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MATT BRITTIN: Hello.
I'm Matt Brittin, and I run Google's operations
and business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
I'm happy to join you, and I hope that you and your loved
ones are well.
I'm really looking forward to the times
when we can all meet again in person.
Yes, Next OnAir is a cloud conference,
but I didn't plan to talk about infrastructure or databases.
I want to talk about Google and our big commitment
to help inclusive, sustainable economic recovery.
With skills, helping people learn new skills to find jobs.
With tools, helping businesses grow online.
And with rules, working with governments and communities
to boost recovery.
We've all seen how online tools can
be a lifeline in the lockdown, and we can also
see how they'll be a catalyst for the economic comeback.
For health information, education, and the economy,
for people, communities, and businesses,
and for organizations, like Savoir Faire Ensemble.
Businesses in the French fashion and textile industry
supported the fight against the virus
by getting together, coordinating their resources.
They formed this organization Savoir Faire Ensemble,
and they shifted their resources to produce
masks and surgical gowns to help slow the spread of the virus.
Our tools help their suppliers and their buyers
collaborate remotely.
This became a collective organization,
one of millions of organizations and businesses
across the globe who embraced online tools
to help their community, to ease business model transition,
to strengthen supply chains during the pandemic.
In fact, globally the consumer and business use of technology
has leapt forward five years in perhaps five months.
We've seen a 60% increase in internet usage overall.
Online searches for online shopping or how to buy online
grew by 200% worldwide.
And our own video conferencing solution, Google Meet,
saw its daily peak usage grow by 30 times.
All of us have faced some harshness
in the conditions we've had during the pandemic.
Some have found new opportunities to innovate.
I've been inspired by so many of the stories.
For example, Landbot reduced the pressure on emergency systems
with chat bots that processed 280 million messages
during the pandemic.
Ocado Technology supported their retail partners
to deliver 40% more groceries during the pandemic
than pre-lockdown.
But not everyone has access to these transformational tools
or the skills to use them.
Even before the crisis it was clear
that the jobs of the future would need
a new set of digital skills.
We did work with McKinsey, and we
found that people will need to learn new skills
and that some will need to change careers as some jobs
and industries are disrupted.
And COVID-19 has only accelerated
the speed of that transition.
So now it's even more urgent to invest in people and businesses
for a sustainable and inclusive recovery.
You and your family want that recovery to be rapid.
You need the skills and jobs to support you,
and you deserve technology that helps.
What are we doing?
Recently, we launched a pledge to help 10 million people
and businesses in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
to find jobs to digitize and to grow over the next 18 months.
It comes down to four things--
investing in skills to help you and your employees
to get ready for the jobs of the future,
providing tools to help businesses digitize
and recover faster, helping governments build programs
for a resilient and equitable workforce,
and finally we have to ensure that economic recovery is also
green and sustainable.
Let me take each of those in turn.
Technology must help everyone prepare
for the jobs of the future, creating
that sustainable, inclusive economy by eliminating
the barriers to learning, barriers caused by inequities
such as where you live, your race, your financial resources,
your access to education.
And we know a bit about how to help with skills.
It's called Grow with Google.
We set out five years ago to train a million Europeans
in digital skills, working with governments, trade unions,
and training organizations.
We were blown away by demand.
We've scaled it globally, and we've now
trained over 70 million people around the world.
And during the lockdown, we saw a three times
increase in demand for this training.
Now to tackle the skills gap for jobs in STEM specifically,
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math,
we're introducing a new suite of Google career certificates.
These will help people get qualifications
into high-paying, high-growth jobs,
such as IT support or data analytics or UX and design.
And you don't need a university degree to take part.
We're covering the costs for 100,000 people
to take these Coursera courses.
More than half of the certificates
will be specifically dedicated to underserved communities,
and they include scholarships to provide
child care or technology or language support.
And to support the job search after the training,
we're developing and actively looking
for partners for a global hiring consortium, companies
who consider graduates of these courses for jobs.
Now on top of those courses you can also
earn Google Cloud Skills Badges or take
free foundational courses in cloud computing or big data
or machine learning, all of them on our website.
Let's switch from digital skills to digital tools.
As I mentioned earlier, online tools
have been a lifeline during the pandemic
to both individuals and businesses.
They helped you stay connected with customers,
keep your employees working, and adapt to changing customer
expectations.
That's why we're helping businesses like yours
with new digital tools to help you communicate with customers
online, collaborate with remote teams,
and transform your operations with AI.
If your store's shut, you need tools to generate awareness
to simplify communication with customers,
and Google My Business includes tools in Search and Maps
so that you can spread the word, stay connected, and keep
customers up to date.
During the crisis we released a number of new features,
including for restaurants to inform customers
that they now do home delivery.
If you manage a team, you need to reimagine the way you work.
Many of you are familiar with G Suite.
And as you may have heard, we recently announced
a new brand, Google Workspace, which has all the productivity
apps you know and love, Gmail and Calendar and Drive
and Docs and Sheets and Slides and Meet and more,
thoughtfully connected together.
So that whether you're at home, at work, or in the classroom,
it's the best way to create, to communicate, and collaborate.
If you want to transform your operations,
you need access to AI.
And we want that to be for everyone, not just
for multinationals or for the tech sector, AI for everyone.
We recently launched our AI for business checkup tool
in 11 countries.
And it gives you a personalized report
on how to implement AI in your business,
the potential benefits, and how to get started.
In Italy, I talked to the CEO of a packaging company, Saccheria
Franceschetti.
They now use AI-based Google solutions
to boost their supply chain efficiency and reduce costs.
Investing in AI helped them monitor company processes
in real time from their supply chain, to warehouse systems,
to logistics, and delivery.
They saw a dramatic increase in operational efficiency,
doubling their profit margins in three years.
Bold community initiatives are needed to fully recover
and keep the economy moving.
And for governments to create the conditions
for a resilient and equitable workforce,
they need to work with technology partners
with deep industry expertise and build
programs to support the most heavily impacted communities.
For example, in partnership with the Italian government
and the European Union and various local partners,
Crescere in Digitale is our program
that helps young Italians find opportunities and develop
their digital skills through online training.
So far it's trained 82,000 people
and activated almost 4,000 business internships.
Google.org, our philanthropic arm,
is also partnering with Youth Business International
to support over 200,000 underserved small- and
medium-sized businesses in 31 countries
to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.
Finally, beyond skills, tools, government, and community
partnerships, we're investing in creating a greener future
and green recovery in Europe.
Sustainability has been a core value for us
since Google was founded two decades ago.
I joined Google in 2007, and that was the year
we became carbon neutral.
By 2017 we were the largest corporate buyer
of renewable energy in the world.
We operate the cleanest cloud in the industry.
And we recently announced that we've
eliminated our entire carbon legacy since our founding, as
well as a new and most ambitious sustainability goal yet.
We aim to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy in all
our data centers and all our campuses worldwide by 2030.
This means that every email you send through Gmail,
every question you ask Google search, every YouTube
video you watch is already carbon neutral.
And in the future, our services will
be supplied only by carbon-free energy every hour of every day.
Here in Europe, the European Commission
has set its sights on another ambitious goal
with the European Green Deal.
That's to make Europe the world's
first carbon-neutral continent by 2050.
We absolutely applaud this vision.
We will support it in three ways.
First, our own investment.
By 2025, we will anchor more than 2 billion euros
in green infrastructure investment
and create more than 2,000 new green jobs in Europe.
That comes on top of the green jobs and investments
we made in the past.
For example, between 2007 and 2018
we invested approximately 7 billion euros
in constructing some of the world's most energy-efficient
data centers in Europe, supporting 9,600 full-time jobs
across Europe each year on average.
And second, we want to help European businesses
and partners increase energy efficiency
by their own use of AI.
Using machine learning, we reduced
the energy needed to cool our data centers by 30%.
And now we're making this proven cloud technology
solution available for customers and partners.
And then thirdly, we want to help boost innovation in cities
and support European nonprofits with a 10 million
euro Google.org impact challenge.
As an example, we've pledged to help
500 cities and local governments globally
to reduce an aggregate of 1 gigaton--
that's 1 billion tons--
of carbon emissions per year by 2030, more than a country
the size of Germany emits today.
So I hope that you can tell we remain fundamentally
optimistic about the future.
We know that getting there is not going to be easy
and that there are going to be tough times ahead.
And that's why Google is committing
to help people gain skills and find jobs,
to help businesses recover faster,
smarter, cleaner, to help governments and communities
accelerate recovery.
Online tools and digital skills for everyone
will be a catalyst for the comeback,
and Google is here to help.
Thank you.