THE TECHNOLOGY INTERVIEW

In banking, for example,“ the agent can understand who you are and actually talk about your spending and your savings plan, right the way through the system,” Oliver explains.

Today, Gen AI is driving serious money. The cloud AI market hit US $ 78.36bn last year and analysts expect it to reach US $ 589.22bn by 2032. But most of that growth is coming from a relatively small number of companies that have figured out how to make AI actually work. The rest are burning cash on projects that look impressive in presentations but don’ t move the needle.

Why AI strategy actually matters The performance gap between companies with proper AI strategies and those without is staggering. Businesses that have taken time to develop comprehensive AI plans report 80 % success rates with their implementations. Those who haven’ t? Just 37 %.

The failures aren’ t about picking the wrong technology or hiring the wrong consultants. Research shows that 68 % of executives report serious friction between their IT departments and business teams when it comes to AI projects. Even more telling, 72 % say their AI applications are being developed in isolation, with different parts of the company building competing solutions that don’ t talk to each other.

The money follows the same pattern. Companies that invest properly in AI see success rates 40 percentage points higher than businesses that don’ t.

Source: Stanford AI Index

Half-hearted attempts at transformation are worse than doing nothing at all, because they consume resources whilst delivering disappointment.

Skills shortages add an extra challenge. A third of enterprises report they simply don’ t have people who understand how to implement AI effectively, while more than half are paralysed by data privacy concerns.

Google’ s bet on intelligence Google Cloud sits in an interesting position in this market. With between 10 % and 13 % market share, it’ s smaller than Amazon Web Services( AWS) or Microsoft Azure, but it’ s betting that its AI background gives it an edge.

“ We’ ve been an AI-first company for a very long period of time,” Oliver notes.“ When you think about our mission statement in terms of organising the world’ s information and making it universally accessible and useful, that is fundamentally a data and AI mission statement.”

28 October 2025