 Good afternoon, Cloud community, and a welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're midway through day two of three days here at Google Cloud Next. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by the ineffable and fabulous Rob Streche. Rob, what a joy to host with you. This is always so much fun. I know. I think, again, getting the energy from all the guests that have been on today has been fantastic, and this place is just hoppin'. It really is. And you know, I thought we were going to have a little bit of a come down because we just came off a show in Paris. I feel like that energy is good. We have all the shows to go to if we have to leave France. We come here, but it's similar technology. It's a lot about Cloud, and I think we get to talk about two really tightly knit topics here, tax and sustainability. Because I'm very interested in diving into this because not usually what I think of, I mean, I had to do my taxes this past weekend, but other than that, it was, it's really- I'm an extension filer myself. We deal with that and I'll cover it. 100%, I will just admit that. It is busy season for events this time of year. Without further ado, I suppose we should welcome these fabulous gentlemen to our left. Justin and Dallas, thank you so much for being here. Pleasure to have you. Excited. I'm excited. When I was reading the briefing and it literally said, tax, sustainability, and data, I thought, okay, this is awesome. Where is this bend diagram? Yep, yep. Obviously, governance is going to be a theme of what we're talking about, but why don't you explain why these three things go together so lovely? Sure, I'll get started, but we're excited to be with you guys as well. I don't have adjectives prepared to describe Dallas. But we'll start on these topics. So it's interesting. Tax has been around forever, right? Death and taxes. Certainties in life. Right, just going to say. So tax functions have become more mature over time versus sustainability, which is a relatively newer area, but there's a couple of things that are happening all at the same time in both of these areas, right? So number one, it all stems around data, okay? The first thing is, both of these functions share attributes that we don't get the right data that we need. We have a lot of manual work spreadsheets to get the data together, which is not in vogue with cost reduction and things that we're seeing in the market, right? When we're asking for more resources to deal with manual work. So that's the baseline. Both of these areas, there's a bunch of new regulations coming out. So our friends in tax will talk about pillar two regimes and we'll talk about invoicing, and we can talk more about what those are after the interview. And on the sustainability side, we've got CSRD that came out in Europe demanding more disclosure around our carbon emissions. We've had the same thing in the SEC recently and state of California. So these regulations are putting more pressure to have good data, to be transparent around the data and to have quality and reliable proof of that the data is valid. The last part of this equation though, with the regulations, it's not just about the reporting, most companies, tax functions and sustainability functions are looking to become more strategic, right? They don't just want to be a back office. They want to move to the front office, so to speak. They want to be involved in decision making. They want to help advise the company on where to go and the ROI and all those things. It's really difficult to do that if I can barely get numbers to do extension or a tax return. I was going to say, yeah, I feel a little bit last minute. So companies are looking for more sophistication which has brought us here because we need more sophisticated data management tools and analytics to be able to move from back office more efficiently and into the front office which is what gets Dallas and I out of bed in the morning, so to speak. I love that. Dallas, why do you get out of bed in the morning? Are you going to miss us going to put these pictures? It's mostly just to make sure that Justin doesn't talk too much. Yeah. No. I can see why this is a good little dream team between the two of you. So where are customers off at in the journey when they come talk to you? Dallas, I'll open with you there. Yeah, actually, they're everywhere in the journey but most of the time on tax, they're nowhere. Okay, that's what I was thinking. So there are visionaries, but the ability to really progress that vision into something that's practical and applied is very nascent. And that's the interesting part because whenever we come with not just a vision but actually now with a tool set the things that we developed over the last couple of frankly years but really the last couple of months where we had the most synergies take place between PWC and Google and building some of the technology we have in the market now. Like we're able to show them almost instantaneously joking aside on extensions that you can do something within a couple of days to actually take a bunch of different data sets, pull them together, have them immediately accessible even to like the CFO level where they can look at summarized information that is actually like meaningful. And the part that happened I think the last couple of years on the individual automation, a lot of people were playing with other tool sets and they said, oh, I'm going to do this little thing here, I'm going to do this little thing here. There was no standardization. What we see taking place now, both within PWC but also with our clients is them saying, wait a second, we actually need to use the same tool set. And you mentioned this with sustainability reporting, tax reporting, other SCC related matters and the like. You can actually use in this case Google Cloud to be the foundational model. The data set all sits there. You can then extract what you need for the various reporting requirements that are from it. But the real key is, it's quick access. You're not doing ERP transformation. You're not doing a two year journey to go install and implement, change a whole team of people. It's not that. It's nearly plug and play, the APIs exist and that's the fun part. I think that's the piece that really will be the most meaningful and the most absorbable from a market point of view. You don't have to change everything. And for us from a services point of view, we can meet our clients where they are as opposed to telling them to come where we are, right? In terms of either delivering the service or transforming them or what have you. I think that's, go ahead. So is this that you're helping them move the data into Google and into one of the services and then you're applying models on an AI that you've helped to tune for these purposes? Or how is it really working? It's both. Yeah, it's both. It's a great question. So the answer is yes holistically. Like within our global alliance, we are absolutely taking people and doing lift and shifts whether information's like sitting on-prem if it's an interior data, we're going to BigQuery, we're doing those types of large data modernization programs. But even if that's not what's going on, right? From an API point of view, we're actually able to use these tool sets we developed like the tax control center through our connected tax compliance platform. We're able to go in and actually say, hey, I don't care necessarily where it is right now. Let's point that data into one control plane where we can actually summarize everything that's going on and give the users data sets that they can actually go take and not only do reporting if they want to do it, but also do the internal stakeholder management. So it's a little bit of both, right? Like you don't have to come in and say, I want to move all my data over to BigQuery. Of course, our preference would be to do that. But in our little, like if we're just sitting in our tax bubble, right? Like here's the tax nest over here. What do we want to do? I just want to get no joke. Like as a corporation, I just want to get my extensions done. There's a bunch of information I need to go do that, right? I need state apportionment data. I need global payroll information. The only way to go do that is actually like to go find it and pull it in. And you can do that very easily now with a lot of the tool sets that are out there. I mean, I'm a business owner outside of being this person and running an agency. You're speaking my language so much. I have employees in seven different countries and just even to get over the line for saying, hey, I need some more time is a huge process. I can only imagine as a corporation, quite frankly. So I can imagine that customer feedback is probably pretty positive when they hear this. Most people would think of a transformation as taking more time than you said, like a plug and play sort of option. Yeah, I think speed is key here. Right. Look, and we partner with the ERP companies too and there's massive power in those programs. I think people have come to realize though that these cloud-based ERP programs have largely been about business simplification. The back office functions like tax and sustainability have sort of been penalized in a way because in the effort to simplify the business, a lot of the custom analytics and data and processes that we're built in are actually maybe shrinking, right? So it's not quite the home run for tax and sustainability as we thought to Dallas's point. So now we're coming and saying, all right, we don't need another five to seven year ERP program. Let's take the data as it is, as imperfect as it is, structured, unstructured, invoices, feeds from ERP, feeds from vendors and outside parties and let's start to make some sense out of all the noise. And that's where a lot of these tools have come in place. On the sustainability side, are you helping them put together their scope one through three and do all of that reporting back? Because we cover sustainable IT. And I think a big piece of that is obviously, Europe is light years ahead right now of the US, but we can see this train coming this direction. Is that really where you're- It is. I'll just talk about the specifics of what we built, but if you think about sustainability, it's a gigantic umbrella in which you can work under, right, it's no different than, oh, it's the world of the tax, okay? Well, like every country has a tax, then you have state everything else. They're all chaotic. Correct. Yeah. On sustainability, I'll just make the plug, right? PwC's sustainability partner of the year, which is super exciting because some of these, the team has built. Give me some shouts for that. What we're doing as a services firm is looking at that saying, hey, where do we want to meet our customers, our clients, in terms of their needs? Whether it's strategy, it's reporting, right back to that point, it's somewhere in between its ERM, right, which is an interesting space for more sustainability and your footprint, like just what are you doing for a planning point of view? The cool part with Google Cloud, we've done some of the things on ERM, but on the reporting side, that's where we're really excited, and Justin, if you want to take that a little further. Yeah, and I love the question, right? So the scope one, two, and three, right? Just to click in for a second. So a lot of companies have already started reporting scope one and two. A lot of, I would say, leading companies, like Google and several other, have committed to report on scope three, which is their entire supply chain, right? Because they would argue, or many would argue, that that's the indirect impact across their true operations. And so the tool that Dallas has talked about where we're using Google Cloud and working with a lot of our clients is really interesting because it might have started in the, I just need to measure, right? So how do I measure all this information? And that's hard, a lot of the data sits in my supplier's information wall, so to speak. But as they're getting into it, they're saying, wow, this is giving me new information around my whole supply chain and my supply chain risk. And wow, I didn't realize I was concentrating 50% of my buying from this particular region or market or customer. So I think the cool part about all this is reporting and regulations are maybe driving the need to get the information. But then they're quickly saying, what this data, how do I actually bend the graph? As opposed to just, you know, see what the graph looks like. And so that's where a lot of the exciting, I think work is really starting to happen with us and our clients. Can you give us any client examples? As some success stories, perhaps? Sure, well one of them was along the lines of what I just talked about, right? It started with a reporting function. And so the company had made, and we've seen this in many companies, like kind of a broad commitment that they want to do, scope three hadn't really factored in what exactly that meant from, you know, Dallas talked about getting data integration. I mean, it was a big technology lift. So you had the IT team saying, hey, you should probably consult with us. You had the operations team, you had the procurement teams. You had a lot of teams that were not necessarily organized around what that ambitious statement meant. We helped them stand up a steer-co just to get all the right parties in the room. We used the platform that we were just describing where we basically used GCP. We partnered with a lot of their suppliers to give us information. And we created again, something to do the initial reporting, but it actually gave us some really good ideas and gave their management some really good insights to make improvements on their supply chain that went far beyond climate, actually got them into cost reduction, improved the relationship with some of their buyers or suppliers, sorry, who are also trying to set their own commitments in this area. So it was a home run in terms of galvanizing supplier buyer. It was a home run in terms of getting better data to make decisions. And again, it all started with, maybe a pledge that was not well informed, but we quickly were able to galvanize people and then use Google Cloud to bring the data and do what we needed to. So low key, PwC can save you when you've decided to go fully sustainable, but you have absolutely no idea how to do that. Yeah. Yes, I'm sure answer that, yeah. Yeah, I think again, to your point, obviously being in this industry, we see a lot of people looking at scope three because that and maybe they're sort of trying to figure out which pieces of scope three are actually applicable to them. How does that work when you're trying to get the data from those suppliers? I mean, because again, it can go, there could be multiple levels of that supply chain that you have to go into and getting that all into one place. I'll say this, there's no common model yet to actually go about doing this. Certainly there are some folks who are filling the gaps on the we're going to go out there and collect, but that's not, you know, necessarily the space we're trying to play in just to be clear. However, the space we are playing in is once it's all collected, like what do you do with it to go get there? I think there will be a common model to go collect that information as these rules that Justin mentioned a second ago actually go into full effect on the reporting has to happen. Someone's going to come in and say, hey, we actually want to own all this collection. We're going to do it in the exact same way and or you're going to have, like I said, a common like actual cost to every single thing, which there's sort of a little bit of that out there, but the standardization of it having everybody going down the road and using the exact same data point for any given, you know, input in supply chain, that's really where everything has to like eventually evolve to. It'll probably be a mixture of private industry and the regulators, you know, the rule makers coming together and figuring this out. No different than the way the last 150 years of policy on other reporting fronts have evolved. Right, but this one is probably a little bit better informed candidly when you stop and think about, you know, the level of complexity it's there because I think technology actually exists right now for people to actually partner on this in a way that they never really did before. You've briefly mentioned it Justin, but if you think about what the OECD has done in terms of their standardization of global tax reporting, what, you know, the globe wants to do in terms of sustainability reporting is actually very, very similar, different bodies, but very, very similar to what the OECD has done in pillar one and pillar two. Standardize and say, hey, everyone's going to be on this plane for the amount of tax you're going to play. This you're going to be on this plane for the basis for the tax you're going to pay. Now apply that sustainability. You're going to be on this plane for exactly how far we want you to go deep within your supply chain. You're going to be on this plane for exactly how you're going to report it and the numbers you're going to use to do it. I just see that as being like the direction of travel. The cool part of that is there's actually an opportunity for someone to come in on a single platform to go actually sell that as like the thing. I actually don't think it's a bridge too far to say Google's actually really uniquely positioned as a broader company to go do that if you think about just the amount of data that Google has. Might be a bridge too far for right this second, but they exist if you go back 25 years to organize the world's information, right? So how is this any different? I mean, I love that analogy and it gives me hope that our taxes are going to get better across the board. Probably not lower though, I'm sorry to say. I'm a Californian, don't remind me. I got it, no, us too, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, we're still here paying. And half my team is in New Zealand, where it's even worse. I just love paying taxes. I hope the government's listening to that statement. Yeah, right, yeah. Pays are taxed. Yeah, yeah, I do pay my taxes for better or for worse. So you mentioned data. Trusted data has obviously got to be a big part of this, right? You've got a lot of bespoke solutions, you talked about spreadsheets. I mean, I know for my personal business, I won't even throw anyone else under the bus. Things are in a lot of different places and don't always have a central hub. How do you get everyone on the same page of trusted data and what is that even for an organization? Well, I'll say this, as it relates to our global alliance with Google, our moniker is founded and trust, right? Power by data, right? So, us as a large regulated entity, right? We're an audit firm, a tax firm, in addition to what we do in the consulting business. It is fundamentally about trust. It's fundamentally about being in some way, shape, or form like a go between a stakeholder management, if you will, for companies and what they are reporting to the government, what they're saying to their shareholders, what they're saying to the public, what the NGOs want to know, right? All those things. We are very uniquely positioned to answer that question. That's why a lot of the things that we've looked at, and from a vision point of view, a lot of the places that we've been talking to Google and our stakeholders has been around the idea that, hey, if you're going to go with a partner and with a company, right, who knows what trust is, who has that built into the framework of their existence, like the partnership that we founded is actually, frankly, the right place to start. And I think you start with that point and then you layer the pure technology play on top of it. It's a great story, but it also has a practical application because we have the technology capabilities that are there, too, which is basically what Justin's built. To be a little bit self-engraved shading, right? Please! I afforded you the opportunity to do so. We talked about stitching the technology together. That is hard. These tools make it a lot easier, quicker speed to value. But to Dallas's point, where we're playing a large role, on top of the technology is back to the sustainability or tax point. Things were done locally very different. My assumptions, my methods on how I pulled it together, very different. In the case of sustainability, I may never, maybe never was audited before. You look ahead to the future. I'm all of a sudden going to be audited. That's a whole different level of rigor and scrutiny from the last week. Everyone's favorite word, the A word, yeah. So a lot of where this starts is just inventorying all the disclosures we've made, all the assumptions we've made in our data, where our differences are, starting to establish very central governance around all of this and then, you know, inventorying all the assumptions that we're going to use going forward. So even if my data's not perfect, I have a transparent trail on the methods I'm using, you know, that's consistent that I can say is reasonable. So even where there's gaps, I'm filling in those gaps with this logic. That's a key stepping stone to then piping in all the data, codifying that logic and getting something pretty automated, even again, when the data's not perfect, which it will never be perfect. If it is, we might be out of a job. But I think it's a fair bet that source data's never going to be perfect. Just the notion of data being absolutely flawless is a very Cinderella concept in general, but I love it, and hopefully we're all so employed. Question for you, what's your advice for companies as they're thinking about coming to approach you, where they realize this is a process that they could transform? Yeah, I'll say this, I mean, it doesn't matter where you're out on the journey. Justin mentioned I've made a promise and now I have to figure out how to keep it. What if I've never mentioned anything about this before in the press? I need to analyze an approach to go get there, I need to formulate a strategy around it. The good news is we take all kinds, like come as you are, if you will. All about inclusion. We'll sort it, we'll sort it, right? In the best way, we'll sort it as in, hey, maybe you're not ready to make any proclamation of what you're doing. Maybe you're not big enough to go down the road of having to create an entire data platform, pull this all together. Maybe you could have two people go do it, you don't have to go that direction. But I think the real key is engage with some folks and have that conversation, figure out like where are you at on the maturity scale. And Frank, we can help with that too, but the idea shouldn't be I need to wait until I've done something extreme and then it's too late. Or I need to show up, I'm a pre-IPO private company, I just got my first round of funding, I should figure out sustainability reporting. It's probably everybody in between, but maybe not necessarily those two, but hey, we'll figure it out and figure out where you land on the map. Again, the fun part about the scalability here is if you're ready to talk like what data you're going to put in the cloud, you could probably start having this conversation, right? Like you start having the conversation because that means you're likely a company, you hope to make a profit, therefore you might pay taxes, right? And depending on what you do, you might have a sustainability reporting obligation, you certainly have a financial reporting obligation, so you may as well get the ball rolling and have that conversation and figure out what's the best model. It may not be that, but start having the conversation, right? Yeah. And I would just add on it, in addition to Alson, we take all kinds, which we absolutely do, or all levels of maturity. I think it's awesome, my favorite conversation is not just what's the one single need that's driving you for data right now, but let's step back and look five years from now. What are all the insights you want to drive? So let's not just let the newest regulation dictate, well I need these 20 business requirements or the stuff that we do today for these other 30 business requirements. I've seen a lot of companies fall into that trap. Step back and think about what are the insights I want to be able to give to my C-suite when it comes up? And you work backwards from those to figure out what data you need, and that might be a totally different inventory of data that you haven't thought about, but that's where a lot of the ROI might come in from. So don't make this as much as we help companies on the regulation management, we need to have the data, we want to be able to be compliant, we want to use that data with credibility, with our stakeholders, but really thinking about all the insights that we want to deliver and then reverse engineering the data we need, again, provides a much bigger component of return and also really elevates the value of the function. I think that's a great point, and I think we're really at a stage, even with JNAI, where we're rethinking how we ask questions, right? Rather than having to figure out the solution, it's what is it that we're trying to do? What do we want to do? All right, last question for you both. What can't you say today that you hope to be able to say when we have your fabulous selves on the show at the next Google Cloud Next? That's a great question. I'll respond in this way, because you just said JNAI. The direction of travel for the type of services that we're talking about is to simplify and actually make accessible to even more users, right? You can say more taxpayers, you can say more clients, you can say more Google Cloud customers. I think the scalability and access point is going to be the most critical feature that comes into play with the latest, iterations of Vertex AI, the Enterprise Suite, and even the individual user part of it, which is something we've been excited about. I started talking about this with my leadership team probably eight years ago. We said, how do we commoditize the construct of tax reporting and make it so that anybody can actually go and get the absolute best from a big four in this case and what they're trying to do? It doesn't have to be the largest corporations or the most famous people in the world, right? Which I'm sure you fit into that category, no doubt about it. And soon to be in the former category, but it is anybody should be able to come to use this as a service provider. I think that's like the democratization, if you will, of that service. I think that's where it's going. I don't know how fast. It may not be at the next next, but maybe like the next, next, next, next, next, best. No. We'll count how many next it is when we have you. We'll have you on this show again. What about you, Jesse? I'll go shorter terms, since Dallas won a few years out. I'm going to go back to my point about value. I think, and I believe this will happen, that Gen AI specifically, since you asked about it, will raise the IQ, and it's going to show us where our gaps are in IQ. So in other words, let me just give you an example. With a lot of historical automation tools, it's been about doing the same thing faster in a more automated way. Gen AI is very different, right? Like the real, the real sauce is like, what questions are you asking? And what so what question? And you can ask the so what question repetitively so many times in such a short period of time, that that's where your brain starts to go and train starts to thinking. So we've already seen this with the clients that we've been working with. We talk a lot about getting the data together, but then it's like, what can you do with it? Whether it's on the tax side and saying I've got thousands of variances, but let me ask Gen AI and use it to channel on which ones actually matter, right? So separating the signal from the noise, whether it's asking questions like in our ESG solution, which is what's the most cost effective way to hit this decarbonization goal on a year versus two year on three years? It's just getting us thinking in a different way. And I think it's starting with leadership teams and I think that's going to trickle down to everyone else. So that's what I'm looking forward to and I think it's starting to happen already. Well, we hope both of those things happen much sooner rather than later. Thank you both for being on the show with us today. Justin Dallas, always great to have another sitting name on the show. Absolutely. Happy we're representing the South today, candidly. Rob, you're just a gem. I don't even have to say anything else, nice to. I've said enough nice things to you today. And thank all of you from tuning in, wherever you happen to be on planet earth or in outer space today here. We're in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.