Google, Gmail, GPay. It’s undeniable that these three are inextricably linked to Indian households.
Google India is an integral part of the India story.
As a report mentions, Google India started with five employees in 2004 and since then, it has had one of the largest employee bases outside of the US. It started the engine in English before making a presence in India with regional languages such as Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil. Not to mention that Google introduced India-first innovations and invested massively in the country’s digital economy (approximately Rs 75,000 crore) through the India Digitisation Fund, announced in 2020.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai is upbeat about what is in store. “We’re helping to advance India’s digital future. That includes our efforts to build a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text—part of our global effort to bring the world’s 1,000 most-spoken languages online, and to help people access knowledge and information in their preferred language,” Pichai said in December in 2022.
Google Pay has already completed more than five years in India.
The report adds that in June, Google partnered with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to enable Aadhaar-based authentication for UPI activation to simplify the user onboarding process.
Further, Google in August augmented its generative AI search experience in India and Japan, the first countries
outside the US.
The new AI-powered search feature, called SGE (Search Generative Experience), will be available through Google’s Search Labs in these markets and will introduce a new feature that will make it easier to find information in AI-powered overviews.
With Pichai announcing that Google will open its global fintech operation centre at GIFT City in Gujarat, a new page awaits us.
