Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator, said on Monday it had entered into a long-term partnership with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and generative AI products to Indian businesses.

The collaboration will leverage Airtel's massive customer base, which, in words of the company, covers 2,000 large enterprises and a million emerging businesses. The companies would offer AI solutions, in this case generative AI, which Airtel would train on its vast datasets.

Under the partnership, Airtel and Google Cloud would be providing business enterprises with products such as geospatial analytics, location intelligence to spot trends, predictive capabilities, market assessment, site selection, risk management, and asset tracking.

Other projects reportedly on the pipeline include voice analytics for conversational applications trained across languages, and marketing technology, which will predict consumer behavior, perform audience segmentations, and streamline content creation with contextual ads. To handle support, Airtel said it has established a managed service center in Pune crewed by more than 300 "experts".

The tech giants, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are now focusing on the telecommunication sector as they focus on the billions of data generated by the global customers of this sector. The three firms have made deals with telecom operators in various parts of the world, including the U.S. and U.K. The companies are also aggressively targeting businesses worldwide to sell their offers of generative AI.

The company already invested in Airtel and has committed to invest up to $1 billion in the Indian carrier by 2022. Google also funded Jio Platforms, an Indian firm that owns the country's largest carrier. Jio has a similar long-term deal with Microsoft, as the Indian carrier cross-sells Office 365 and Azure to local companies.
Google and Airtel refused to give financial details of the deal.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has described the partnership as "a significant milestone" towards Android creator's commitment to accelerate cloud and AI adoption in India.