Google Cloud India growth to be driven by agentic AI, data: MD Sreedharan

Google Cloud India MD Sashikumar Sreedharan says sectors such as financial services are likely to be among the early adopters of agentic AI-powered cloud services

The next phase of growth for Google Cloud in India will be driven by offering enterprises artificial intelligence (AI), agentic AI, data and security tools and services, Sashikumar Sreedharan, managing director for Google Cloud India, said.

 

“In the context of AI, these four are transformative in nature. The customer is modernising data, overhauling security completely, bringing in agentic AI, and was, before that, going deep into generative use-case models,” Sreedharan said.

 

In India, the use of agentic cloud, along with tools such as Gemini Enterprise agent platform, the agentic data cloud, defence and the model play, has helped the company achieve a competitive edge against other hyperscalers that are deeply entrenched in both the enterprise and public sector markets in the country, he said.

 

The integration of a semantic layer in the cloud has also solved the problem of enterprise or public sector data being present in fragments and silos, as long as the data is clean and accessible to the AI agent, Sreedharan said.

 

“As long as it (data) can be indexed, the AI instrument will absolutely make sense of all of them together,” he said.

 

Sreedharan, who was appointed head of Google Cloud India in 2025, said that while horizontal business opportunities, such as call centre and support businesses, are achieving high levels of accuracy and efficiency by using an agentic AI framework, some of the more nuanced business verticals, such as health insurance claims approvals, are much more complex and often require the implementation of multiple AI agents that have the ability to talk to each other.

 

In India, verticals such as financial services, which have high volumes of data, are likely to be among the early adopters of agentic AI-powered cloud services, he said.

 

“There are also scenarios that are emerging but still not at scale. For example, agents running in manufacturing workstations on factory floors. They are all built in multiple steps. Nobody is rushing into it. They are looking at one element at a time, validating its outcome, doing the next piece and stitching it together,” Sreedharan said.

 

The scope for agentic AI to grow in India will be much more pronounced across sectors with voice and video elements, especially in vernacular languages, as these sectors will have high data volumes and are extremely diverse, he said.