LAURENCE LAFONT: Hi, everyone.
Welcome to this Virtual Fireside Chat with Google Cloud.
My name is Laurence Lafont.
I'm Vice President Industry Sales, EMEA, for Google Cloud,
and I'm really happy to be joined today
by Cornelia Schaurecker from our customer Vodafone.
CORNELIA SCHAURECKER: Hello.
LAURENCE LAFONT: Cornelia, thank you so much for joining us.
Most of us in Europe and Asia-Pacific,
in particular, know Vodafone extremely well.
But maybe for those who don't know,
it would be great if you could explain maybe
a bit more about what Vodafone is
and what you are responsible for there.
CORNELIA SCHAURECKER: Yes, for sure.
So Vodafone is connecting people all over the world.
It's one of the largest mobile networks,
with more than 300 million customers.
The footprint is predominantly in Europe and in Africa,
but we have partners all across the world.
Also, we are the second-largest TV platform in Europe
and the largest 5G network, which
is a very important innovative topic, also
very important for our data and AI use cases in the future.
And also, we have a world leading IoT platform
connecting more than 120 million connected devices, many
of them, for instance, connected cars.
So for those of you who don't know us or don't know me,
I'm leading the Global Big Data and AI Team as a Global Group
Director, and my team spans across our footprint
in all the markets that I've just mentioned.
And our vision is really to not just build the best use
cases to help Vodafone to have the best customer
service and growth, but also to use our data
whenever possible for social good, which is one thing we've
done together with Google.
LAURENCE LAFONT: Yes, since we effectively--
I think it's impressive, first of all, to see the footprint
and the impact Vodafone has all around the world.
We've been working very closely, as you
mentioned, since 2019, focusing on data and AI projects.
We recently announced the next phase of this joint work.
Maybe you could tell us a bit more
about this in a few words, what you're
really excited about in this partnership and joint work
before we go on the social good initiative.
CORNELIA SCHAURECKER: Yes, for sure.
So I'm very excited.
First of all, the big things.
We have completed our global migration
to the Cloud, which is called Neuron.
It's 100% completed, and it's a very good basis.
And now we are starting the next rocket, if you like,
which is called Nucleus, which is
going to bring us data standardization
to our global information.
And also we're working on Dynamo,
which is a global hybrid data integration project.
And another thing that is very important for me is we
are one of the first customers to implement
Vertex AI, which Google has just announced a couple of weeks
ago.
We call it AI Booster, and it's really
our AI platform for unified envelopes, which will bring us,
hopefully, the possibility to scale very fast at speed
and really to build our use cases around the world faster
and better and leverage the value of our data
for our customers and our company.
LAURENCE LAFONT: One thing that we know, of course, is data
and AI can play a very significant role,
as we were mentioning, in the companies, but also
to drive positive societal impact.
I think in the COVID area we've seen a lot of great use of data
to go faster to help getting the vaccines, also, up and running
more rapidly.
So besides the business critical projects
we have been talking about, It's great
to see companies, such as Vodafone, actually,
really focusing on looking at how data, how data analytics,
how AI can be used for social good.
And so I really would like you to tell us
more about the projects your team is working on,
which are absolutely impressive.
CORNELIA SCHAURECKER: Thank you so much.
Well, I quickly mentioned that we
started to work on the COVID topic
as soon as the pandemic started.
And before that, we have been working
on malaria, which helped us very much in transferring
some knowledge and even models for the COVID situation
and enabled us to support governments
all over our footprint with a very fast response.
So let me start a little bit explaining
how Google and us have collaborated in the malaria
topic.
So in collaboration with the University of Southampton,
my team has developed a model, which used our mobility data
in an anonymized way, aggregated,
so fully adopting all privacy standards--
which are very high, by the way.
And what we've done is we identified sources and sinks
of malaria in Mozambique and we have shared the findings
with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who have supported
us along with other initiatives like the Clinton Health
Initiative.
And thanks to their support, we had an epidemiological expert
on my team when COVID started, and that allowed us,
together with the Google Cloud brought in by Google,
to build a platform very quickly to leverage, again,
our anonymized and aggregated mobility data to leverage
learnings on how COVID was spreading
and what governments could do.
And so hence, we have rapidly replicated a methodology
and applied it on the COVID problem, which helped us a lot.
LAURENCE LAFONT: And it was very fast tracked.
I think you saw, very rapidly, an impact contribution,
as you said, right?
So it's also the time it takes to be
able to get these impacts that was really impressive, I think,
in these projects.
CORNELIA SCHAURECKER: Interestingly enough,
my team and I, all my heads of big data,
we met in late February in Paddington
and we said, what can we do about the situation
and how can we leverage our models, our insights,
and the fact that we have an epidemiologist in the team?
And together with the Cloud we built up
everything in a couple of weeks.
We did daily stand ups. We worked in agile,
and we brought in all the different markets
and we always help when we are requested.
So upon request of European governments and the European
Commission, we provided those insights
in a secure, anonymized, and aggregated way.
LAURENCE LAFONT: Yeah, and I think
it's great to see the combination of obviously,
the technology, which is here, which can help
go fast the mindset also of the teams,
and the spirit for bringing innovation into life for good
and for positive impact in the society, which
I think all of our teams are really also aspiring to.
So that's great to see.
Beyond the very immediate positive impact,
I would say, from the project, what
would you say will be the long term contribution
or impact you can have with these first projects
with organizations?
Like I know you worked with UNICEF,
I think, on this kind of expansion.
CORNELIA SCHAURECKER: Yes, we've worked with UNICEF.
We've worked with the World Bank.
We've worked with the IMF on different questions.
So for instance, on trying to figure out
what the different impact was on socioeconomic groups
like young people, like women.
And of course, those data-driven insights
help those organizations to work on countermeasures
or to work on how to support those especially
vulnerable groups, and we're very proud we can do that.
And like in every AI use case, there is always more.
And very often the questions just
arise in the collaboration, if that makes sense.
LAURENCE LAFONT: Yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
And that's great to see.
And I'm sure your teams are asking
for more in terms of contribution
and what they can continue to do in these kind of projects.
CORNELIA SCHAURECKER: And by the way,
we don't have an army of people here.
We really have a very small team,
and I would like to thank them and thank the people
from the Google side, as well, because we're doing that
with limited resources.
Because, of course, our predominant role
is to deliver our commercial projects.
But I'm very happy and very proud
that people are doing things and go way
beyond every day to support here, many of them
in their spare time.
LAURENCE LAFONT: Great to see, effectively,
and we know it matters for the teams and for people,
definitely, to also be able to contribute
to these kind of projects.
And we know it can be hard because it's
on top of everything else, but great to see that.
Thank you so much, Cornelia, for your time.
It's been really interesting, extremely
exciting to hear about how Vodafone
is really able to reach and support
communities, governments, for good use of data,
and impact on social goods.
I'm really looking forward to continuing our partnership
and contributing to this important work in the future.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us, and wishing you
all a great day.
Thanks again, Cornelia.
CORNELIA SCHAURECKER: Thank you so much to you
and your team, Laurence, for a great collaboration
and for all the impact we already had together.
And I look forward to the next big thing,
which is Vertex and all our use cases.
Thank you.
LAURENCE LAFONT: Thank you.