Google Cloud Partner AI Series | Vishnu Indugula, Publicis Sapient & Jim Anderson, Google Cloud

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Vishnu Indugula, Publicis Sapient & Jim Anderson, Google Cloud

Jim Anderson

Vice President, NA Partner Ecosystem & Channels Google Cloud

Vishnu Indugula

Senior Vice President Publicis Sapient

In this interview from the Google Cloud Partner AI Series, theCUBE’s John Furrier hosts Vishnu Indugula, SVP at Publicis Sapient, and Jim Anderson, VP of North American Partner Ecosystem and Channels at Google Cloud, for a deep dive into the future of AI-powered marketing transformation.

The discussion explores how Google Cloud and Publicis Sapient are partnering to unlock personalization at scale, break down traditional marketing silos and operationalize agentic AI across industries. Indugula explains how Publicis Sapient’s SPEED framework (Strategy, ... Read more

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Vishnu Indugula, Publicis Sapient & Jim Anderson, Google Cloud

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>> Welcome back around to theCUBE's special coverage here at the New York Stock Exchange, part of our CUBE studio here on the East Coast. Of course, we've got our Palo Alto Studio. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here for the Google Cloud AI Partner Series. Jim Anderson is here, vice president of North American Partner Ecosystem and Channels of Google Cloud, and Vishnu Indugula, senior vice president of Publicis Sapient, leading the charge in transformation in the networking and marketing side. Gentlemen, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Good to see you.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Good to see you, John.

Jim Anderson

>> Thank you for having me.

>> Publicis and Sapient, two firms that formed 10 years ago innovating with AI. Agentic is here. We're seeing sales and marketing. Anyone with data having great transformative value. You guys are a leading firm on everything, ad tech, marketing, technology, innovation. What's your vision for the market right now and how do you see this playing out?

Vishnu Indugula

>> I think that the market's really at the cusp of this, so there's a lot of focus on efficiency that AI can bring, but I think that the true unlock is really the effectiveness of the AI, because at the end of the day, I feel like with huge amounts of data and the amount of things that we look at from a personal perspective, humans are all very different. They all have different choices and different tastes. The ability to crunch that data is not possible through what we had from an old technology perspective. So what I'm excited about with AI is really the ability to really get to that real nugget of information that really connects to a consumer, and how can the businesses then can use that to message them the right way.

>> Jim, talk about the relationship with Publicis Sapient. Obviously, they've had a great view into the landscape. They've seen many waves of innovation, now on the cusp of the AI wave on us, pre-existing data, workflows, but also the demand curve is changing on the consumer side and on the business side. How do you see this relationship playing out?

Jim Anderson

>> Well, Publicis Sapient is actually unique in the relationship with us because they have a big relationship with us on the ad side and they have a big relationship with us on the cloud side. So as you look at the convergence of various technology and processes out there, we're able to leverage that to actually go make a difference in areas like marketing that you mentioned earlier moving forward. So we're really excited about the possibilities that we possess. We're both committed to customer success and we're both committed to driving innovation with our customers.

>> Vishnu, talk about the relationship. Obviously, you mentioned the ad side, Google obviously pioneering obviously the performance-based marketing of AdWords. Now a variety of other things they have. Performance-based marketing, a buzzword would be like, okay, with AI, the performance is key. Productivity and personalization, micro-targeting seems to be the leading indicators of what people are saying AI value is. This puts us back into the driver's seat on enabling the kind of value that web 1, web 2, now here with AI, that's rejected. Can you take us through how you see that and what's your ideas and how AI is going to drive that value?

Vishnu Indugula

>> It goes back to what I was trying to say before. Personalization, micro-segmentation, all of these things are wrappers around what we say is the ultimate thing that we want to get to is the customer experience, and the individual customer experience is probably the most important thing. What works for me may or may not work for Jim. What he likes is different from anybody else, and I feel like while we put all of these things around getting to the micros, what we're trying to get to is the individual, and I feel like AI is really going to help us to get that last mile. We've got the cohorts, we've got the audience segments, all of these things, but never to an individual, and I think that that's really where I see the excitement of what it can actually drive.

>> I've had a lot of conversations with Google Cloud and their customers and partners and just other people in the industry over the past year and a half around agentic AI or GenAI, is that the thing is that innovation is the driver and it disrupts existing systems, but it's also an enabler. So everyone says, "Stay in your lane. This is this department." So the silos that were once cast for ad, for marketing has been disrupted. And the number one thing I hear from CMOs, chief marketing officers, is, "My CEO and executive staff is asking for me, what's our marketing strategy in the new era of AI?" And it's more of a generic blanket statement. And they're looking around and there's the question, so they're like, I won't say deer in the headlights, but there is answers that need to be evolving for them. Instead of looking at , they're doing POCs. There's a lot of action, so answer that question. How are CMOs answering, in your opinion, that question? Because that's the number one thing we hear. Now there's a variety of different answers, but what's the high level? Because there's a methodology, the suppliers I choose, how I leverage my pre-existing marketing systems, making them more efficient. Take us through that problem statement.

Vishnu Indugula

>> I think that for me, first of all, I think there's two things that is very different about this trend. One is the pace of change from a technology perspective. Things that were true last year, even six months ago, they're evolving at a much faster pace. So to have a definitive answer, you need to have the patience and you need to understand how you're going to evolve through the journey. I joke about this thing, if you went to any conference last year, every one of our esteemed partners were all talking about GenAI. You go to the conferences this year, it's all about the agentic, and that's the point that I'm trying to make is if you thought that you had the strategy around GenAI and you had it all figured out, guess what? Within six months, you now have a new paradigm that you need to. But I feel like there's lots of parallels that people draw to. I talk about what AI is doing. If you go all the way back to the eighties-

>> The eighties?

Vishnu Indugula

>> Hear me out on this, but when computers first came in and started to change the knowledge work from paper-based to now the world revolved around a computer and digitization, I think AI is doing the same thing right now. So you've got to go through the journey. I think ultimately, if you keep the customer's success and what you want to be able to deliver to your customers from an experience perspective, you'll figure out the right strategy.

>> That's a good point. So you're basically saying keep your eye on the prize, which is why does marketing exists in the first place? To figure out how to market the product to the customer.

Vishnu Indugula

>> And grow the business.

>> And measure it and create value for the company, versus getting optimized for the machinery.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Yes.

>> Which some people would get too optimized on the system they're building, to get the leads, to do all these different things, whatever. I'm just making that up, but that's the point. Are you feeding the process? That seems to be the north star right now. That's the mindset.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Yes. And I think that the technology is changing and that is going to change underneath, but if you do have that anchor point, I think that you'll figure out the journey much easier. Right.

>> What's your take on that? You guys live it first hand. You have the ads side nailed down, you got Google Cloud, you've got visibility. Scale's a big deal too.

Jim Anderson

>> Yeah, I think scale is key, and like you alluded to, you've got to keep your eyes focused on the North Star as we're going through this change. The pace of innovation is so fast, I talk about AI is a journey and not a transaction. It's really who do you want to partner with to go on that journey? And that's where you can leverage the domain expertise they have in areas like marketing and Google's innovation technology and the fact that obviously we have a big ads business to really make a difference with some of our customers to go from there. So I am fully in agreement with regards to that.

>> One of the things I would say is that the answer to that from my conversation with CMOs is that the basic, this sounds simple, but like, "Hey, I want to solve what I'm designed to solve, market the product, but also I want to get operating leverage out of the technology. So productivity's there and I have data, so I have a lot of data so I want to look at the workflows." So this brings up how you guys work together. How are customers working with you guys when you partner in the market? Can you share some examples of how, one, you guys work together, and two, what are some of the things you're working on? Because people are looking at re-platforming, not pivoting, but extending and evolving their practices on the marketing side for sure and all that encompasses, but they're going to leverage the data and do all those things. What are some of the scopes of the projects that you guys are working on? Can you share examples? And if you can't name names, that's cool, but what are the top things that are happening?

Vishnu Indugula

>> Yeah, and we're partnering with Google on many fronts. I'll pick a couple of examples in the marketing side, and they're very different use cases. We're helping a large CPG company actually transform the way that they're thinking about how they generate content, and the reason for that is if you think about personalization, there's always been two sides to that. You needed to know about somebody and then be able to message them the right way, and we've never been able to crack the code on being able to develop all of that creative output to be able to really talk to someone. And what GenAI has done is really changed that. And so we're working for a large CPG company that's actually optimizing that entire process so they can actually drive a lot of personalization. The other one's actually a little bit more interesting to me because one of our large healthcare clients in the payer space was starting to think about marketing and competitive marketing. And what we're using Google's technologies for is we can look at what the competitive messaging is and be able to then synthesize all of that to understand, how is your messaging positioned against your competitor's messaging, and how do you actually modulate your campaigns or how do you actually optimize those campaigns based on what's happening in the marketplace? Because as consumers, you know that we are bombarded with a lot of different messaging and a lot of different choices, so how do you actually find that edge and that inch of advantage that you can actually talk better to a customer? And part of that is just competitive intelligence. So there are so many different ways in which we're using AI now and partnering with Google to actually deliver that for our clients, and again, I think that it's all about how do you actually deliver that ultimate experience for the consumers?

>> Yeah, I think the speed game is on because if you can get that advantage, you can double down on it, you could actually expand it fast, versus the old way which was what was the alternative? Weeks of planning.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Absolutely.

>> Hire a firm. Seriously, that's like a couple of years ago.

Vishnu Indugula

>> And I don't think... See, the AI will not replace the human intuition and the human expertise, but I think that it is much more surgically applied as to what human intelligence and how it augments artificial intelligence.

>> Yeah. Let's talk about operational leverage or let's talk about operational efficiency, because a lot of the transformation is not just driving top line revenue. It's operational transformation because there's change management involved, cost reduction that increases profits, it's revenue and cost reductions are happening. What's your thoughts on how you guys are using agents and AI together to bring not only that productivity but operationally make change?

Jim Anderson

>> I think there's a couple of things. If you look at the whole spectrum, you can start with using agent just in an assist fashion, where they're assisting additional current processes to make people more efficient with that process. Then what you see is some people using agents to actually automate a process. So it's not just assist, but the automation is still human intervention and those types of things, and I think that will eventually lead to agents that actually will do work associated with a process if you look at the full spectrum, and then you'll get more productivity benefits there. So we're seeing the whole spectrum with regards to how people are leveraging various technologies in AI, and the goal is to work with a Publicis Sapient to meet the customer where they are and then take them on that journey to go from there, so that's what we like to do.

>> What's your thoughts? I think of Publicis and Sapient. Okay, I got digital transformation, user experience, consumer business, marketing. Sapient, technology, depth, integration, in the weeds, connected together. You must have a lot of visibility on some of the operational views and how these things are deployed into production and how the benefits come out of it. What's your thoughts on operational efficiency?

Vishnu Indugula

>> Yeah, 100%, and I think that that is the key to it. And as Sapient, we use this term called SPEED, which stands for strategy, experience, engineering, product and data, so not in that order when you spell it out. Clearly, I can't spell speed. And the reality is yes, technology is able to do a lot of things, but you have to put everything into context. What is the strategy? What are you trying to get to from an end goal perspective? What is the experience going to look like for your internal employees, for your customers? So you have to use all aspects of that discipline, because I think that one of the things, at least I feel, is that we think about AI as some sort of a magic bullet. It isn't. You still have to use the traditional methodologies that you did for transformation and still apply it. It's just that you've got different tools and better tools now, but the fundamentals still have to remain the same. You still have to have those multidisciplinary teams who understand how to actually get the most efficient use out of the AI technology that the-

>> Talk about the internal folks that you had. You had mentioned before we came on camera about the people on your team have tons of technology depth. You build your own technology.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Right.

>> Because we're in an accelerated compression zone now. Things are getting done faster. Those projects that used to take months are now in weeks and days, years to months. So you're an highly accelerated operational piece for deployment. And plus the toolings coming out of the cloud, some of the best things coming out of GenAI, it's the tooling side of it. MCP is the hottest trend right now. That's a protocol for agents, agent to agent technology. So you're starting to see really hot areas where developers are going to start having not only reference frameworks for agents to code. That's going to probably even accelerate more. What's your view on that?

Vishnu Indugula

>> Oh, 100%, and we're already using it. So again, about a year ago, what we did was we took a very methodical approach and we said it's not just about a code assist tool that tells you how to do code more efficiently. What is the entire software development life cycle going to look like, and how do you chain the right sets of technologies to be able to enable that entire thing? Everything from how you take a design and create components to how does a product manager actually come up with the product requirements? All of that has AI applied to it, and this underscores the point that I was making around the ability for you to have these multidisciplinary teams that actually understand the process and then apply AI the right way to get the result that you want.

>> Yeah. Jim, reminds me of the DevOps early days of cloud. Now you've got marketing ops and marketing SecOps coming soon, so that's a great front end. Going direct, people stay there all the time, go direct with your messaging, shrink the layers, time to value. But there's also the data problem because you'd mentioned some of the operational tooling stuff like migrating off databases. I get stuff in a normalized clean way ready, so there's a lot of tech too involved. Can you guys share your view on how you guys are working together to either migrate, transform, get the readiness up? And then also how is the marketing ops? Because that's going to, I think, look a lot like DevOps, because now the agents and people are going to be in charge.

Jim Anderson

>> Yeah. I think first, the silos of data, the fragmentation, the unstructured data out there, working with someone like a Publicis Sapient who can understand how you should bring all that together is sort of key. So anything we do in AI is only as good as the data that you have associated with it, so we work closely with them. They leverage our technologies for those migrations to go from there, and often what we see is they'll go in, they'll work with a customer and say, "Hey, listen, I'm going to migrate this data over to a cloud environment, but then after that, I'm going to make sure that it's usable in the ways that you can scale." We talk a lot about scaling in a digital fashion so you can take advantage of it with the agents they're developing and those types of things. So I think that's going to be a key way in which we work together. We're technology partners, we're actually innovation partners, and obviously we work with them to migrate customers, taking them on that journey from where they are today to some future state.

>> And the cloud mindset with marketing brings... I'm just kidding. When I said marketing, I was obviously making a play out of that, but really, in reality, the cloud agility combined with some of the new things puts marketing in a very agile position.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Absolutely, and you have to change your process to be able to take advantage of that. It's actually funny, if I just go back to one thing, that the most interesting case that I've come across from a data transformation perspective is we are actually using AI to help the AI learn. What I mean by that is there's so much assets that people have built from a visual perspective, but there's no description of it. So we're using computer vision and the models that Google and within the Gemini family to actually write descriptions for those assets that can then be used by the marketers to actually market better, so it's a fun space to be in.

>> You're creating a search environment for runtime assembling generatively assets.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Yeah. So there are so many possibilities with it and we're having a lot of fun trying to... You discover all of these things. It's just an idea that needs to come up and the AI can actually do it.

>> What's interesting about AI, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this because people always in the old school was you got to do the analysis, do the document, get people on the same page. Let's launch. Now you just get a little bit with AI and then it spurs up more. You get a small little win, it turns into much larger aperture of value, or then more visibility into potential value. So it's a whole different progression. Thoughts on, reaction to that? Do you agree and what would you add to that?

Vishnu Indugula

>> I absolutely agree with it, because like I said, it is a canvas that we are painting on with ultimate freedom, and you're actually starting to find lots more use cases for them and use it in different ways. We've done everything from figuring out how to modernize COBOL code to, like I said, on the marketing side, the spectrum and the possibilities are just endless, and we're just excited to be scratching on that surface and going faster on that journey.

>> I hear this all the time, problem-solving is a big skill we need to have in the AI era, but also management giving employees and customers the agency to make calls. That comes up a lot, big time. All right, so talk about the relationship. What's next? What are you guys working on in the partnership? Can you share the current state of the roadmap and what's next for Sapient?

Jim Anderson

>> Yeah, I think from a partner standpoint, what we're really trying to do is focus in on what are your business priorities of our customers? And then make sure we're bringing solutions to those business priorities. We're not just trying to do a proof point associated with technologies. Customers are coming to us, "Hey listen, we want to work with you, but we got to work with you that makes an impact to our bottom line, and to do that, you need to work on our business priorities and those types of things." So we are focusing in on business priorities and key challenges of our customers. We're continue to innovate. We do a lot to keep publicists being up-to-date on our latest technologies where we're going and get feedback about, hey, should we continue to go in this direction? And at the same time, we're learning as we go, like everybody, and we're sharing those learnings back and forth to make sure we can continue to make a difference with our customers.

>> Vishnu, what's your take on what's next for the partnership?

Vishnu Indugula

>> I think it's everything that Jim said, and again, I think that what's wonderful about the partnership and what we do is we get to see possibilities because somebody said something, a customer of ours said something about, "Oh, this is a problem that I've got to solve." And they may not be thinking about that to be the use of what technology they're building, but we can look at it and say, "Hey, can it actually solve that?" So the ideas that come together with the... And as much as we talk to our customers, Google talks to their customers, but we also bring a very different domainist perspective to it. So I think that together, we solve very, very different problems, and again, it widens that aperture as you were saying as we look at the products and the innovation that's coming out.

>> Yeah, you can just solve the problem right at the point of contact knowing what you know.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Yeah.

>> All right. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I appreciate it.

Vishnu Indugula

>> Absolutely.

>> And congratulations, looking forward to hearing more. We'll be following the MarTech transformation, marketing ops. As generative AI changes the productivity and cost equations and increases the human agency, we're going to see a lot more marketing and activity around generative AI. Of course, I'm here on theCUBE, bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.