Making investments in Online Safety, Skill Development and Green Energy to ensure long-term growth with AI
Responsible AI is at the heart of Google's mission. We're working towards building a future where AI benefits everyone by prioritizing a safer internet, expanding access to AI literacy, and championing sustainable practices. This commitment drives our approach to AI development and deployment, ensuring an equitable and inclusive AI-powered world.
Prioritizing Online Safety
At Google, we have been using AI for over a decade to strengthen our protective measures, including automatically detecting and blocking fraudulent activities.
For example, with more people using digital payments than ever before, we’re focusing on proactive mitigation on Google Pay, powered by our cutting-edge AI/ML models. Since last year, we’ve prevented scams worth over ₹13,000 crores and displayed 41 million warnings for fraudulent transactions to safeguard Indian users.
Under the DigiKvach program, we’re continuing to partner with government agencies and the industry to proactively mitigate financial scams and strengthen our defenses collectively. We've partnered with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, and boarded Google Pay, on to the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal. This allows us to receive critical information to investigate fraudulent financial activities. We've established a team to respond to these financial fraud complaints, and the insights help us identify new fraud patterns and continuously improve safety for our users.
We're also proactively combating financial fraud through multiple layers of protection within Android, powered by AI and backed by a dedicated security & privacy team. Google Play Protect, Android’s built-in app security system, already scans 200 billion apps on devices every day to help users stay safe from harmful apps. To bolster protection against malicious apps installed from outside the Google Play Store, we launched enhanced Google Play Protect real-time scanning last year, which has already identified over 10 million malicious apps globally.
Building on these protections, we're soon piloting enhanced fraud protection within Google Play Protect in India. This feature will analyze and automatically block the installation of apps from outside the Play Store, such as a web browser, messaging app or file manager, that request sensitive permissions often abused in financial scams.
This initiative has already shown promising results in other regions, blocking nearly 900,000 high-risk installations over six months in Singapore alone.
To further strengthen our commitment to online safety in India, we're establishing a new Google Safety Engineering Center (GSEC) in India in 2025, a significant step in enhancing online safety and security in the country.
Bringing together our safety engineers, local policy experts, and government partners, the center will focus on protecting users from online threats, strengthening security for businesses and government agencies, and advancing cutting-edge research.
With AI at its core, the India GSEC will drive concerted efforts, playing a vital role in advancing our global mission to create a safer online experience.
Advancing clean energy goals in India
As AI becomes increasingly central to our lives, so does the need for clean and sustainable energy to power these advancements. We're committed to leading the way in transitioning to a carbon-free future. In India, we're taking significant strides towards this goal with two major clean energy collaborations:
- Partnership with CleanMax: We are partnering with CleanMax to enable a portfolio of 125.4MW of new clean energy projects, consisting of 66 MW solar in Rajasthan and 59.4 MW wind in Karnataka. These projects are expected to start commercial operations in Q4 2025 and will deliver carbon free energy to the grid where Google operates offices and cloud regions in India.
- Collaboration with Adani Group: We're also partnering with Adani to procure bundled energy solutions and advance decarbonisation of Google’s cloud services in India. This includes clean energy supply from a 61.4 MW solar-wind hybrid plant to be developed in Khavda, Gujarat, and expected to start commercial operations in 2025.
These partnerships demonstrate Google's dedication to the transition to a 24/7 carbon-free future and our commitment to powering India's AI engine sustainably by enabling new clean energy capacity in India. We aim to provide the critical support needed to scale these innovations, making them cost-effective and accessible, and ultimately transform the world's electricity systems.
Skilling: The Heart of India's Growth Story
AI is rapidly transforming industries and creating new opportunities globally, and India is poised to be a leader in this revolution. To ensure that India's AI journey is inclusive and benefits all citizens, there is a need to bridge the skills gap and democratize access to AI training and education. This will empower and equip individuals to seize new opportunities and cater to the growing demand for AI skills across all sectors.
At Google, we’ve always been committed to making information universally accessible, and this moment is no different. We must continue to invest in people, education, and training programs that help people of all backgrounds learn to use AI effectively.
Empowering 10 Million Indians with AI Literacy
With this in mind, we’re launching a new initiative, AI Skills House, designed to further accelerate India's journey towards an AI-ready future.
Through this initiative, we aim to empower 10 million Indians with AI literacy and unlock India's digital dividend, enabling students, job seekers, educators, developers, and public administrators to seize new opportunities and shape India's AI-powered future.
Learners will now be able to discover Google's flagship AI courses on YouTube, including "Introduction to Generative AI," "Introduction to Responsible AI," and "Introduction to Large Language Models; and delve deeper into these topics on Google Cloud Skills Boost platform.
These courses will initially be available in English, and expand to 7 Indian languages to cater to diverse learning needs.
We’re soon making the Google AI Essentials course, as well as the GenAI for Educators course available in Hindi.
We're also strengthening our commitment to AI literacy through ongoing efforts like Google Career Certificates and industry-specific programs, ensuring that individuals and communities are prepared for an AI-powered future.
Google.org: Supporting literacy-focused changemakers in an AI-powered era
Progress is powered by a comprehensive approach, which is why we have also focused on supporting India’s changemakers through Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, in their efforts to prepare underserved communities for an AI-powered future. We are pleased to announce our support for two organizations with such initiatives:
We are providing a $4 million Google.org grant to Central Square Foundation (CSF), a non-profit dedicated to enhancing the learning outcomes of school-going children across India, in support of its new initiative ‘AI Samarth’ to equip and create awareness amongst 5 million students, educators and parents across India on meaningful and responsible use of AI.
Through research, curriculum development and integration, training programs, and partnerships with ecosystem players, CSF aims to foster AI literacy in communities across India.
Building on previous $1.5 million Google.org funding granted through the AI for the Global Goals challenge, Google will provide pro bono support through a Fellowship to Rocket Learning, a non-profit working to transform Early Childhood Development (ECD) across India.
A team of Google.org Fellows will work full time pro-bono for 6 months to help Rocket Learning build an AI-powered personalized tutor that will support millions of 3-6 year olds across the country in their learning journeys towards foundational literacy and numeracy skills.
These build on our longstanding commitment to support India’s changemakers using the best of technology to solve humanity's biggest challenges. Google.org has now grown our support to India’s nonprofits to over $60 million in funding, approximately $195 million in donated products, and over 70,000 hours of volunteering since 2015.
Our initiatives and partnerships with the ecosystem speak to our aim to help shape a future where technology benefits everyone and countless individuals can build a brighter tomorrow.
