San José is one of the most diverse U.S. cities, with residents speaking more than 100 languages. Several years ago, we set out to improve city community interactions through more equitable service management and delivery. This demanded a new approach to automating the intake of requests from a majority population whose first language is not English.

We first created the 311 portal and app, which was an important step as we effectively separated resident service requests from emergencies. The way we describe it to our citizens, you call 311 for a burning question, and 911 for a burning building. In the last fiscal year, San José 311 received nearly 210,000 contacts by phone and an additional 211,000 service requests through the SJ 311 app. 

Through the portal and app, we gave citizens an omnichannel experience enabling them to interact with the city to request improvements, access useful information, and get emergency help when they need it. 

In order to truly serve our diverse communities, we recognized language translation services would be required to offer truly equitable services to everyone. That’s when we started working closely with SpringML, Google Cloud, and other partners with involvement from our Mayor and City CIO.

Building public services with community engagement in mind

When we first rolled out the My San José website and mobile app, we used an out-of-the-box translation service that ended up not working. It had poor accuracy and did not meet our needs to provide all citizens with coherent services. After looking at many other options, we decided to partner with SpringML and Google Cloud to leverage the AutoML Translation with other technologies such as our virtual agent.

SpringML was selected through an open RFP process, and helped us to build and optimize our integrations, interfaces, and more between several systems, making the app and website more intuitive to manage. SpringML delivered the product we needed on time and up to specifications, and additional value came from the training sessions they provided to our team. This enabled us to understand everything we could do with AutoML and opened the door to other enhancements such as simplifying the vernacular used with our residents, making government access easier to navigate regardless of natural language spoken. 

After establishing the My San José app’s translation capabilities using AutoML, SpringML also helped us incorporate Dialogflow virtual agents. Dialogflow also positions us to make modifications with our own staffing practices – something that has become increasingly important amid the frequent changes in service levels from COVID-19 response in the past year.

Responding to community needs

With the app up-and-running, our next step was to bring in community members to help with testing, improvements, and more. We wanted the app and the website to not just be something we provided to the community, but rather something they helped us build so they would readily adopt it.

Thanks to the greater accuracy of translation supported by Google Cloud services, we were able to leverage the expertise of a small pool of community members to evaluate translations. AutoML Translation and Glossary proved to be a powerful combination that pushed us closer to our goals. 

Our primary targets were Spanish and Vietnamese translations. We are now seeing 90 percent accuracy in automated Spanish translations while Vietnamese translations continue to improve. We continue to work to simplify the language used in these services, which makes a big difference in terms of ensuring optimal language accessibility.

This work includes best serving our community members who primarily use phones to get in touch with us through 311 services. Using Google Cloud Contact Center AI, we have been able to effectively manage the calls we receive 24×7 and communicate with residents who speak Spanish as well as English. No matter which channel one of our residents choose to use to reach out, we can serve them efficiently. 

A well-timed release

We’re proud of the work we’ve done. We’ve made many government services available to our community 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — accessible through many channels. Regardless of a person’s native language, the consistency of experiences enjoyed by everyone is improving every day thanks to AI. We’re also actively incorporating more language translation capabilities to better serve more people.

While we began this process several years ago, the recent integration of machine learning language translation with our customer relationship management system in late 2020 was very well-timed because we were able to incorporate this into our COVID-19 pandemic response. 

We’re also beginning to work with other municipalities across the U.S. to share some of the lessons we’ve learned and success we’ve seen in hopes of furthering more equitable citizen services far beyond our City limits. 

We are excited to continue working with SpringML, Google Cloud, and other partners to improve our city and the equity and quality of services that our residents enjoy.

Learn more about how you can work with a Google Cloud Partner here.

Indonesia is leading the way for digital transformation in Southeast Asia. According to Google’s e-Conomy South East Asia report, the country’s 2030 Gross Merchandise Value – the value of online retailing to consumers –  could be twice the value of the whole of Southeast Asia today.  

This growth means that many companies need more qualified IT graduates and employees with digital skills than they have today. Fast-growing tech companies need more qualified IT graduates, and employees with digital skills. According to the World Bank, Indonesia needs an additional nine million people with digital skills by 2030. The shortage of technical talent reiterates the need to invest in a reliable skills pipeline.

Following years of digital talent developments in Indonesia, Google has become a supporter of Bangkit, an academy designed to produce high-caliber technical talent for Indonesian technology companies and startups. Bangkit has facilitated a multi-stakeholder collaboration between Google, government, industry, and universities across Indonesia. 

Last year, the President of Indonesia and the Ministry of Education and Culture, Research, and Technology, acknowledged Bangkit’s significant impact, with 3,000 students completing nearly 15,000 courses and specialisations. 

Building on last year’s success, Bangkit started its 2022 program in February, offering three learning paths to students:

• Cloud computing with Google Cloud, preparing students for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification. Some of the course components are also available online 
• Mobile development with Android, preparing students for the Google Associate Android Developer exam. An online version is available here. 
• Machine learning with Tensorflow, getting students ready to take the Tensorflow Developer certification. Some of the online courses are available here for others.

Bangkit 2022 has enrolled 3,100 university students who will take a five month study course, obtaining university study credit, as well as industry certifications. The program accepts diverse cohorts of people who are passionate about preparing for a tech career in the near future, with support and encouragement for women, people with disabilities, and students from across Indonesia to apply. 

Since its pilot in 2019, Bangkit has been guided by three principles:  

• Industry-led: provides curriculum and instructors from industry experts, including Google, GoTo and Traveloka. Instructors include key figures such as Laurence Moroney (Google, Lead AI Advocate), Google Developer Experts, and other committed professionals. 
• Immersive: combines online learning methods conducted in both individual and group settings.  
• Interdisciplinary: contains knowledge and best practices in tech, soft skills, and English to provide complete career readiness. 

The program runs from February to July 2022, and has a 900-hour curriculum throughout the 18-week learning experience. 

Benefits for students participating in Bangkit include:

• Study credit conversion 
• Job opportunities at our career fair
• Google Cloud, TensorFlow and AAD exam vouchers
• Incubation funds and mentorship support from industry

Towards the end of Bangkit 2022, students will team up for the Capstone Project challenge to propose solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing problems, such as environmentalism, accessibility, and more. The top 15 teams will be selected to receive funding to incubate their capstone projects. These education and career-preparedness offerings are provided at no cost.

Google is partnering with industry, governments, universities, and employers to help meet the skill demands of today. From supporting the State of Ohio to offer tech skills to residents, to working with the University of Minnesota-Rochester to create a customized health sciences degree program, Google is here to help our partners prepare those they serve for a cloud-first world.

With Google Cloud, Autonom8 can run a platform that accelerates and streamlines customer journeys in a scalable, reliable, cost-effective infrastructure, while using advanced optical character recognition to enable intelligent document processing.

About Autonom8

Headquartered in the United States and India, Autonom8 has built a low-code SaaS platform that allows businesses to digitize customer-facing workflows. The business aims to help clients reduce costs and improve interactions with their customers through automation and enablement of customer journeys.

Industries: Technology

Location: United States and India

Google Cloud results:

• Increased margins by up to 30% by switching from a home-grown OCR system to Cloud Vision AI
• Enables one DevOps team member to manage up to 30 customers
• Provides real-time information about customer journeys to enable businesses to respond quickly and accurately
• Ensures use of its platform with containerization in customers’ private data centers
• Reduced operating costs by up to 20% with localized scalability and architecture through GKE

Just as cars are evolving to become autonomous, smart and self-driving, enterprises can gain self-awareness, an ability to learn and an ability to adapt. This is the value proposition put forward by Autonom8, an India- and United States-based enterprise workflow management software business. “We provide a low-code, high-intelligence customer journey automation SaaS platform,” explains ​​Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8.

The Autonom8 platform includes components, such as A8Studio, a drag and drop location from which clients can create customer journeys, a chat platform that enables clients to create chatbots, and an analytics module. “With our platform and services, businesses can reduce costs and improve interactions with their customers by applying automation to accelerate and provide better customer journeys,” adds Padmanabhan.

Demand for Autonom8 is being driven by the changing customer demands of enterprises, including the expectation to interact with them over multiple channels, and the rising cost of building software with experienced developers. These trends place enterprises under growing pressure to increase the productivity of the people they do have, particularly those who are less technically inclined. In addition, changing consumer habits, regulations and the emergence of new technologies mean customer journeys cannot remain static and need to evolve.

Developing a microservices-based SaaS platform

From the start, Autonom8 planned to deliver a SaaS platform and initially deployed on a multinational cloud service, chosen due to the team’s familiarity with its products and the availability of credits. However, the company’s decision to opt for a microservices architecture that enables individual services to scale independently while running in a containerized environment, demanded high-quality container orchestration. To optimize cost, scalability and performance, Autonom8 began evaluating Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

The business then completed a side-by-side comparison between Google Cloud and its incumbent provider of compute, storage and other services. Google Cloud fared favorably, with Vision AI in particular providing powerful machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR) functionality, supporting a key use case for Autonom8.

In addition, many of Autonom8’s clients at the time are financial institutions in India, and legally required to retain data within the country’s borders. Google Cloud’s global network and local presence means the business could fulfill this requirement easily.

“We decided to evaluate Google Cloud, particularly GKE, from two perspectives. One, from a security perspective, as we sell to banks that audit our platform, and two, as a failover between regions because downtime costs money. We found it a compelling solution.”

— Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8

A seamless move to Google Cloud

Autonom8 began deploying on Google Cloud in 2018, with its architecture comprising storage, compute, serverless, container management and orchestration, and Vision AI. “We looked at our scripting with the previous provider, and using the Google Cloud documentation available online, educated ourselves over a few weeks before moving pieces of our architecture step by step to Google Cloud,” says Padmanabhan. “We did not run into any major issues. It was pretty simple, with our experienced engineers training others in the product.”

According to the CTO, the business had two options when moving to Google Cloud. Autonom8 could either install raw virtual machines and effectively create its own virtualized data center, or rely on managed services for functions such as memory store, registration and authentication to save time and resources over the long term. Autonom8 opted for the latter and has transitioned fully to Google Cloud, with the number of cloud products and services in its architecture rising from five to about 15. While each product and service performs a key role in the delivery of Autonom8’s products and services, Padmanabhan nominates GKE, Vision AI and Cloud SQL as providing the greatest value to the business.

Scalability, real-time monitoring and intelligent document processing at low cost

With GKE, the business can now scale the nodes or containers specific to each microservice in the event traffic to a particular client surges, due to a rebate or promotion. “Through the combination of the architecture and localized scalability we achieve with GKE, we are reducing our operating costs by up to 20%,” says Padmanabhan.

Running an open source TimescaleDB on Postgres in Cloud SQL enables Autonom8 to give its clients the ability to monitor customer journey information in real time. An example of a journey is applying for a bank loan. The customer must take steps including providing income, tax and other financial details that the bank then appraises to help make a decision on the application. “The moment someone applies for a loan, for example, a bank knows about it and can monitor for fraud, bottlenecks, or other abnormalities, and immediately route to a remediation workflow,” explains Padmanabhan. “Cloud SQL enables us to maintain transactional logging and provide real-time data to our dashboards.”

After evaluating alternative services, including developing a home-grown OCR engine, the business turned to Cloud Vision AI to manage the intelligent document processing that comprises much of its transactional volume. “Vision AI is significantly better than the alternatives and the cost of maintaining our version did not make sense, because Google Cloud continues to make improvements over time that enable us to deliver more and more accurate results to our customers,” says Padmanabhan. “Switching from our home-grown service to Vision AI has enabled us to increase our profit margins by up to 30%.”

“Through the combination of the architecture and localized scalability we achieve with Google Kubernetes Engine, we are reducing our operating costs by up to 20%.”

—Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8

Supporting client demands and improving developer efficiency

Google Cloud also enables Autonom8 to meet the demands of businesses that want to run its platform within their own private data centers. “We can undertake the build within Google Cloud and ship our containers to compatible hosts within those clients’ data centers,” explains Padmanabhan. “With our previous provider, we could create containers, but these would not run properly within those data centers.”

Furthermore, Google Cloud documentation and online resources help Autonom8 reduce the training needed for new developers to become productive, with the Google Cloud learning curve taking up just 10% of the overall onboarding cycle.

The organization spends the equivalent of just 3% of its overall annual revenue on DevOps, measured as DevOps Utility Ratio, while the cloud cost of revenue is about USD 1 for every USD 6 in annual recurring revenue, measured as Cloud Utility Ratio. “These two metrics are about what we can do with the people we have,” explains Padmanabhan. “Our current ratio implies that one DevOps person can handle approximately 30 customers. This is made possible by the tools we have, and the comprehensive support from Google Cloud in terms of security patches, intelligent alerts, resource overloading, and more.”

Google Cloud also provides the flexibility for Autonom8 to accommodate the varying service levels required by individual customers based on factors, such as the impact of downtime, as the business can failover seamlessly between regions to mitigate the impact of any issues that may occur.

“Our current ratio implies that one DevOps person can handle approximately 30 customers. This is made possible by the tools we have, and the comprehensive support from Google Cloud in terms of security patches, intelligent alerts, resource overloading, and more.”

—Ranjit Padmanabhan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Autonom8

Integrating Google Workspace with Autonom8 to deliver new capabilities

Autonom8 relies on Google Workspace for communication, collaboration and other workplace productivity requirements, growing its footprint from Gmail when the employee population was four or five, to a range of products including Sheets and Drive as the business grew. “It became natural to use the capabilities in Google Workspace as we matured,” says Padmanabhan. “One of the most interesting capabilities was our ability to integrate Google Workspace into our platform. For example, when someone is running a workflow, they can add data from a Sheet. We’ve added Google Workspace authentication capabilities into our products as well.”

“Everyone is using shared links to Drive and I really like the granular permissions structure,” he adds. “I can open up folders to clients while keeping an internal space within the business to ensure security and privacy.”

With Google Cloud, Autonom8 is now poised to continue growing its business and adding new features and capabilities for clients. “We are extremely excited at the opportunity to step up our offering to clients with Google Cloud,” concludes Padmanabhan.

As a leading French agricultural cooperative, Groupe Dauphinoise places collaboration at the heart of its philosophy. Working with farmers in the Rhone-Alpes region, Groupe Dauphinoise takes on a diverse range of activities from agricultural production to research and development to running retail outlets.

As its operations expanded and strained its existing infrastructure, Groupe Dauphinoise saw the opportunity to upgrade its technology solutions and adopted G Suite, Chrome devices and ultimately Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We transitioned to G Suite to improve our staff’s collaboration. We quickly realized that as the company grew, we needed a new infrastructure. Based on our satisfaction with G Suite, we chose GCP. With Google, ‘any device, anytime, anywhere’ is not just a dream,” says Sylvain Claudel, Head of IT at Groupe Dauphinoise.

“We transitioned to G Suite to improve our staff’s collaboration. We quickly realized that as the company grew, we needed a new infrastructure. Based on our satisfaction with G Suite, we chose GCP. With Google, ‘any device, anytime, anywhere’ is not just a dream.”

—Sylvain Claudel, Head of IT, Groupe Dauphinoise

Flexible workforce, stable infrastructure

Many of Groupe Dauphinoise’s 1,500 employees spend their days out of the office. Five years ago, with the help of Google partner GoWizYou, the company transitioned to G Suite to improve the flexibility and collaboration of its staff.

As Groupe Dauphinoise began to expand and collect more data, the company reached the limits of its on-premise infrastructure. Adding new storage was not a simple matter. Acquiring, configuring and synchronising new servers costs Groupe Dauphinoise time as well as money. In addition, with all its servers stored in a single room, security was a concern. Groupe Dauphinoise needed a new infrastructure.

Google Cloud Platform was the only solution in mind after Groupe Dauphinoise’s experience with G Suite and Chromebooks. Disruption was kept to a minimum thanks to Google’s licensing agreements with Microsoft products, allowing the company to migrate without affecting its operations.

After migrating its infrastructure to Compute Engine, Groupe Dauphinoise can let Google look after the security and maintenance. Cloud IAM makes it easy for Groupe Dauphinoise to hand out permissions to sensitive resources across a number of sites with maximum security and minimum fuss. The company placed its archives in Cloud Storage, while Cloud SQL allows it to continue to make use of its MySQL databases without disrupting the day to day business. Meanwhile, BigQuery provides Groupe Dauphinoise with the raw power to analyse large datasets quickly.

“Our company is growing and we have more and more data to collect and analyze like sales data, weather patterns or production numbers. With GCP, we have more than a single on-premise data store, so our disaster recovery plan is much more flexible. Compute Engine allows us to add more storage quickly and easily, without having to spend days synchronizing data and installing new servers. We have improved security and maintained the stability of our infrastructure while keeping costs down,” says Sylvain.

Safeguarding the present, looking to the future

With Google Cloud Platform, Groupe Dauphinoise has expanded and secured its infrastructure without sinking costs into on-premise servers or DevOps staff. Its investment in Chrome devices and adoption of G Suite mean that its mobile workforce can fully reap the benefits of a cloud-based infrastructure while dramatically cutting the cost of hardware. Meanwhile, working with a 200 million line table of sales data in Google BigQuery, the cooperative found that queries ran ten times faster than with its previous database provider. Groupe Dauphinoise is experimenting with Google BigQuery to expand its BI capabilities. Products like Google BigQuery help Groupe Dauphinoise grow its business, safe in the knowledge that its infrastructure is stable and secure.

“The amount of data we collect is growing very quickly. We need to break our rules and evolve from the mindset that we had with on-premise infrastructure and our old databases. We can now look at collecting more customer fidelity data, or big data for our farmers. With our data and infrastructure in Google’s care, we can concentrate on growing our customer base instead of our IT department!” says Sylvain.