Expectations for both consumer and commercial products have changed. Consumers want products that evolve with their needs, adapt to their preferences, and stay up-to-date over time. Manufacturers, in turn, need to create products that provide engaging customer experiences not only to better compete in the marketplace, but also to provide new monetization opportunities. 

However, embedding intelligence into new and existing products is challenging. Updating hardware is costly, and existing connected products do not have the capability to add new features. Furthermore, manufacturers do not have sufficient customer insights due to product telemetry and customer data silos, and may lack the AI expertise to quickly develop and deploy these features. 

That’s why today we’re launching Intelligent Products Essentials, a solution that allows manufacturers to rapidly deliver products that adapt to their owners, update features over-the-air using AI at the edge, and provide customer insights using analytics in the cloud. The solution is designed to assist manufacturers in their product development journeys—whether developing a new product or enhancing existing ones. 

With Intelligent Products Essentials, manufacturers can:

• Personalize customer experiences: Provide a compelling ownership experience that evolves over the lifetime of the product. For example, a chatbot that contextualizes responses based on product status and customer profile.
• Manage and update products over-the-air: Deploy updates to products in the field,  gather performance insights and evolve capabilities over time with monetization opportunities.
• Predict parts and service issues: Detect operating thresholds, anomalies and predict failures to proactively recommend service using AI, reducing warranty claims, decreasing parts shortages and increasing customer satisfaction.

In order to help manufacturers quickly deploy these use cases and many more, Intelligent Products Essentials provides the following:

• Edge connections: Connect and ingest raw or time-series product telemetry from various device platforms utilizing IoT Core or Pub/Sub and enable deployment and management of firmware over-the-air and machine learning models with Vertex AI at the edge.
• Ownership App Template: Easily build connected product companion apps that work on smartphones, tablets, and computers. Use a pre-built API and accompanying sample app that can incorporate product or device registration, identity management, and provide application behavior analytics using Firebase.
• Product fleet management: Manage, update and analyze fleets of connected products via APIs, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Looker.
• AI services: Create new features or capabilities for your products using AI and machine learning products such as DialogFlow, Vision AI, AutoML, all from Vertex AI.

Enterprise data integration: Integrate data sources such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and others using Dataflow and BigQuery.

Intelligent Products Essentials helps manufacturers build new features across consumer, industrial, enterprise, and transportation products. Manufacturers can implement the solution in-house, or work with one of our certified solution integration partners like Quantifi and Softserve. 

“The focus on intelligent products that Google Cloud is deploying provides a digital option for manufacturers and users. At its heart, systems like Intelligent Product Essentials are all about decision making. IDC sees faster and more effective decision-making as the fundamental reason for the drive to digitize products and processes. It’s how you can make faster and more effective decisions to meet heightened customer expectations, generate faster cash flow, and better revenue realization,” said Kevin Prouty, Group Vice President at IDC. “Digital offerings like Google’s Intelligent Product Essentials potentially go the last mile with the ability to connect the digital thread all the way through to the final user.”

Customers adopting Intelligent Products Essentials

GE Appliances, a Haier company, are enhancing their appliances using new AI-powered intelligent features to enable:

• Intelligent cooking: Help cook the perfect meal to personal preferences, regardless of your expertise and abilities in the kitchen.
• Frictionless service: Build smart appliances that know when they need maintenance and make it simple to take action or schedule services.
• Integrated digital lifestyle: Make appliances useful at every step of the way by integrating them with digital lifestyle services – for example, automating appliance behaviors according to customer calendars, such as oven preheating or scheduling the dishwasher to run in the late evening.

“Intelligent Products Essentials enhances our smart appliances ecosystem, offering richer consumer habit insights. This enables us to develop and offer new features and experiences to integrate with their digital lifestyle.“ —Shawn Stover, Vice-president Smart Home Solutions at GE Appliances.https://www.youtube.com/embed/zaWAJN8aKOw?enablejsapi=1&

Serial 1, Powered by Harley-Davidson, is using Intelligent Product Essentials to manage and update its next generation eBicycles, and personalize its customers’ digital ownership experiences. 

“At Serial 1, we are dedicated to creating the easiest and most intuitive way to experience the fun, freedom, and adventure of riding a pedal-assist electric bicycle. Connectivity is a key component of delivering that mission, and working together to integrate Intelligent Product Essentials into our eBicycles will ensure that our customers enjoy the best possible user experience.”— Jason Huntsman, President, Serial 1. 

Magic Leap, an augmented reality pioneer with industry-leading hardware and software, is building field service solutions with Intelligent Products Essentials with the goal of connecting manufacturers, dealers, and customers to more proactive and intelligent service.

“We look forward to using Intelligent Products Essentials to enable us to rapidly integrate manufacturers’ product data with dealer service partners into our field service solution. We’re excited to partner with Google Cloud as we continue to push the boundaries of physical interaction with the digital world.” — Walter Delph, Chief Business Officer, Magic Leap

Intelligent Product Essentials is available today. To learn more, visit our website.

Our collective understanding of work—where it takes place and how it gets done—has been transformed over the last year. As companies and organizations across the globe reimagine work, new challenges and opportunities are emerging. How do people working “somewhere else” stay connected and part of the same conversations as those in the office? And if hybrid work is the sum of all the places and ways that work happens, how do employees create a shared experience, better manage their time and attention, and build stronger connections along the way?

For well over a decade, we’ve been building the future of work with products and experiences that transform how teams of all sizes connect, create, and collaborate together—on any device, from any location. Last October, we launched Google Workspace as an integrated solution with a singular promise: everything you need to get anything done, now in one place. In March, we introduced a series of innovations to help people better manage their time and build deeper connections with each other as the future of work continues to evolve. And at Google I/O last month, we took our next big step in transforming collaboration with smart canvas, a new product experience in Google Workspace. And today, we’re delivering additional innovations that address the specific challenges and opportunities of the hybrid work world.

A dedicated space for teamwork and collaboration

Chat and video meetings have been an essential part of work during the last year, serving as a bridge for separated colleagues to collaborate in real time. As we reflect on the lessons of a year where many people were working remotely, we know that distributed teams need a new type of dedicated, shared space. A place in Google Workspace to bring projects to life by connecting the right content, people, and conversations in new and powerful ways. 

With the introduction of Spaces, we’re evolving the Rooms experience in Google Chat into a dedicated place for organizing people, topics, and projects in Google Workspace. Over the summer, we’ll evolve Rooms to become Spaces and launch a streamlined and flexible user interface that helps teams and individuals stay on top of everything that’s important. Powered by new features like in-line topic threading, presence indicators, custom statuses, expressive reactions, and a collapsible view, Spaces will seamlessly integrate with files and tasks, becoming a new home in Google Workspace for getting more done—together.

Spaces can provide a place to fuel knowledge sharing and community building for teams of all sizes, where all the relevant information, conversations, and files for a project can be organized, and where topics—even at the organization level—can be intelligently moderated. With the ability to pin messages where everyone can see them, Spaces will play a crucial role in helping people stay connected and informed as hybrid work evolves.

As we transition from Rooms to Spaces in Google Chat this summer we’ll be delivering new features on a rolling basis. Customers can have their admins turn on Google Chat in Gmail so their organizations can start using Rooms today, ensuring a seamless path to Spaces when it becomes available.

Keeping everyone in the conversation during hybrid meetings

Collaboration equity—the ability to contribute equally, regardless of location, role, experience level, language, and device preference—is a cornerstone of Google Workspace. When teammates were fully remote during the last year, everyone experienced meetings in much the same way and had access to the same communication features. But what happens when some colleagues are in a conference room together while others are joining from living rooms, home offices, or a remote co-working space? How do they all participate equally in the same conversation?

At Google I/O, we previewed Companion Mode in Google Meet as a way of fostering collaboration equity in a hybrid work world. Companion Mode is designed to seamlessly connect those in the room with their remote teammates, giving everyone advanced features to participate, while leveraging the best of in-room audio and video conferencing capabilities.

Companion Mode gives every meeting participant, no matter where they are, access to interactive features and controls like screen sharing, polls, in-meeting chat, hand raise, Q&A, live captions, and more. Colleagues who are in the same meeting room together will enable Companion Mode on their personal devices, giving them their own video tile in Meet and helping them to stay connected with their remote teammates. Companion Mode will be available on the web and our upcoming progressive web app in September, and it will be coming soon to mobile.

To allow meeting organizers to better plan for hybrid meetings, invitees will soon be able to RSVP with their join location, indicating whether they’ll be joining in a meeting room or remotely.

Updates to improve the in-room experience are also coming to Google Meet hardware in September, including the ability to see and use the hand-raise feature and receive notifications from polls and Q&As. The modular design of Meet’s Series One room kits can easily accommodate a variety of space layouts and be paired with an AV cart for optimum flexibility. 

We’re also continually launching new controls to make meetings more safe and secure, including the ability for admins to set policies for who can join meetings, and how participants can engage within meetings. To help everyone stay focused in meetings without interruption, in the next few months we’ll introduce moderation controls for hosts, giving them the ability to prevent the use of in-meeting chat and prohibit presenting during meetings, as well as allowing them full control to mute and prevent participants from unmuting.

Together, these changes will make meetings a safer, more connected, and inclusive experience across all hybrid environments. Register today for our free webinar on how Google Workspace is enabling hybrid work and helping foster collaboration equity. 

Trusted hybrid collaboration in Google Workspace

Security, data privacy, and trust continue to be the foundation that make anywhere, anytime collaboration possible. As organizations explore new ways for their teams to collaborate securely in a hybrid work world, we’re introducing several ways that we’re strengthening this foundation in Google Workspace. 

Today, we’re announcing new security and privacy capabilities to help Google Workspace customers realize the full power of trusted, cloud-native collaboration. Google Workspace Client-side encryption will help customers strengthen the confidentiality of their data while addressing a range of data sovereignty and compliance needs. It will also strengthen meeting security when it comes to Google Meet this fall. Additionally, we’re rolling out a number of security enhancements for Google Drive, including trust rules for Drive that help control how files can be shared within and outside your organization; Drive labels that classify files and apply controls based on their sensitivity levels; and enhanced phishing and malware protections to help safeguard against insider threats and user error. For full details, please visit our security blog post. 

A single, connected experience

As businesses move to a hybrid work environment, the importance of creating secure collaboration spaces and fostering human connection has never been more important. Because Google Workspace was designed to fuel anywhere, anytime collaboration, we’re now helping millions of organizations navigate the challenges and opportunities of the newly emerging work model. Our customers are using Google Workspace to rethink virtual meetings, provide people with modern tools to stay connected and manage their time and attention, and double down on security and privacy. In countless ways, Google Workspace was built for this moment.

See how we’re bringing Google Workspace to everyone. With this change, all of our 3 billion existing users across consumer, enterprise, and education now have access to the full Google Workspace experience, including Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet and more.

Oxford Economics and Google Cloud surveyed 1,000 CIOs across seven industries around the world to understand their approaches to developing strong business partnerships that support innovation and drive business results—and to find out what the most successful companies are doing differently. Download to read more.

The ecommerce playing field has been hard to navigate for most retailers, and Cart.com is on a mission to change that. Traditionally, retailers needing to run their online store, order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, and other essential activities have had to cobble together systems to get the capabilities they need – much less having access to analytics across these functions. The result is costly, siloed ecommerce operations that are difficult to manage and scale.

It’s clearly not a formula for success, yet that’s the reality facing most retailers. Cart.com, in contrast, has set out to democratize ecommerce by giving brands of all sizes the full capabilities they need to take on the world’s largest online retailers. Our end-to-end environment empowers retailers to keep more of their revenue, set up proven strategies for managing all aspects of their business, and act on valuable insights from customer data every step of the way.

Together with our talented team, we’re building a unified ecommerce platform that already provides value to many leading or up and coming brands including Whataburger, GUESS, Dr. Scholl’s, Rowing Blazers, and Howler Bros. 

We’re excited about the opportunity ahead as we reimagine traditional approaches to online sales, fulfillment, marketing, accessing growth capital, providing a unified view of all ecommerce and marketing analytics, and other activities. Expectations for Cart.com are high, and we are building a company that can scale to $100B in revenue and beyond. Supported by the Startup Program by Google Cloud and Google Cloud solutions, we’re establishing a technology platform to transform all aspects of ecommerce for brands worldwide. 

Partner in disruption

At Cart.com, we’re currently targeting an underserved market. Our ideal customer is beyond demonstrating product-market-fit and is now at an inflection point seeking a growth opportunity. Typically, those companies are generating between $1M and $100M in annual revenue. We’ve seen an enthusiastic response from brands and retailers as well as investors, with backing from investors in just over a year totaling $143 million in three funding rounds.

Our strategy is to build an integrated ecommerce model that combines best-of-breed solutions, many of which we gain through acquisitions and then build upon to provide a streamlined and fully integrated experience for our brands. We’ve made seven acquisitions so far to round out our online store, order fulfillment, marketing services, customer service, and we have launched some integral partnerships including easy access to growth capital through our relationship with Clearco and product protection for customers on every purchase with Extend. Instead of acquiring a data company, we’re building our data platform on Google Cloud, across each operating function for a single-view for brands to harness actionable data. We see Google Cloud as the leader for data management, analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Other reasons why we’re building our business on Google Cloud include scalability, excellence, security, reach, and data analytics that are far superior to other environments.

We also feel a cultural and mission alignment with Google Cloud and envision leaning into a long-term partnership of marketing, selling, and disrupting the disruptors together. Equally important to us are the investments Google Cloud is willing to make in early-stage companies like ours. The support through the Google Cloud for Startups program has been outstanding.

Built on Google Cloud

A wide range of Google Cloud solutions provide the foundation for our platform. For instance, Cloud Pub/Sub keeps our services communicating with one another. We rely on fully managed relational databases, like Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner, to securely handle the huge volume of brand and shopper data generated every day.

Cloud Run allowed us to develop inside of containers before our Kubernetes infrastructure was ready to go. Now, we are taking advantage of all the capabilities in Google Kubernetes Engine. BigQuery integrates with all Google Cloud solutions and offers true data streaming natively out of the box, along with Dataflow for advanced analytics. We also use Container Registry to store and manage our Docker container images. Right now, we’re testing Cloud Composer to evaluate using it for data workflow orchestration instead of Apache Airflow.

The openness of the Google Cloud environment is further enabled by Anthos, which we may deploy soon to perform data integrations quickly as we acquire more companies over the next year. For example, if we acquire a company using Azure, we can easily align it with our Google Cloud ecosystem.

Enabling ecommerce 2.0

Recently, our team has been experimenting with Google Cloud Vertex AI and the fully managed services of AI deployment and ML operations. The capabilities would save us substantial time in the management of the ML lifecycle which allows us to focus more on developing proprietary AI that will transform commerce at scale.

Because Google Cloud is so far ahead in data science, our teams benefit from deep Google Cloud expertise as we look to provide brands with unmatched insights into customers to improve services and revenue. We’re also planning to test Recommendations AI among other tools to deploy customer product recommendations and personalization as turnkey productized offerings. Moving forward, we will likely use Bigtable to aid in serving machine learning to hundreds of thousands of brands due to its low latency and scalability.

Fanatical about brand success

We know that our work with Google Cloud for Startups and use of Google Cloud solutions for best-in-class data management, analytics, ML, and AI will enable us to offer even more transformative services to brands.

We also see the opportunity to use our platform and customer insights to break down barriers between brands, enabling retailers to share information and work better together when it’s in their best interests. What we’re building today on Google Cloud is fundamentally changing what’s possible for retailers of any size everywhere. 

As a startup, when recruiting talent or working with prospective customers, it helps to share our success with Google Cloud. We view them as an extension of the Cart.com team. It also validates our business as we continue building a more integrated, holistic approach to commerce that opens new opportunities and drives growth for brands worldwide.

For more details about Cart.com’s vision for unified ecommerce, check out our video.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.