Dive Brief:
- Enterprises are fueling hybrid cloud investments to drive generative AI adoption, according to a Wipro survey of 500 technology executives published last month.
- More than half of respondents said AI technologies will drive cloud investments, with banking, manufacturing and retail businesses leading the pack, the technology services firm found.
- Generative AI amplifies the importance of cloud as an agent of transformation and innovation, Jo Debecker, managing partner and global head of Wipro FullStride Cloud, told CIO Dive. “If you want to implement AI, you need to have the data, which requires you to digitalize and to modernize your core applications,” Debecker said. “That requires cloud.”
Dive Insight:
Generative AI needs the cloud to deliver the data and compute resources that sustain large language models. Hyperscaler platforms also provide customers with model marketplaces and readymade sandboxes to pilot potential use cases.
As generative AI stoked enterprise enthusiasm, cloud paved a path to adoption.
While most organizations — 55% — are further ahead in cloud than in AI adoption, more than one-third said they are moving at the same pace with both technologies, Wipro found.
The symbiotic relationship is reflected in enterprise cloud usage and deployments, which have accelerated since the emergence of generative AI.
“There is no AI without cloud,” Debecker said. “But on the other side, in the future, I think there will be no cloud without AI — that's why the cloud providers are now positioning themselves as AI providers.”
Enterprise spending across cloud infrastructure, platform and application services is increasing by nearly 20% annually, according to IDC’s analysis. The market is expected to surpass $800 billion this year and double by 2028.
AWS, the largest of the big three hyperscalers, reported multibillion-dollar returns from AI last month, during a Q2 2024 earnings call. Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy mentioned generative AI nearly a dozen times during his opening remarks and boasted about the cloud division’s offerings.
“During the past 18 months, AWS has launched more than twice as many machine learning and generative AI features into general availability than all of the other major cloud providers combined,” Jassy said. “This team is cooking, but we're not close to being done adding capabilities for our customers' interface.”
AWS’s leading cloud competitor, Microsoft, reported similar growth in the number of AI users on its Azure public cloud in a July earnings call. CEO Satya Nadella said Azure AI’s customer base increased nearly 60% year over year to 60,000.
The third-largest hyperscaler, Google Cloud, also tied billions in Q2 revenue to generative AI solutions and claimed more than 2 million users for its developer tools.
As cloud and AI strategies mature in tandem, Debecker anticipates enterprises will gravitate to hybrid ecosystems, integrating public and private cloud with on-prem infrastructure.
“Customers will be looking to use the right AI model for the right workload,” Debecker said. “And they’ll want the right workload to run in the right environment, be it public cloud, private cloud or on-prem.”
