How do you scale online safety for users around the globe?
Upholding digital trust and safety with Google
Google’s Trust & Safety team has a big responsibility: to work to keep people safe online and protect Google’s services and products from abuse. Specifically, people across using Google products in countries across the world, many of which have different safety regulations.
To keep pace with developing technologies, many countries are introducing new rules about how we engage with online content.
Google balances delivering information with protecting users and society.
That means providing access to trustworthy information and content by protecting users from harm, by partnering with experts and organisations to create a safer internet.
Working alongside the Trust & Safety team, Deloitte has helped Google meet this challenge head-on through innovations, including a bespoke AI agent, that work to boost Google’s ability to stay one step ahead of regulatory change and continue to safeguard users.
“Deloitte mapped complex workflows and identified the critical pain points that were slowing our teams down, delivering a diagnosis and a solution.”
Amanda Storey, Managing Director in Regulation, Transparency & Risk, Google Trust & Safety
A complex compliance landscape
The internet isn’t just part of our lives; it’s a way of life.
It’s created opportunities, from how we express ourselves to how we do business. But it can also be a confusing and scary place, especially for children and young people.
Google’s Trust & Safety team is there to keep its trusted platforms at the forefront of user protection, creating a safe online environment.
In a fast-moving regulatory landscape, workloads and complexity have skyrocketed.
With new legislation to navigate, including the Online Safety Act in the UK and the Digital Services Act in Europe, Google asked Deloitte to collaborate with the team and help re-engineer its compliance processes to free up vital capacity.
“The volume of demand coming into this team is increasing exponentially, and it’s only going to continue,” says Deloitte Human Capital partner Sam Aling.“ Google needed efficient solutions that would enable its experts to work smarter.”
As well as supporting the team to become more agile and ready to respond to potential compliance issues, solutions needed to be easily replicable across different parts of the organisation. For this challenge, the team adopted the principle of simplicity at scale.
Introducing agent Aura
With expertise in business processes and change, digital regulation and engineering, Deloitte has helped Google’s Trust & Safety team prepare for the future.
Together, we explored processes, pain points and solutions, creating a technology roadmap, toolkits, guides and training.
“Working with Google, where technology advances almost daily, you have to match their pace as well as the speed of regulation,” explains Deloitte partner Nick Seeber, who leads digital regulation globally.
Building on the Deloitte-Google Cloud Alliance, and with our client at the frontier of AI, this was an opportunity to harness agentic capabilities. For one area of the business, focusing on knowledge management, we developed a bespoke agent called Aura.
Built with Gemini Enterprise, it can quickly and accurately retrieve information from a specific knowledge base that includes Google’s Transparency Reports: online reports produced by Google detailing the ways in which it seeks to make its products safe.
Grounded in these facts, it gives users instant access to Google’s published point of view on a wide range of topics, acting as an important queryable knowledge base for Trust & Safety.
“Agents are an emerging technology, so we needed to frequently reassess our strategy and tools to make sure they aligned with Google’s enterprise approach,” Nick continues.
Open to innovation
Aura was created and rolled out in just eight weeks and is now being scaled across the Trust & Safety function.
We also developed a set of metrics to help the team measure and report on the effectiveness of new processes.
Working together with the Google team, we showed how well we understood Google’s culture as well as its technical capabilities and that we could work as fast as they could innovate. Feeling confident and safe online is central to making the most of the internet, now and in the future.
We’re proud of a collaboration that’s enabling Google to comply with new global safety regulations and a tool and approach contributing to building trust and keeping people safe online.
“Deloitte’s ability to deliver under tight timelines allowed us to shift to a transformative way of managing regulatory disclosures globally – with a tool and the capability to sustain momentum.”
Zeina Belouizdad, Knowledge & Management Lead in Regulation, Transparency & Risk, Google Trust & Safety
