How businesses achieve strong ROI with Google Cloud AI

It’s clear that companies who began adopting AI early are seeing strong results. Last year, we surveyed a large group of businesses to learn about the impact they were seeing from AI. Almost 75% of these companies said they were already seeing ROI, and they reported strong gains in productivity, employee engagement and satisfaction.

Now, we want to take a closer look at how Google Cloud customers in particular are benefitting from our AI products and services. To better understand this, we worked with the team at IDC to survey hundreds of Google Cloud customers who are using our AI technologies right now. The result is a new study, “The Business Value of Google Cloud Gen AI,” which unveils new data on exactly how much AI is benefiting these customers and their people today.

The study highlights several exciting data points:

According to IDC, our customers are seeing a significant material return on their investment. 

• Customers found an average of 727% return on their investment in Google Cloud AI in three years. 

• The “payback period” for businesses adopting Google Cloud AI is roughly eight months.

• Businesses using Google Cloud AI are gaining an average of $205,000 in productivity and output value per 1,000 employees.

• These gains are largely thanks to helping people be more productive, helping them better support customer demand, and increasing revenue per employee.

Individual employees see as much as a 36% boost in their productivity – the equivalent of having 683 additional hours in their year. 

• This is largely due to the ability to reduce the occurrence of manual, repetitive processes in areas like data extraction, content creation, and application development.

• One Google Cloud customer in the marketing industry reported accelerating content creation by 46%; a healthcare customer cited developer productivity gains between 30% and 70% thanks to Google Cloud AI.

• One customer surveyed by IDC reported 30% higher career satisfaction among their developers who used Google Cloud AI in their day-to-day jobs.

• Our tools for developers, like Gemini Code Assist and Vertex AI, empower developers to  generate high quality code and ultimately build and launch applications more quickly, while incorporating human-in-the-loop practices for oversight. The recently released Gemini CLI embeds these capabilities even more deeply into dev workflows.

• Google Cloud AI is helping people save time, have more impact, and grow in their careers.

AI is now the primary driver for customer engagements with Google Cloud’s services partners like systems integrators.

• Google Cloud partners offering technology services are investing billions of dollars to grow their AI project capacity, including adding more Google Cloud AI experts to their teams, upskilling existing consultants, and developing new solutions.

• Google Cloud services partners are also growing their teams and expert consultants to address the AI opportunity, and expect to increase their skilled AI professionals as much as 100% annually.

• Systems-integrator partners anticipate AI adoption in 2025 will easily surpass the high growth observed during 2024.

We see many of these same benefits ourselves, as Google employees are using AI today to drive more productivity and creativity in their work. For example, 30% of code at Google is now suggested by AI, and we’ve seen a 10% increase in coding velocity using AI tools.

You can read the entire IDC research paper here, and discover use cases from more than 600 companies already using Google Cloud AI across their operations and offerings here. And please reach out to your Google Cloud sales representative if you’d like to learn how Google is using its own AI to achieve new efficiencies and growth, and how you can, too.