Private Sector Solutions to Public Sector Challenges

We established Google Public Sector in 2022 as a separate subsidiary of Google. GPS has a core mission to really empower the public sector to accelerate digital transformation. This is about helping government agencies transform the way they deliver services to better serve their constituents using digital platforms. We deploy security solutions to make government platforms more secure and protect against cyberattacks. 

We also very proudly serve educational and healthcare systems using our communication tools and our collaboration tools with our productivity suite, Google Workspace. It enables these systems to use data to improve their critical infrastructure. In so many ways, across federal, state, local, and educational institutions, we are bringing our technology to really help drive their missions in new and improved ways.

El Koubi: I’m really interested in hearing about where you are and where the public sector is in this transformation along the different dimensions that you just outlined. You are basically at your two-year mark now as CEO of Google Public Sector. Can you talk a little bit about the big challenges and where we are as a society in dealing with some of these transformations? What have been the key ingredients for you and your team at GPS as you help governments at every level take on some of these challenges?

Dahut: It’s such an exciting time to be at this intersection of technology and public sector mission. Generative AI has captured the imagination of citizens across the globe, and it has raised the awareness of what technology can do to enhance the lives of everyday citizens. It’s what energizes our teams at Google to be able to bring these technologies to bear.

I have had the opportunity to travel all across the country, meeting with local mayors, governors, state agencies, and federal leaders. What I hear, universally, is that they are ready to adopt and accelerate their digital transformation, and they don’t really know where to start. Part of what has been so exciting is to show them the way, how Google Cloud and AI can help them enhance their services and make sure that their technology is truly secure. But more importantly, deliver on their missions better, faster, and more efficiently.

I joined Google because for years I felt like I was integrating other people’s technology, and this gave me the opportunity to work with the world’s leading technology company to actually build mission, purpose, and technology.

El Koubi: What have you found to be the most useful tools for helping those public sector leaders, those organizations, both individually and at a larger scale?

Dahut: It’s a really good place to describe the environment I think we find ourselves in today as public sector leaders and people trying to serve the public sector. There are challenges that our public sector leaders face, including data silos, legacy IT, ambivalence about implementing new technology, bureaucratic red tape, a need to recruit the next generation workforce, and how to equip those serving now with the skills for AI and more. Google Public Sector is about bringing a world-class team and world-class technology to this mission.

Google has taken a very different approach to GovCloud. Many public sector agencies are running on less reliable, less feature-rich, fortressed versions of commercial clouds known as GovCloud. We’re certifying our entire U.S. Google Cloud infrastructure to be able to serve the public sector mission. And this was a strategic choice. We believe commercial cloud solutions provide superior functionality, flexibility, and security.

Speaking of security, our approach is also radically different. It is truly at the center of every product and every solution we build. We use encryption, software-defined networks, and zero-trust, a security model based on the idea that no person or device should be trusted by default, even if they are already inside an organization’s network, rather than physical separation. We adopted zero-trust over a decade ago as our security foundation for the entirety of the company, and we believe that this is the same approach that the government needs to embrace. We invented foundational concepts around zero-trust architectures, and it’s proven that this zero-trust architecture ensures that an individual with the right identity, with the right access authorized by the right code, is more secure than any other approach to security. 

These are just a few areas. As you can probably tell, Jason, I could go on for hours on this.

El Koubi: Just before we started this conversation, I was texting with somebody else here in my state government organization after having gone through résumés saying, “Gosh, it’d be really nice if, instead of getting 25 résumés, I might’ve gotten an AI-generated spreadsheet.” I think people in organizations across the public sector and the private sector are asking similar questions right now. What role does artificial intelligence play in your internal operations and the capabilities and services that you’re delivering to your clients in the public sector? How do you see this evolving to serve different business needs? I’m interested in what’s happening at Google, but also, what do you see happening in the wider market?

Dahut: AI and machine learning have been employed by Google for years, from the very early days of the company. In fact, if you read some of our founding documents, you would see elements of AI and the possibilities of natural-language processing throughout. Our founders imagined the power of AI and its embedded capabilities into all of our products very early on in our journey. And it was in 2016, when Sundar Pichai, our current CEO of Alphabet and Google, said that Google is an AI-first company. 

At a company level, we infuse transparent, responsible AI practices across all of our products, and it’s fully integrated into Search, YouTube, Maps, Workspace, and, of course, Google Cloud with Gemini and our Vertex AI stack. It’s fully embedded. We’re very proud of the work that we’ve done around our Google Distributed Cloud. We have digital watermarking that’s generally available for AI-generated images produced by Imagen, and we’ve expanded all of our grounding capabilities to make sure that we’re producing responsible outputs to AI and generative AI.

You also asked about what we’re seeing in the market. Your example of the résumés is a really good one. We’re seeing generative AI used to enhance productivity. I think about it as an always-on personal assistant to a public sector employee that allows them to work on higher-order work while their generative AI assistant does some of the more routine work for them. It also helps to use AI to automate processes that are more mundane in their execution. 

An area that we are really talking about in the public sector is: How do you engage your citizens differently? They might go to the website for the Commonwealth of Virginia and have really specific questions on how they apply for unemployment benefits. You can produce a generative AI assistant for that citizen that helps them navigate that website, allowing them to get much easier natural-language answers to their questions, and save the citizen time in the process. There are so many great examples and things that we are building prototypes for and proofs of concept for our customers, and we’re excited about the possibilities that are yet to come.

El Koubi: Among other things, you said that responsible AI implementation has never been more important. Why are we at this moment of time where it’s become of utmost importance? How are you leveraging the capabilities of Google to ensure that there’s a responsible AI approach that helps government organizations with these kinds of implementations?

Dahut: There’s a lot of concern about AI because it is not well-understood by the general public, and so when they hear potential things that could go awry with the use of AI, that’s what stays with them. Google, since its founding, has been extraordinarily upfront and responsible in the application of any of our technologies. And when I talk about responsibility, I mean that we have been working as a first party. We understand it at its nucleus level, and we can explain and describe how it works in great detail. I think that’s the power of a company that really was founded and predicated on this idea of technology and AI.

When we talk about it being at the core of who we are, we don’t just mean that we’re applying it. It means that we truly understand how it works, how it comes to its conclusions, and how it’s being displayed in terms of answers to questions that users are asking. 

We built a fully integrated enterprise-grade vertical stack that starts with the infrastructure. It goes all the way up that software stack to AI operations, and that’s really one of a kind. It’s singular in our industry. We’re very, very proud that we’ve built it, soup to nuts, and can apply it in meaningful ways. What we’re very excited about is the possibility of applying this to the public sector, whether it’s in classified spaces or unclassified spaces. We know how it runs, we know how it works, and we know what to expect from the outputs.

El Koubi: There’s a people side to this. You and your team are based in Northern Virginia, and we’re thrilled to have you here. There’s also a very physical side to this to support the technology of the digital transformation, including data centers. Just this past April, Google announced that it would invest an additional $1 billion into its existing data center campuses in Virginia. 

What differentiates Virginia in terms of the decision-making process at Google? You guys have made some major investments here, both in terms of where you put your people, but also where you put your infrastructure. And where do you think that investment is going to go as you continue to scale your data-related capabilities and services, and how does that relate to your clients in terms of where you put the capabilities?

Dahut: We’re headquartered, as you mentioned, right here in Northern Virginia in Reston, which is an amazing central location for us to serve obviously all of the federal government, but also has ease of access to great airports to be able to go wherever the mission calls us. We’re proud of our location in Virginia.

Virginia’s strategic location is critical, along with the robust infrastructure that Virginia provides and a ready-skilled workforce, a business-friendly environment, and a thriving tech ecosystem. I was on the board of the Northern Virginia Technology Council for years, and was so appreciative of everything that the tech council did inside the Commonwealth of Virginia and for federal and state employees. 

Data centers and racks of computers really do generate the compute power to really power the AI movement, and so we continue to make investments in great states like Virginia to continue to power our position of being first across AI in the globe. 

You also mentioned the importance of investing in people, and we at Google have a very strong heritage of doing just that, whether it’s through Google.org or our business leaders, such as myself, helping to teach, train, educate, and broaden the understanding of technology and AI. It makes life easier. It can create economic opportunity. It can address some of America’s most complex and pressing challenges, but only if people really understand it and find it easy to embrace. 

El Koubi: What does innovation mean at a company that operates at the scale of Google? How does that translate into impact for the organization and the customers you’re serving?

Dahut: I have always thought of innovation as a mindset, and when you can create the mindset that anything is possible, you can get the best thinking from people, organizations, and cultures. One of the things I really love about Google is that we have a healthy disregard for the impossible. Things can be super hard, but that’s okay. We can still solve for it. And so it is part of the thing that attracted me to Google, because this mindset of solving for the impossible really is embedded in everything that we do to talk about Google Public Sector being the innovation choice for government and education among a sea of legacy technology vendors.

All of us have a responsibility to think about technology in ways that can benefit the world, because I think that in order for us to really take on some of these challenging areas that we all have in our daily lives as well as our professional lives, technology is going to be critical in that, and understanding it and applying it is going to really help us solve for some of these things that I think were previously considered unsolvable.

El Koubi: You’ve really been at the forefront as a proponent for women in tech and advancing women’s leadership roles in tech. Can you tell us a little about your personal journey and what you’ve observed about the journeys of other women business leaders?

Dahut: I went to graduate school at the University of Southern California, their School of Engineering. They have, for the last several years, had more women in their classes of engineering than men. Now, that is a statement around the University of Southern California, but it’s also a statement that women are increasingly choosing technology and engineering roles, which is thrilling for me. And I do think generations of women, certainly women who came before me, have paved that way for women today.

Women possess unique strengths that make them the perfect candidates to work in STEM fields. They are collaborative. They have great organizational skills. They are persuasive and influential. These are critical skills for success in STEM fields, and women have these skills just innately. I have forever advanced the idea that we need parity at work and in skill sets like technology, and that we need to build trust and empower women to take on these roles, to reward risk-taking, to allow for failure, and to learn from failure. 

El Koubi: I believe you spent some time early in your career as an officer in the Navy. How does that inform your leadership and your perspective in the private sector at Google and elsewhere? 

Dahut: My father, an Italian immigrant who came to this country when he was about six years old, served for 42 years in the Navy. He went all the way through the enlisted ranks and retired as a Navy captain. And he and my mom traveled the globe with my two sisters and I, and taught us such an important lesson: that a life of purpose, one that is rooted in service to our country, is really a worthy and an extraordinary life. 

For me, the Navy was an amazing training ground and a tremendous place to learn and grow. I had the opportunity to lead men twice my age, experiment with new technologies, and travel to places that honestly I had only ever dreamed of. 

I have come to realize over that time that my Navy service defined the rest of my life. I consider myself a mission junkie. I love this idea of serving the mission, and I think it goes back to those early days when you stand and you raise your right hand, and you take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America. It’s really an awe-inspiring act. I’m not sure I’ve ever really gotten over how important those words mean to me, and to our country. I really try to carry that lesson of service to the mission. I was only in the Navy for about seven years, but it really was the foundation that I think set me up for my career.

El Koubi: Karen, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Dahut: Jason, it has been such a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you.

For the full interview, visit www.vedp.org/Podcasts