Why Google Cloud had an ‘Office of the CTO’ before it had a CTO

If you’re responsible for helping your company use technology effectively and strategically, this is the newsletter for you. Each week, we’ll bring you the most important insight, news, and analysis about the issues and challenges that tech leaders are navigating at companies big and small.

These days, being an in-house tech leader is an expansive and ever-evolving job, with responsibilities and stakeholders that can extend throughout the organization as well as to vendors and customers. Whether the title in your email signature says chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, or chief digital officer, my goal is to help you stay at the top of your game. 

To kick things off for the first newsletter, I decided to talk to Will Grannis, VP and CTO of Google Cloud, the Alphabet division that generated $33 billion in revenue last year. Grannis has a unique perspective in this role which involves working closely with CIOs and CTOs at other companies to help them get the most out of Google’s cloud offerings.

“The most important thing a technology function can do is harmonize the possibilities of what we build with what’s going to be most valuable for our customers,” he says.

Today, when Grannis meets with customers, AI is top of mind. “The number one question is AI, and specifically generative AI,” says Grannis. Customers are trying to figure out the right mix of AI models to use for specific use cases and cost optimization. 

Most companies Grannis speaks to are at one of two stages when it comes to AI. The first is learning mode, with companies simply trying to understand generative AI and the opportunities of deploying the tech. The second stage is what Grannis calls “summarization and synthesis of existing documents and data”—basically using AI to help employees access the jumble of internal data scattered throughout a company.

“If you’ve ever been a CIO of a large, Fortune 500 company, you’ve had a knowledge management project of some form or fashion over the last 10 or 15 years and most of them have been very difficult to achieve,” Grannis says. “Today with conversational AI and generative AI, you can just ask questions of your data stores and get back summarized and synthesized information. It’s a very straightforward use case.”

One of the most curious things I learned talking to Grannis, is that Google Cloud had an Office of the CTO for years before it had an actual CTO. In 2016, shortly after Grannis joined the company, he created a new Office of the CTO at Google Cloud and served as its managing director.

The Office of the CTO was literally an empty room with a little placard that said “CTO.” This was a spot that was reserved for customers. The concept was that important customers were put in the center and Google then built a peer group around them—including Google’s technology experts and former enterprise CTOs—who could share insights and advice to tackle complex technology questions. 

In 2020, Grannis was named Google Cloud’s CTO, but the Office of the CTO’s mission of providing customers with a team of trusted advisors remains unchanged. “There’s no single human being that is capable of being the authority on the span of engineering and technology topics that often fall underneath cloud or AI,” Grannis says. 

I conclude our chat by asking Grannis what his favorite part of his job is—a question that’s going to be on my mind a lot in the months ahead as I continue to write this newsletter. What makes being a CTO or CIO so fascinating? 

“The best part of my job is getting to work with people who are trying to solve really, really difficult problems and playing some small part in helping them build a team, integrate technology, and solve their own customers’ problems,” says Grannis. “This role is a privilege.”

Programming note: It’s also a privilege for me to talk to the people shaping the way technology is being used to make business better. Tell me what’s top of mind for you, what some of the topics and issues are that you’d like to see CIO Intelligence delve into, and how your job as a tech leader is changing.

I look forward to continuing the conversation,

John Kell

Send thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.

NEWS PACKETS

Bundle inflation. CIOs say they are being asked by vendors to pay more for larger software bundles, a shift in vendor sales strategies that reflects the recent wave of business technology M&A such as Broadcom's November acquisition of VMware. The Wall Street Journal reports that while consolidation can help reduce the number of vendors a CIO may have to deal with, some favored tools could be eliminated along the way—and bundles may come with tech features CIOs don’t even need.

One better than two? An activist investor is pressuring Walt Disney Co. to appoint a corporate chief technology officer, saying the entertainment giant should have a leader who steers innovation, according to a presentation by Blackwells Capital that was reviewed by Bloomberg. Disney’s current CTO responsibilities are split between two executives—one who leads ESPN and entertainment and another who oversees parks and experiences.

Wiki finds an AI strategy. Selena Deckelmann, chief product and technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, says the nonprofit that hosts and manages Wikipedia has developed an AI strategy to build tools for contributors, editors, and moderators to make their work faster, while also running off-platform AI experiments. “How are we really making life better for them as we’re playing around with some cool technology?” asks Deckelmann rhetorically in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

ROI of gen AI. Last week, at the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Network Summit, several business leaders shared just how much real value they were generating from generative AI investments. Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information, data, and digital officer at Ally Financial, said they are saving anywhere between a minute to two minutes for customer-care calls thanks to gen AI. Cisco chief information officer Fletcher Previn says programmers are accepting below 50% of code suggestions that the AI makes.

ADOPTION CURVE

Bleeding SaaS cash. Companies average $18 million in wasted spending on annual licenses, an increase of 7% from 2022. The report, by SaaS management provider Zylo (which, it should be noted, hopes businesses will pay to license its service to detect and eliminate other licenses), says companies are only using 49% of their provisioned licenses, essentially throwing cash out the window every month. According to the report, now in its sixth year, the average company has 15 duplicative online training apps, 11 project management tools, and 10 team collaboration apps. Read the full report.

JOBS RADAR

- The J. Paul Getty Trust has appointed Katharine Krieger to fill its vacant CIO position. Krieger will oversee the $8.6 billion endowment’s investments.

- Bumble Inc. appointed Antoine Leblond as chief technology officer, where he will be responsible for the technological vision for all of Bumble, leveraging foundational and emerging technologies such as AI.

- SymphonyAI announced that Pushpraj (Raj) Shukla has been appointed as CTO. Formerly SymphonyAI’s SVP engineering and head of AI and ML, Shukla will lead the technology roadmap and execution at SymphonyAI and the team that builds the Eureka Gen AI platform.

- Root Inc. announced the promotion of Matt Bonakdarpour to president and CTO. Since joining Root in 2018, Bonakdarpour has been instrumental in driving the company's advancements in pricing and automation.

- Stax Payments named Mark Sundt as CTO to accelerate the delivery of new products, features, and functionality for the payment technology provider.

- CrateDB announced that Sergey Gerasimenko, former VP of engineering at MongoDB, has been appointed as the company’s new CTO.

- M3 LLC named Parag Doshi as CTO, overseeing the technological direction of the hotel accounting software and service provider as it works to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.