CEOs Consider Tech to Be a Differentiator for Their Businesses

The chief information officer has taken on a more important role in businesses across the U.S. and around the world, as CEOs now look to them to make the right technology decisions for their companies, Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud, told The Wall Street Journal.

Google held 6% of the cloud market at the end of 2021, up 1 percentage point from a year earlier, well behind Amazon.com Inc.’s 41% share and Microsoft Corp.’s 20% market share.

“If you look at what has really fundamentally changed in technology, I would say it is the pervasiveness and speed with which new technology has been predominant,” said Kurian in the WSJ report Monday (April 25).

“Part of it is the ease with which technology can now be adopted with many things being delivered, from computing as a service,” he said. “Today everyone in the organization is a digital worker. Fifteen years ago, before smartphones, people would not have said that.”

Digital workers include nurses, staffers at airports, workers at automotive companies, bank employees, insurance agents and more, he said, joining the transformation that retail workers started about 15 years ago.

“Data is becoming a very important asset,” said Kurian. “Once you make the adoption of technology materially more convenient, you see a rapid pickup in the adoption of that technology. I think we’re in a period where CEOs in particular … see technology as a source of differentiation.”

That includes using artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline their operations, he said.

Related: Google Will Automate Every Financial Operation It Can, Finance Chief Says

Google Vice President and Head of Finance Kristin Reinke said earlier this month that Alphabet Inc. is automating as many financial tasks as possible to reduce manual work completed by staff by using artificial intelligence (AI), the cloud, raw data and machine learning to digitize its finance operations.

Google still uses spreadsheets and other tools that cannot be automated, but Reinke said the goal is to focus on how automation can improve processes, make the company a better partner to its client business and reinvest time saved into the next business challenge.