BT signs five-year deal with Google Cloud to revamp customer experience

BT has signed a five-year deal with Google Cloud that will see the pair collaborate on a wide-ranging body of work geared towards helping the telco giant cut costs and build out new revenue streams.

Specifically, BT will be drawing on the Google Cloud portfolio of infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics services to digitally transform its business.

The work will be overseen by the company’s BT Digital arm, which has been tasked with building a group-wide data and AI fabric in accordance with the company’s overarching cloud-first, AI-first digital strategy.

According to the companies, the fabric will ensure that every level of BT’s business can reap the benefits of access to Google’s data and AI capabilities to help revamp the customer experience, with more emphasis on personalisation, and unlock new business use cases.  

The two companies have already started work on shifting BT over to Google’s technology, with the pair claiming to be on course to complete the “core migration” of its data by 2023.

“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,” the companies said, in a statement.

“Under the partnership, the two companies will help BT unlock hundreds of new business use-cases to strengthen its ambitions around digital offerings and create hyper-personalised customer engagement.”

The five-year technology partnership will also see members of Google’s site reliability engineering team work with BT to foster a “zero ops” product development strategy that is autonomous and focused on continuous delivery. 

“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,” said Harmeen Mehta, chief digital and innovation officer at BT. “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.”

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the tech giant was looking forward to helping “one of the world’s leading providers of communications services” sculpt its digital transformation journey.

“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,” said Kurian.

News of the partnership coincides with another announcement by the Google Cloud team about the work it is doing with cosmetics giant L'Oréal to help it build a more sustainable data warehouse setup to underpin its business operations.

As detailed in a blog post, L'Oréal said it decided to enlist Google’s help after its multi-supplier data warehouse setup became too complex and unwieldy to manage, as it pooled in external and internal data from a wide variety of organisations.

To rectify this, the firm decided to remodel its data warehouse using Google Cloud’s serverless and data tooling services, paving the way for the creation of the L'Oréal Beauty Tech Data Platform, which is used to process 20TB of data each month.