's not going to be a dramatic overnight change that the hierarchy falls down. You still need to have the scale to deliver across multiple lines of businesses, which is where our conversation potentially around agentic can become interesting. When you go to the agentic topic, I'll bring this topic again. DG.

Debashish Ghosh

>> I think just to add to it, I think it'll eventually collapse.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> I don't think so.

Debashish Ghosh

>> But we are not there yet. So we are empowering the users to become more developers, everything. So I think those hierarchies, those structures will essentially collapse.

Savannah Peterson

>> I understand. I agree with you.

Debashish Ghosh

>> And it would become a more flat structure.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> I don't think so.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think it's going to be really interesting. I do think we'll have a rise of a new cohort of creators, if you will. But I'm not a hundred percent sure that we eliminate hierarchy, though I'm here for the socialistic approach to technology. I'm not even sure where I'm going with this at this point.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> I'm really going to jump the gun on this topic because in the future, it's going to be a lot of agentic operations coming into AI. There'll be multiple businesses, multiple agents running. There'll be a super agent and there'll be sub-agents running. Those sub-agents will be having teams, which is a hierarchy. There's a super agent hierarchy, sub-agents, and people below them. That's why I'm saying the hierarchy-

Savannah Peterson

>> It has to roll up to someone or something.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Yeah. The hierarchy will morph and change in a different way. But still, I think there's a command and control you need in an organization. You still need a hierarchy.

Dave Vellante

>> Where it gets interesting, because what I heard from both of you, I think you agree that it gets somewhat democratized where, for instance, a data engineer can become a much more powerful, well, can become a quasi-developer, if you will, but that individual has to report up to somebody, but-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Well, everyone, I mean the idea is the water level rises with everybody. So I think we kind of end up pushing the little boat or raft of everyone.

Dave Vellante

>> I agree. But I could see shadow development.

Savannah Peterson

>> I mean, it's going to be cool to watch and see-

Dave Vellante

>> Could be Wild West....

Savannah Peterson

>> see what happens. Sri, I want to bring up something that you brought up earlier before we were live. You mentioned your family and talking to your family. You've got kids at home?

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Yeah, they're in college. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, nice. You want to say hi to them? You can say hi in that camera right over there.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Hi. They'll be sleeping in India already.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, also your family. What's up everybody? What do you hope that AI does for your family or your community? I would love to hear from both of you.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> That's a question that I keep asking all the time as well. I think if you want to say three things that it does to my family, first and foremost is it, one of my child has special needs, it really has helped him to learn languages in a much better way than ever before. And it has given him to create new emojis, new tools by himself. But what I see in Google, people with disabilities can use AI and they can do a lot of things others cannot do. He cannot speak as fluent as we can, but AI can help him to translate what he speaks to normal people and to others as well. So I see it's tremendous potential for people to become more inclusive with AI in the future. So I'm super positive about it. That's first thing.

Debashish Ghosh

>> I think three things, environment, health, and wellness. Those are three things that I would call out. If AI can do it better for my family, for everybody else, for my friends, that's what I want AI to do.

Savannah Peterson

>> DG, well said. I think that those are all the things that affect our life, particularly out of work as well, which is important. And I think we focus on tech and our jobs. The ripple effect here is going to be huge. I love that you brought up customized learning. We actually, one of the things I'm most passionate about that we cover here is accessibility and inclusion. And we just did a feature last week with the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Working Group at KubeCon, we're here in Kubernetes-land, where we were using different tech to help translate for him and make sure that everyone was on the same speed. And it truly changes the game when you bring everyone to the table and everyone can be a part of the conversation. And I'm touched that you brought that up.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> And second thing is creativity. You can create things on your own as well as the AI, and you get a lot of confidence that you can do newer things as well as the AI. So I'm pretty positive about it. And I think the kids are also, when they're growing up, they look at beyond technology. My son doesn't want to be a coder because he has seen what I do with coder, but there's a lot of role for him to play because the role I spoke about, bringing people together, being more social, that's sort of the role that they're looking forward to as well. But as DG said, they're very environmentally conscious. So what extent AI can play in the environmental area is going to be an interesting area to watch as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, it's going to be a lot of fun to watch. Okay, final question for you gentlemen before we wrap this up. We'd love for both of you to answer this. When we're at Google Cloud Next 2026, 2026, when we're here next year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Sriram Narasimhan

>> I'll say only one thing. What is that you said last year? GenAI? What is that you said this year? Agentic AI? Next year you're going to say AGI or artificial general intelligence.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, first mention of AGI on the show today, folks. Love it.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> You're going to forget GenAI. You're going to forget agentic. You're going to say AGI. And there's going to be a Google agent standing and welcoming people. You're not going to have manual scanning of these IDs. So you're going to have a completely different experience next year. I'm looking forward to it.

Dave Vellante

>> Wow. That's more aggressive than Ray Kurzweil.

Savannah Peterson

>> Interesting. Love that.

Debashish Ghosh

>> You hit the nail on the head. But I do want to let you know that we are the launch partner for Agentspace for Google Cloud.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes. Very exciting.

Debashish Ghosh

>> Very exciting.

Savannah Peterson

>> Congratulations again.

Debashish Ghosh

>> We have already built more than 50 agents that are available on the Google Marketplace. And we are expected to build another 150 for a total of 200 by the end of June. So we are very excited and they will be all available on Marketplace. So we are very excited on this journey with Google Cloud. So thank you for having us here.

Dave Vellante

>> You're welcome.

Debashish Ghosh

>> And hope you can make a difference to our customers by leveraging AI effectively.

Dave Vellante

>> Thank you.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Thank you for, again, great questions and was lovely talking to you.

Savannah Peterson

>> It was a true joy.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> And you have to read the book, "Why Only Us?" by MIT University.

Savannah Peterson

>> We're going to have to start a book club. All of our great guests, your great ideas. Yeah, you heard it here first, folks, theCUBE Book Club coming to a show floor near you. All right, DG and Sri, thank you so much for being here.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Genuinely appreciate it, gentlemen. This was very insightful.

Debashish Ghosh

>> Thank you for having us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Dave, always a pleasure.

Sriram Narasimhan

>> Great talking to you guys.

Debashish Ghosh

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank all of you for tuning in. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada at Google Cloud Next. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.