Google Cloud Next 2024: Partners, Customers Set to Discuss Sustainability, AI

When the Google Cloud Next 2024 conference arrives this week, the cloud services event will feature roughly 18 sessions that tackle sustainability challenges and opportunities. Some of those sessions will describe how to leverage AI (artificial intelligence) for various carbon reduction and net zero strategies.

First, the big picture: Google Cloud, led since 2019 by CEO Thomas Kurian, achieved profitability in early 2023. Meanwhile, the overall Google business is striving to achieve net zero emissions across all operations and value chain by 2030. At the same time, Google Cloud's goal is to run on carbon-free energy across all data centers by 2030.

Google's sustainability efforts include plenty of cloud-centric partnerships. During the 2023 conference, partners such as SAP, Deloitte, and Hitachi Energy described how they were assisting customers with sustainability data management and energy management strategies.

Google Cloud Next 2024: Sustainability Discussions

Fast forward to the April 2024 conference, and the sustainability conversations will include key Google Cloud partners and customers such as Carrefour, Devoteam, EA Sports, Hudbay Minerals, Intel, L'Oreal, MongoDB, MSCI, Pachama, Perennial, Pythian, Rent the Runway and Woolpert.

Updates: Check this blog for news and analysis before, during and after the conference.

Sustainability Sessions: Here are the conference sessions that will likely address sustainability as a primary or secondary topic area...

1. Level up your sustainable engineering practices with Google Cloud: Featuring Antoine Castex of L'Oreal and Cynthia Wu of Google.

2. What's new and what's next in cloud sustainability: Featuring Justin Keeble, managing director, global sustainability, Google Cloud.

3. What is the EUDR and what does it mean to Retailers? Featuring Google Cloud's Charlotte Hutchinson and Prue Mackenzie.

Charlotte Hutchinson and Prue Mackenzie

4. Make apps greener with serverless: Featuring Guillaume Blaquiere of Carrefour and Antoine Caste of L'Oreal.

5. Connect all your data to AI: Stay tuned for speaker details.

6. Game-changing migration: Moving EA SPORTS FC to a global stage: Featuring Wilson Chan of EA Sports.

7. Reinvention and Disruption in Mining through Technology Evolution: Featuring Jason Kozar from Hudbay Minerals and Paul Lewis from Pythian.

8. Retail reimagined: Where AI, serverless computing, data, and APIs meet: Featuring Sijohn Mathew of Devoteam.

9. How Rent the Runway transforms garment management automation with MongoDB: Featuring Fred Favelin of MongoDB and Mike Liberant of Rent the Runway.

10. Achieve GPU-level performance effortlessly with Intel Xeon in Google Cloud: Featuring Andres Rodriguez of Intel.

11. Future-proofing progress: Embedding DEI into the fabric of tomorrow: Featuring Brianna McCullough-Weah of Google Cloud.

12. Pinpoint climate risks to sustainable finance in the era of AI: Featuring Naman Bairagi and Pooja Malpani of MSCI; and Chad W. Jennings of Google Cloud.

13. Gain real-time insights with AlloyDB for PostgreSQL’s analytic accelerator: Featuring Google's Sam Idicula, Isabella Lubin and Sridhar Ranganathan.

14. Prompt Engineering using PaLM and Gemini: Featuring Vishal Patel and Kyle Steckler of Google Cloud.

15. What's next for security professionals: Featuring Sunil Potti of Google Cloud.

16. Build for the future of Android: Featuring Yingying Mast from Google.

17. Build the future of global carbon market analytics in Google Cloud: Featuring George Azzari of Woolpert, Marie Hoeger of Pachama and David Schurman of Perennial.

18. Simplify cloud operations with App Hub’s app-centric approach and Duet AI: Featuring Syed Ameer Abbas and Sahil Nanda of Google Cloud.

Updates: Blog originally published February 20, 2024. Check this blog for news and analysis before, during and after the conference.