“[The chatbot will] help our partners have this integrated experience where they can go and get their questions answered, whether it’s go-to-market resources or … ‘I’m at this program level, I want to move to this next program level. What’s left for me to do to get there?’” Colleen Kapase, vice president of channels and partner programs, tells CRN.

Colleen Kapase, Google Cloud’s new vice president of channels and partner programs, continues to see a variety of opportunities for partners in artificial intelligence and cloud migration, with the tech giant’s AI investments poised to lead to an AI-powered chatbot experience for partners in the new “earnings hub.”

Kapase told CRN that AI is transforming the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor’s partner ecosystem into one that is “more services-oriented, more outcome-led than ever before.”

New investments in Google’s partner portals and resources for piloting AI tools are meant to empower the “show-and-tell sales process” that so far helps engage customers in the emerging technology.

“You’re going to see more and more investment from us in Partner Hub—trying to make the ease of doing business with us easier and easier and leveraging AI and drinking our own champagne—and lean into that show-and-tell sales process,” Kapase said. “And then let’s drive the outcome, let’s get the ROI on this opportunity so we can invest in the next opportunity and the next opportunity after that. We’re seeing that stickiness happen.”

[RELATED: Google Cloud Adds New AI, ML Course Collections That Can Help Partners Differentiate]

Google Partner Investment

Google’s partner-facing employees have been working with the AI-powered chatbot to ready it for partner use, already saving Google employees time in answering questions and finding resources, she said.

The AI moment has added to partner conversations with customers around cloud adoption. “If there were any holdouts there, AI has been that final straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said. “Those people are now absolutely moving to a cloud-based solution so that it can bring all of their data together to then leverage it through AI. … The rise of cloud continues to happen.”

Google partners also continue to see work from VMware users looking to leverage the Google Cloud VMware Engine for their virtualization applications, she said.

Here’s more of what Kapase had to say.

How is the earnings hub going to help Google partners in this AI era?

[AI] is exciting. It is transformational. That is definitely a show-and-tell sales experience.

It very much is something a customer wants to see: ‘What can you do with my data in my industry for my needs? And show me what the output of that would look like.’

Because oftentimes we’re not we’re not talking to the IT departments, per se. We’re talking about the people creating products or creating marketing material. And they want to understand what this can do for them. And they need to touch it and feel it.

And so those pilots are huge. And one of the investments that we have is our delivery assessment funds, lovingly called DAF. And this [the earnings hub] is where they can see, how much they have earned in a year or across a particular product or in a particular country on these pilot funds.

Each one is deal-based. But then we can roll it up and allow the partners to interact with this data and say … ‘My team in Germany is actually doing a ton of pilots. Maybe there’s an opportunity for a team in a different country to tap into that and do more.’ … A lot of these partners are multi-regional, multi-country, multi-geography. And this helps them learn about themselves as well, just as much as learn about us.

What’s a compelling example of a Google partner working with a customer on an AI use case?

I was at [a recent event], and we had a showing with [solution provider] Publicis Sapient and Unilever. And they had a great app that you could take a picture of everything in your fridge, and with all the produce, you could actually see what recipes could I have using their Hellmann’s mayonnaise. And it came out with a ton of different recipes. … And Unilever [said], ‘This is great. What more can we do with it?’

It’s unlocked the potential of creativity, of what’s out there and what’s possible for that customer, just as one example. And so those are more things that we want to continue, jointly investing with our partners and our joint customers.

That’s why this earnings hub is so powerful. It also will be using AI, so the partners can interact with this tool itself to ask it questions in natural language. ‘What did I earn in this country? What did I earn on this particular SKU?’

Google has a ton of products. They can get very specific, or they can get very broad. … Every layperson can ask a question and get a very simple answer when it all comes to the earnings that they have with us.

What should partners know about the upcoming AI-powered chatbot in the earnings hub?

We’ve launched that internally to all of the folks that cover partners and all of our account teams … to help the experience, to ask questions—how do we enable a partner who’s on a deal doing the services opportunity right now?

‘Where do we go to get that next level of learning? … Where do we go to get more support? Where do we go to get more information on our particular product?‘

We’re using that internally because we’re literally training that tool for both our field and our partner account managers to use that.

The goal is to bring that to our partner community, too, and just have it rock-solid with all of the best answers out there to help our partners have this integrated experience where they can go and get their questions answered, whether it’s go-to-market resources or … ‘I’m at this program level, I want to move to this next program level. What’s left for me to do to get there?’

Just make their journey with us easier and just simpler. … That one should be launching at the beginning of the new year. But we are spending some time with our own internal folks training it.

It’s answering our own people’s questions right now and making sure that we come back with the right, high-quality answers.

So it’s already impacting the partner’s ability to get answers from our own teams as we speak. … We’ve had some learnings of how the tool is interpreting the word resell versus reseller. It has been very interesting for us to learn and smooth that process. … It’s amazing to see how things are changing those experiences and reducing our costs sometimes as well and getting our own employees to focus on higher-level things that they could be doing too.

What advice do you have for partners building out AI practices?

The Google mantra is to interact and use it every day. … whether using it with our Workspace collaboration apps and Gemini, and whether using it in your calendar, in your email, in your content creation, in your creating of data and creating of slides, in learning different topics, in answering questions.

AI is something every individual should be using and interacting with daily. And then stepping back and looking at your processes and your programs and how you can use it at a more enterprise level as well. … That’s why you’re seeing it come out in our programs and in our tools and in our own experiences as well. … In terms of working with the services partners … a lot of our key partners, we’re focusing with them on building out their pilot experience in the industry that they’re an expert in of what AI could do.

Because if you’re focused on health care, you can look at a nursing scheduling tool, for instance, and how you’re using AI to make that a more effective use of resources and better scheduling for nurses. That’s a great example that is also an amazing customer door-opener.

And it might not be exactly the solution that the customer wants, but it shows you can speak their language. You know how to make a relevant outcome for a problem that they have.

And then typically, the next conversation is, ‘Let me tell you what my real problem is. How can we get to a solution that solves operating room scheduling and ease of use of our physical resources?’ That’s exactly what partners need to be doing, showing in their industry of expertise here’s what AI could do for you as a door-opener.

Where else in AI do you see big opportunities for partners?

It’s affecting every single industry. But retail search is one that I think is jumping out to us, one getting immediate ROI.

People being able to search for a particular product in a visual way. We just showed a demo [at a recent event] … [U.K. plumbing equipment retailer] Screwfix was the example that was shared. … And they had created an AI app, and you could take a picture of the particular piping unit.

And a plumber can look at that and then instantaneously order more of that if they want, or get the instructions for how to use it, or what does it go into, or what’s the next piece that comes after it. It was just amazing.

They are getting a huge ROI almost instantaneously on that app, using [Google’s] Vertex Search for that. And, of course, Google Cloud underneath.

Are you also seeing an opportunity with VMware and Citrix users?

We have a simple bring your own license program with existing VMware customers who like to come to the GCVE [Google Cloud VMware Engine] Google instance.

It makes it simpler, it makes it easier for customers to make some transitions to the cloud. So we’re seeing that grow significantly. … We’re seeing the growth in VMware partners triple for us on a monthly basis. That’s absolutely amazing as they look at coming from that on-prem, VMware experience to the cloud journey and figuring out what’s the best way to move some of those workloads for their customer base. So that’s been growing. … Data migration continues to be a huge area. When you look at your AI strategy, oftentimes you need to get your data foundation as strong as you possibly can.

Those projects are coming to us in multitudes. And I would say the best AI partners are the ones that have spent 10 years focusing on data, on data migrations, on building that foundation, if you will. And now they’re like, ‘Great, now we can get to outcomes and realize value for our customers faster.’

[For Citrix opportunities], I actually see that for the Workspace side of our business, frankly. And the end-user standpoint.

We’re seeing huge uptake on Workspace now, bringing AI into it. Remote locations, manufacturing floor workers, nursing staff, that is just booming for us as well. … That’s one of the things that’s pretty amazing to me about Google is you go from the chip to the collaboration apps to the data structure model to the search technology with Vertex all the way up to the large language models.

And not just Gemini and Gemma, which is the open-source large language model as well for Google. But having 125 additional AI startups with their large language models on our infrastructure as well. It’s the breadth of products and technology and offerings. It’s just breathtaking, frankly. … That’s why we’re seeing the types of partners, the service orientation of partners, and those outcome-oriented partners just absolutely blossom for us.

Would you like to see more partners using Google’s marketplace?

Marketplace is booming for us. … The marketplace is doing well with our ISV partners, especially.

But it’s important because these two worlds are colliding because it’s the ISV partners coming to the marketplace where we have customers that have made commits to us. … This is a great way where I can also get access to my Palo Alto Networks opportunity here, [for example].

And bringing our technology together with our ISVs and resellers being engaged, being able to resell those partners’ technologies through our marketplace, and the thing that’s unique about us is the entire value of the transaction can actually go through that reseller.

In some other marketplaces, it’s just the margin that they’ll make on that deal. … Ours is the whole transaction going to the resale. So I would think that’s a differentiator for us as well. … I’m a big believer in marketplaces.

It makes it an easier experience for customers to see their commit, to burn it down across multiple different products. We are just going to continue to see that grow.