Google Cloud Summit London 2025: Practical AI deployment
As startups take hold of technologies such as AI agents, where is the sector headed?
The level to which firms are already using AI varies according to technological maturity, strategic focus, and on an industry by industry basis.
But what’s clear is that from the smallest to the largest businesses, the landscape is already shifting. We’ve spoken about AI agents on the podcast before – the promise of autonomous AI activity – but it’s only now that businesses are beginning to put more faith in these tools.
How is AI already being used to improve business processes? And what will progress in the sector look like?
In this episode, Rory speaks to Oliver Parker, VP AI GTM at Google Cloud, to explore some of the practical ways AI is changing organizations from startups to the enterprise.
Highlights
“So, I often say to clients, and it sounds a little cliche, yes, it's about use cases but it's about a use case with a business case. And that business case could be changing NPS scores, it could be around basket conversion if you're a retailer, it could be around citizenship, if you're in the public sector, and planning documents like I referenced earlier.”
“There's sort of two schools of thought, which is, everything looks leaner going forward, everyone's a 10x, I can be a 10x go to market leader, I can be a 10x engineer. So we don't need more of me, because I'm doing 10 more. So I think that's one school of thought, but I still think people are going to continue hiring.”
“I mean, obviously at an engineering level and developers, you're looking for very strong backgrounds and engineering development, but also people that have used and use a lot of these tools on a day to day basis.”
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Footnotes
- The UK government is teaming up with Google Cloud to kill public sector legacy tech
- Google Cloud announces new data residency flexibility for UK firms, accelerator for regional startups
- Enterprises are worried about agentic AI security risks – Gartner says the answer is just adding more AI agents
- How effective are AI agents?
- IT leaders are less AI-ready than they were a year ago, says Cisco report
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Rory Bathgate was Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro until 2026, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He also co-hosted the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.
In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory on LinkedIn.
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