‘We are not piloting Gemini Enterprise—we have scaled it. We turned on Gemini Enterprise for our entire U.S. workforce a couple weeks ago,’ says KPMG’s Todd Lohr. Lohr takes a deep dive with CRN into Google’s new Gemini Enterprise platform and what it means for the AI market.
Google Cloud all-star partner and global professional services giant KPMG is bullish about Google’s Gemini Enterprise agentic AI platform, which the company has already implemented across its massive U.S. workforce of around 40,000 employees.
“We are not piloting Gemini Enterprise—we have scaled it. We turned on Gemini Enterprise for our entire U.S. workforce a couple weeks ago,” said Todd Lohr, national managing principal of clients and markets at KPMG US.
“So almost 40,000 people and 40,000 licenses,” Lohr said. “Within days, we’ve got about 75 percent of that workforce using the technology.”
[Related: Google Gemini’s 10 New AI Product Launches, Programs And News]
The New York City-based advisory, consulting and professional services all-star is one of Google Cloud’s top partners when it comes to driving Gemini customer deals.
Google recently launched Gemini Enterprise, which brings together several AI technologies, including Google’s Gemini models, first- and third-party AI agents, and core conversational AI and orchestration innovation from Google Agentspace.
“Agentspace was very focused on the build-development of agents. Gemini is really that next step forward that brings all of the pieces together. So it has the models and the agents, the data and integration, which is hugely critical here,” Lohr said. “Google really has created a single, strategic platform for enterprise AI.”
Lohr is an industry veteran who heads KPMG US growth efforts through strategic client engagement and market development as well as leading channels.
In an interview with CRN, Lohr takes a deep dive into Google Gemini Enterprise, why customers will buy the new AI platform, and how KPMG and Lohr himself uses Gemini Enterprise “daily.”
How is KPMG using Gemini Enterprise?
We’ve seen AI as both a disrupter and an opportunity for our business, as well as an opportunity for our clients. Our strategy is we want to be out in front in the use of AI.
We’re one of, if not the largest, purchasers of what was Agentspace—now Gemini Enterprise, in the last year.
We’ve been at the enterprise implementation of that. A lot of organizations, right or wrong, are piloting.
We are not piloting Gemini Enterprise—we have scaled it. We turned on Gemini Enterprise for our entire U.S. workforce a couple weeks ago. So almost 40,000 people and 40,000 licenses. Within days, we’ve got about 75 percent of that workforce using the technology.
We’ve been adopting AI across the enterprise for some time, which certainly helped, because our teams have been using and are continuing to use AI. We have deployed Gemini at scale to a very large workforce and have been using it. I was part of the pre-launch piloted group, so I’ve been using it for weeks, if not months.
So we have the entire enterprise using it on a pretty much active basis day to day.
I have it. I use it. I build my own agents.
How does KMPG and yourself use Gemini Enterprise to make your own agents and improve the company?
I’m using it daily. So one of the agents I personally have built is around how I do a lot of client C-level intro conversations.
I built an agent that has access to a couple pieces of our thought leadership. We have it integrated with a couple of our data sources, which I think is also awesome about Gemini.
The models themselves are great, but they don’t have your company’s data, which is OK, but there’s a lot of stuff sitting in shared drives around organizations that have really interesting information.
So my agent will go through both internal external data and prep me based upon like, ‘Is it a CFO or a CIO I’m talking to? What sector are they in? What’s the latest thinking in that sector?’
It comes up with the questions I should be asking them, questions they may ask me, insights about their company, and insights about all sorts of things.
For me to prep for a C-level conversation in the past would have taken me days to figure out who our experts are, how to find them, and how to get at them.
Now, within 20 minutes, I can have a much higher-quality conversation with the client.
And that’s just one example for my job and how I use it. We have examples across tax, audit, our advisory businesses, everywhere from our campus hires to our most senior partners like myself, that are all using it in very different ways.
Why will businesses buy Gemini Enterprise?
Gemini is that single platform for how an enterprise can scale AI.
It’s a broader ROI conversation.
When you start talking to the C-suite, specifically the CIO, CTOs, in most organizations that is the person that’s leading AI adoption. They [have] an important role. But you need to also have business partnership because, ultimately, this is about changing the way people are working and how they interact with technology. So it’s not just about turning it on.
There are a number of different platforms out there for AI. Certainly, all of those come with a subscription cost. Customers are working through now where they’re going to place their bets and where they’re going to use AI.
What’s most critical in that is where Gemini comes in, which is really enterprise grade and enterprise integration. It has access to the latest models. It has all the pieces. And it really lets you do end-to-end use of agents and integrate with other agents in other platforms.
It’s designed to really be that enterprise single view or single pane of glass. It really allows you to be that single place for enterprise work in AI.
I have access to a lot of different AI capabilities. I find it to be that starting point for where I initially go to use AI.
What are some of the key features in Gemini Enterprise that Google partners and customers will like the most?
The two big things that I get excited about [are] what it’s enabled from a search perspective.
So yes, Gemini Enterprise gets you access to the agents, but it also gets you access to Google Search at the enterprise level.
I have found that hugely beneficial as I look for our content across the firm.
We haven’t integrated every data source in the firm yet. We’re working on that and have a road map to do so. But in what we have integrated so far, I find it extremely valuable in finding content in the information across a large organization that has been historically more challenging.
I feel like we’re starting to turn the corner in enterprise knowledge management. I don’t think any organization is going to stand up and tell you that they have solved knowledge management holistically.
I certainly feel like with what we’ve done with Gemini over the summer, that we have made a gigantic leap forward in advancing how we think about that and how we are doing knowledge management firmwide.
The multimodal AI inside Gemini is great. Especially if you think about how people consume and integrate information. Like I have files of certain topics that I dump content into and then turn those into podcasts weekly to kind of take on a walk and learn and just experience content in a different way.
No longer do I have to read 30 white papers. I can aggregate those, turn it into a podcast and be able to consume it in a different way.
That’s a great example of where I think we’re going to start seeing even more advancements in kind of multimodal AI being able to translate knowledge into different ways of consuming it, which is great. People learn differently. People want to experience and consume information a different way.
How does KMPG, or even CIOs and other channel partners, keep up with the AI wave of innovation? Is it even possible?
We’re measuring advancements in AI technology in days and weeks, not months and years.
The market is moving extremely fast. A lot of business leaders tend to be linear thinkers and look at past trends to predict future results. We are in an exponential curve at this point in the market of AI, where we’re moving straight up that curve in advancements in both the models, the capabilities and what agents can do.
It’s really hard for a CEO to understand the strategy of their organization and where the market is going to go in 12 months, let alone two to three years, which is most strategy planning processes.
Even more so on the CIO role.
Historically, CIOs lay out a multiyear road map to implement technology. They’re starting to look at those road maps and worry that what they’re implementing with a line of sight for the next 24 months, that tech stacks can be very different.
Just in the last several months, what Google has done has just changed—the announcement of Gemini Enterprise is one good example of that. It’s a new set of an enterprise platform. How do CIOs think about that, implement that into their tech stack, converge it with all of their current tech estate?
And then more importantly, how do CEOs understand what those foundational capabilities are to the disruption of their sector or their business, and be able to triangulate on how they need to drive the business strategy forward?
I’m lucky to have both a dedicated AI team that gets up every day understanding the AI marketplace with leadership that focuses on all of the aspects of AI and can ingest all of those changes. As well as a dedicated Google team that helps me make sure that we are understanding the strategy direction of where Google is taking, not only Gemini, but their broader set of cloud technologies so we can help our clients.
