BT picks Google for group-wide data, AI transformation

Google Cloud and BT announced a strategic, five-year partnership to accelerate BT’s company-wide digital transformation. The collaboration will involve BT using a suite of Google Cloud products and services—including cloud infrastructure, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, security, and API management—to deliver superior customer experiences, reduce costs and risk, and build new revenue streams.

BT is undertaking a massive digital transformation through its BT Digital unit, and this initiative includes creating a group-wide data and AI fabric as part of its cloud-first and AI-first strategy. Under the partnership, the two companies will help BT unlock hundreds of new business use-cases to strengthen its ambitions around digital offerings and creating hyper-personalised customer engagement.

BT’s data transformation is centred around driving business outcomes and using AI and deep ML across the organisation to allow businesses and customers to make more data-led decisions, as well as creating deeper personalisation for customer offerings and new go-to-market propositions. This will also enable BT to have real-time network analytics to allow for a more enhanced customer service through predictive fault management and assurance.

In addition, Google’s SRE team will partner with BT to foster a continuous delivery and “zero ops” autonomous operations culture to accelerate product development and continuous innovation as part of the new culture of working that BT calls “The Digital Way.”

“Our partnership with Google is one of a series of strategic moves that BT Digital is taking to help accelerate BT’s growth and digital transformation. This is a partnership that is deeper than just at the technology level. It will help Digital as a whole supercharge BT and drive its return to growth,” said Harmeen Mehta, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, BT.

“We’re proud to collaborate with one of the world's leading providers of communications services and play an integral part in its digital transformation journey,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud. “By deploying our full cloud capabilities, and support from our SRE organisation, our goal in this partnership is to set up BT with the tools it needs for future growth and innovation.”

Google and BT have already started working together on adopting Google technology, and plan to complete the core migration of data by 2023.