For Naren Kachroo, the most useful AI is the kind that finishes the job. “There is no value created without the task actually getting completed with AI,” said Kachroo, Head of Sales & GTM AI at Google Cloud. At TechSparks 2026, during a product showcase titled ‘Voice AI in action’, Kachroo walked through Google’s latest voice models, customer use cases, and a live demo built for small businesses. His argument was: voice is becoming the main way people will interact with AI, and in India, that shift will happen in local languages and accents.
Kachroo said the industry has moved past treating generative AI as a question-and-answer tool. “We have moved from thinking about generative AI as chatbots, as something that we ask questions of and we get answers from,” he said.
The focus now is AI that has access to tools, data, and capabilities, and can take actions on a person’s behalf.
“We are not building AI for the sake of AI,” he added. The goal, he said, is AI that improves how people live and work everyday.
Google recently announced Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. Gemini 3.8 Live can detect and switch between 97 supported languages within the same conversation. Kachroo explained how businesses should choose between the two models.
8 Live suits simpler conversational and agentic tasks, such as a live voice chat with basic tool calling. Extended Thinking suits conversations that need deeper reasoning, context switching, and multiple steps. Cost also matters, he noted: Extended Thinking costs more per token.
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