Enterprise AI just grew up—and the math has changed.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Francis deSouza, COO of Google Cloud, breaks down why the era of scattered AI pilots is over—and why the winners are moving fast, focused, and top-down.

We unpack how leading enterprises are shifting from “let a thousand flowers bloom” to a tight portfolio of high-impact AI use cases that actually ship, scale, and deliver ROI. Francis explains why data strategy—not model choice—is the real competitive advantage, how agents need secure access to data where it already lives (no massive migrations required), and why AI is quietly rewriting the enterprise attack surface.

The conversation also gets real about people. The next generation of AI-ready companies won’t just hire specialists—they’ll build AI-fluent teams where every employee is bilingual in their domain and AI.

If you’re building for 2026 and beyond, this episode is your signal:
less hype, fewer experiments, more execution.

More about this week's guest:

Francis deSouza is Chief Operating Officer and President of Security Products at Google Cloud, where he leads operations to scale the business and oversees Google Cloud's global security portfolio, spanning products, threat intelligence, consulting, and governance. He joined Google in January 2025 after three decades as an engineer, technology executive, entrepreneur, and investor. Previously, Francis served as CEO of Illumina and President at Symantec. He has co-founded three companies and serves on the board of Deel. Francis holds BS and MS degrees from MIT and is driven by technology's power to improve lives.

Francis's top pick: The AI Multiplier: Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage with Google Cloud COO Francis deSouza

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.