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Custom AI Solutions, Global Delivery Centers and More Resources Dedicated for Customer Success

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To serve its growing network of worldwide customers and many successful use cases, Google Cloud introduces a slew of resources and offerings including Custom AI Solution practice, Global Delivery Centers, expanded executive briefing center and more!

At Google Cloud, our customers are at the forefront of digital transformation—launching entirely new businesses and products built in the cloud, redefining entire industries with data and artificial intelligence, delivering innovative new consumer experiences, or committing to sustainable new ways of doing business.

We’re committed to our customers’ success, and over the past two years we’ve invested significantly in providing ongoing and integrated support through our customer care portfolio, including launching new Premium and Mission Critical Support offerings that allow us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly, while delivering the fastest response times in the industry.

Today, I’m proud to unveil several new resources and offerings for our customers, including a new Custom AI Solutions practice, new Global Delivery Centers, expanded Executive Briefing Centers, and new leaders to help continue to drive our organization forward.

Helping businesses innovate with a new Custom AI Solutions practice

We are investing in services and offerings to help our customers innovate and drive innovative change to business processes, culture, and customer experiences with Google Cloud products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are foundational for many such digital transformations, and to help customers create real business value with these technologies, we’re excited to launch a Custom AI offering to address our customers’ most critical innovation needs. 

AI and ML technologies are foundational to digital transformations, yet they are not “one size fits all.” Each customers’ problems and opportunities are unique; a rideshare company will use AI differently than a brick and mortar retailer, or a healthcare company, or an insurance firm. To help organizations deploy AI and ML more effectively, we’re launching a new Custom AI Solutions practice, offering customers custom-built AI and ML solutions built into Vertex AI; access to Google’s engineering expertise; and predictable, subscription-based pricing. 

Our teams are already partnering closely with early customers to build and deploy custom AI solutions. For instance, USAA, the large North American insurer, is using Google Cloud ML to process near-real-time damage estimates based on digital images to create a streamlined operations experience.

Learn more about our Custom AI Solutions practice offering here, and how we work together with our customers here. To get in touch, please contact our sales team.

Launching new Global Delivery Centers

Our drive to digitally transform our customers’ businesses is often manifested through our Global Delivery Centers, which expand our professional consulting and emerging practices capabilities available to customers and partners around the world.

The teams at our Global Delivery Centers help customers get up-and-running on Google Cloud quickly and cost effectively, and consult with customers to rapidly build capacity in areas like data analytics, hybrid and multi-cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. More importantly, they help customers successfully execute projects in support of their most mission-critical business objectives. Critically, these centers also help our global partner ecosystem quickly ramp their Google Cloud practices, and get fast, expert consultation for their customers too.

In 2022, we aim to triple the size of our Global Delivery Center teams in Argentina, Poland, and India. In addition, we’ll invest in building deep Google Cloud talent in Mexico and Portugal, furthering our commitment to the industry’s best expert consultation for customers and partners around the world.

Expanding our Executive Briefing Centers footprint

In addition to our Global Delivery Centers, we’re also pleased to expand our resources and facilities that enable digital and face-to-face meetings and working sessions with our customers. This year, we will launch four new Executive Briefing Centers, located on Google Cloud campuses in London, Paris, Singapore, and Munich. 

These centers provide an opportunity to listen to our customers, share the best of Google Cloud’s solutions, and inspire digital transformation, in conversations facilitated by Google Cloud leadership, engineers, and industry experts. By bringing this experience to our customers in-region we can foster deeper partnerships and develop cloud solutions that meet their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty without compromising on functionality or innovation. 

Adding new leadership to enable customer success

Finally, I’m excited to welcome two new leaders to Google Cloud on the Customer Experience team, who will help scale our Delivery Centers and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers.

Heading our Global Delivery Center experience is Sunil Rao. Sunil comes to Google Cloud from Accenture, where he spent 18-plus years working with large technology customers across many industry verticals and managed large global teams in Accenture Advanced Technology Center. Sunil will also lead our Technical Onboarding Center, which helps businesses around the world get up to speed with technologies that are critical to understanding customer and business process contexts, and delivering great experiences.

Additionally, Lee Moore is joining Google Cloud to lead Customer Experience in North America. Lee spent nearly 30 years at Accenture in various leadership positions, including services integration for complex problem-solving, product development across a number of industry verticals, and building long-term customer relationships.

You’ll be hearing much more from us in the coming months, as we build out even more powerful and effective cloud-based services and offerings, work with customers to deliver new analytics- and AI-based tools and services, and work with our growing list of partners to help ensure customer success, across the globe.

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UKG Ready: Meeting the Needs of Complex Machine Learning Models and Distributed Data Sets

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UKG Ready, an HR software for smaller teams, wanted to help SMBs get the variety of data needed to create a dynamic and agile organization. Read to know how Google Cloud Services helped build a common vocabulary of customers’ business entities.

Business Problem
UKG Ready primarily operates in the Small and Medium Business (SMB) space, so inherently many customers are forced to operate and make key business decisions with less Workforce Management (WFM) / Human Capital Management (HCM) data. In addition to volume, SMB lacks the variety of data needed to create a dynamic and agile organization. This puts SMB at a major disadvantage compared to larger segments.

Project Goals
People Insights module is committed to surfacing insights to customers in the context of their day-to-day duties and aid in decision making. With the SMB customer data limitations mentioned above, the goal of this project was to create a global dataset that augments individual customer data to bring light to less obvious, yet important information.

Challenges
UKG Ready is a highly configurable application that gives customers the opportunity to build solutions on a platform that meets their specific business needs. High configurability gives high flexibility to customers in their usage of the software. However, it becomes nearly impossible to create a global dataset for machine learning and data insights. UKG Ready manages just under 4 million of the US workforce and some 30,000+ customers. Despite the large employee dataset size, machine learning models that are specific to customers are starved for data because the individual customers have a relatively small employee population. Does that mean we cannot support our SMB customers’ decision making with ML?

Result
Partnering with Google, we were able to develop an approach that allowed us to standardize various domain entities (pay categories, time off codes, job titles, etc.) so that we could build a global dataset to augment SMB customer data. Using machine learning we were able to build a common vocabulary across our customer base. This common vocabulary encapsulates the nuances of how our customers manage their business and yet is generalized and standardized such that the data can be aggregated over the variety of customer configurations. This allows us to serve up practical insights to customers through various use cases. Our partnership allowed us to leverage Google Cloud Services to meet the needs of our complex machine learning models, distributed data sets and CI/CD processes.

How
UKG Ready decided to partner with Google for an end-to-end solution for the analytics offering. This allowed us to focus on our core business logic without having to worry about the platform, environment configurations, performance and scalability of the entire solution. We make use of various Google Cloud services such as Cloud Triggers, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, Cloud Composer, Cloud Dataflow, Big Query, Vertex AI, Cloud Pub/Sub… to host our analytics solution. Jenkins manages the entire CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments are configured and deployed using Terraform.

The standardization of business entities problem was solved in three distinct steps:

Step 1: Collecting aggregated data
We needed an approach to collect aggregated data from our highly distributed, sharded, multi-tenant data sources. We developed a custom solution that allows us to extract data aggregated at source for PII and GDPR considerations and transfer to Google Cloud Storage in the fastest manner possible. Data is then transformed and stored in Big Query. Services used: GCS, Cloud Functions, DataFlow, Cloud Composer and Big Query. All processes are orchestrated using Cloud Composer and detailed logging is available in Cloud Logging (Stackdriver).

Step 2: Applying NLP (Natural Language Processing)
Once we had the variety of customer configurations or the business entities available, we then applied NLP algorithms to categorize and standardize these in buckets. This approach assumes that customers use natural language for configurations like job titles, pay codes etc.

String Preparation
The input data for string preparation process is an entity string or several strings, that describe one entity object (like name-description pair or code-name pair). The output represents set of tokens that may be used to run a classification/clustering model. The process of string preparation tokenizes strings, replaces shortcuts, handles abbreviations, translates tokens, handles grammatical errors and mistypes

ML Models

Statistical
The idea of the model is to use defined target classes (clusters) and assign several tokens (anchors) to each of them an entity that has any of those tokens would be “attracted” to appropriate class. All other tokens are weighted according to frequencies of usage of theses tokens in the entities with anchor tokens:

Using anchor tokens, we are building kind-of Word2Vec - dimensionality of vector is equal to number of target classes. The higher the specific dimension (cluster) value, the higher the probability of entity to be included in appropriate cluster. Final prediction for entity tokens list for specific class is sum of weights of all the tokens included. Predicted cluster is a cluster that has maximal prediction score.

Lexical Model
We managed to generate reasonable amount of labeled data during statistical model implementation and testing. That opens a possibility to build “classical” NLP model that uses labeled data to train classification neural network using pretrained layers to produce token embeddings or even string embeddings. We started experimentation with pre-trained models like GloVe and got good results with single words and bi-grams but started getting issues in handling of n-grams. Our Google account team came to our rescue and recommended some white papers that helped formulate our strategy. We now use Tensorflow nnlm-en-dim128 model to produce string embeddings – it was trained on 200B records English Google News corpus and produces for each input string 128-dimensional vector. After that we use several Dense and Dropout layers to build a classification model.

Ensembling
To perform ensembling all the model results for each class are cast to probabilities using softmax transformation with scale normalization. Final predicted probability is maximal average score of both models among all the classes scores – appropriate class is predicted class.

The machine learning models are deployed on Vertex AI and are used in batch predictions. Model performance is captured at every prediction boundary and monitored for quality in production.

Step 3: Making available common vocabulary
Having the standardized vocabulary, we then needed a mechanism to have the results be available in UKG Ready reports and customer specific models like Flight Risk and Fatigue. For this we again used Google Services for orchestration, data transformation and data storage.

Once the modeling is complete, we made the customer specific models leveraging the above architecture be available in Reports. We utilized our proven existing technology choices in GCP for orchestration, data transformation and data storage

Results
We are able to build a common vocabulary of our customers’ business entities with good confidence. And be an expert advisor to our SMB customers in their decision-making using machine learning. With the advice of our Google account team and using Google services we can add value to our product in a relatively short amount of time. And we are not done! We continue to use this platform for new use cases, complex business problems and innovative machine learning solutions.

Sample result:


Special thanks to Kanchana Patlolla , AI Specialist, Google for the collaboration in bringing this to light

Case Study

Quantum Metric Increases Business 10-fold

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Would your company like access to a system which you can ask: "Show me high-loyalty customers, located in specific geographic areas, who visited the web site at least five times, based on specific campaigns, and never booked a seat on a flight.” Read this.

At Quantum Metric, we’re in the business of bringing our customers business insights that are based on customer experience data and analytics for mid-market and Fortune 500 companies.

Our software, powered by big data, machine intelligence, and Google Cloud, helps our customers identify, quantify, prioritize and measure opportunities to improve digital experiences.

As companies move to a more agile product lifecycle, including continuous deployment and continuous integration, they’re finding that it’s critical to receive perpetual quantified feedback and insights from their data in real time to understand where the largest opportunities exist. 

Each year, billions of customer interactions are captured through browsers or mobile apps on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices. This data, fed into the Quantum Metric platform, can show if a customer had a password problem they couldn’t solve or struggled when trying to purchase something and abandoned their cart.

It also can show if the customer tried in vain to complete an online change to their service provider’s subscription, to reach tech support, or couldn’t find the size or color they were looking for while shopping online.

Most importantly, the Quantum Metric platform quantifies the business value of the issue, helping organizations prioritize where they can make the largest impact to their business.

Success overwhelms our initial architecture
Initially, the Quantum Metric experience analytics software ran on a MySQL open source relational database management system (RDBMS). The MySQL RDBMS worked great for simple queries, when there was a specific question to ask of the data.

Soon, though, we knew we needed to offer more advanced data science capabilities. Our bigger customers wanted to ask questions across very large data sets—days, weeks, months, and years worth of data. They wanted to pose iterative questions using complex filters to answer their most challenging business questions. 

With more complex queries across more data, response times from our RDBMS went from 100 to 500 milliseconds to as long as 20 minutes.

That delay was slowing down our ability and time to insights, which also reduced the value we could provide to our customers, since iterative exploration and analysis requires real-time query responses. Because of the need for real-time responses, there were certain questions that we just weren’t able to ask of the data. It became clear that we needed a much more robust data warehouse solution. 

There were also operational challenges with MySQL and massive-scale data ingestion. We spent a lot of time into the wee hours of the night and morning handling errors and recovering databases.

We tried to address these challenges by sharding, partitioning, and indexing the data to optimize for the types of questions customers were asking. But the problems were escalating and happening more often, from once a month across the customer base to monthly for at least 20 different customers.

We could tune the platform for today and tomorrow’s workload, with good guesses at where indexes could be used, but we simply couldn’t continue to horizontally scale MySQL in a cost-efficient and operationally efficient manner. 

Speed breeds innovation
Once we started exploring options that could better scale with our business, we looked at NoSQL technologies like Cassandra (a partitioned row-store database), MySQL’s Column Store (a columnar store database), and Vertica (a columnar store database)—each with unique ways of handling data storage and accessibility.

But with high volumes of complex queries across large data stores, all of these solutions began to fail, bogged down with multiple, simultaneous users. We could have solved the problems with more raw compute and storage, but it would have been prohibitively expensive to run and require a large team to operate. 

We then decided to try BigQuery, and it was transformative.

We connected our front end to BigQuery via APIs. Once data is 15 minutes old, it is automatically extracted, loaded, and transformed (ETL) to BigQuery.

We continuously update the legacy MySQL RDBMS so its data is integrated with BigQuery data when queries require real-time data. Most query response times are within 100-200 milliseconds, matching what we initially experienced with MySQL.

When traffic from our customers scales up, we can now scale on-demand to accommodate it, thanks to BigQuery’s hundreds of thousands of CPUs. Our customers no longer run into slow response times, and we’ve gained confidence that we can offer them—and their users—advanced insights and better experiences without delay.

More importantly, with this scale of query power, we were able to build data science algorithms into the platform, which iteratively query BigQuery based on the results, and help quantify the impact of a specific issue to a specific segment of users. Adding these capabilities was possible because of the massive scale of BigQuery. 

In addition to new insights and fast response times, we wanted our customers to be able to ask complex questions using very simple language.

For example: “Show me high-loyalty customers, located in specific geographic areas, who visited the web site at least five times, based on specific campaigns, and never booked a seat on a flight.”

This was exactly the kind of query that was used by a major U.S. airline to understand the multi-million dollar impact of a failure affecting their most valuable customers: their high-loyalty members.

And this was all done while maintaining the highest standard of care of customer data and privacy by default, using multiple layers of encryption of data in transit, at rest, and a unique military-grade encryption approach. This approach encrypts PII, including even session cookies, with a RSA-2048 key available only to a select few and used for use cases such as fraud analysis.   

It’s no exaggeration to say that BigQuery has totally transformed our business. It provides the petabyte scale and speed we were missing, in addition to taking care of operational maintenance, a task that was burying our team with MySQL.

We’re now able to support some of the largest companies in the world that require real-time, petabyte-scale analytics. That lets them serve more customers faster with higher quality, and take advantage of BigQuery’s power and scale to innovate.

There are other cloud solutions that can address petabyte analytics, but the most unique value proposition of BigQuery was its on-demand scaling and operational management, with extremely cost-effective pay-as-you-go billing. While today we are at a scale where we have round-the-clock querying needs, our early days had very sporadic query loads where we needed instant scale, then a long lull of nothing. The unique business model of BigQuery’s pay-by-bytes-scanned allowed us to have access to a massive-scale querying platform without breaking the bank. 

Using BigQuery powers better customer experience and reduces purchasing friction
Among the many features of Quantum Metric is the ability to replay online customer sessions. In the example below from a mobile e-commerce site, each action is displayed chronologically. Why did this customer’s transaction fail?

Diving deeper, the session replay shows that the user tried to change the item quantity in the checkout cart, which resulted in a failed API call. Powered by BigQuery, Quantum Metric can then show how many other end users had this issue, with a simple click of “Show More Errors Like This.”

With BigQuery’s massive scale, Quantum Metric will then quantify the impact of that issue, so companies can prioritize which issues need attention immediately. If this is the issue that’s impacting the business the most, our customer can use a single click to open a Jira ticket, forwarding the discovery to their product and engineering teams. Those teams can then re-engineer the experience in near-real time, addressing the failed API call and cutting out the frustrating time it takes for engineers to reproduce the issue.

Quantum Metric platform.png

Once we had a powerful back end in BigQuery, we realized that Quantum Metric’s platform could be used to ask complex questions from vast datasets. We built some of the processes that data scientists use to formulate those queries right into our product.  

For example, we added one series of processes to our platform to help customers understand whether a suspect issue is really impacting end-user experience. Is it something that should be prioritized and fixed? Does this really affect the user experience? Does it have financial impact? These and other questions can be pre-defined as a complex query in Quantum Metric to let our customer quickly gain insight on how an issue is impacting the business. Customers were blown away when they heard this was possible. It was the holy grail for what they were looking for in data science. It really sets us apart from our competition.

Today, with every company heavily dependent on data, those companies that can uncover and act on insights fastest are the ones that will succeed. BigQuery gives us the data warehouse platform we need to provide our customers with fast, reliable technology tools. It frees us from having to deal with the minutiae of technology infrastructure operations, so we can focus on finding and extracting the magic in customer data. With the power and scale of BigQuery, combined with the real-time capture of every user experience with 100% fidelity, we’re able to offer a self-service analytics platform that provides insights into digital journey friction points and acts as the indisputable arbitrator of truth. 

Blog

A Road to Possibilities: Google Maps Platform Website

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Roll-out of the new website experience for Google Maps Platform to support modern businesses requirements can help unlock new possibilities by allowing better discovery of products and services, budget planning and developer documentation.

For more than 15 years, developers have used Google Maps Platform to deliver location-based experiences to their end users and used location intelligence to optimize their businesses. Along this journey, we’ve made a variety of changes to better support our community as needs have changed and new industries and technologies have emerged. We started rolling out a new website experience, at https://mapsplatform.google.com, to help you better understand the products and solutions best suited to address your objectives. Plus, now you can directly connect to the developer documentation for each product to get started quickly, and you can visualize usage and associated costs to have a better idea of what to expect before getting started. 

Getting to your solution faster 

Maps, Routes, Places are building blocks that let you develop implementations for any use case. Building for specific use cases, however, typically requires using a combination of APIs and SDKs. To help you quickly understand what’s possible and what you need to build for your use case, you can now visit the solutions tab to select from a list of popular use cases or industries. Once you’ve selected a use case or industry, you’re taken to a page where you can explore relevant products, read helpful blog posts, see how other customers have deployed for similar use cases, and more.  

Find the ideal location

Direct access to developer documentation

Did you know there are more than a thousand pages of developer documentation created to help you get started, unblock you when you’re stuck, and share best practices? Now when you explore a product or solution from the Google Maps Platform website, you can easily navigate back and forth between our website and documentation. Just tap on JS, iOS, Android or API under the product name to get to the documentation you need. 

Link to documentation

Budgeting for your project

To help you calculate pricing for your project, we’ve introduced a new pricing calculator. Once you find the product and API or SDK you plan to use, pull the slider to reflect your estimated number of monthly requests. This will automatically update the “monthly cost” column for each product and API or SDK you plan to use. If your estimated monthly requests exceed the slider limit, contact our sales team to ​​learn about volume discounts that start at 20% off. 

Pricing calculator

We hope our new website makes it easier to discover our products and solutions, estimate your budget, and start building with our documentation so you can deliver helpful experiences to your users and optimize your business. 

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit https://mapsplatform.google.com.

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4 Methods How AI/ML Boosts Innovation and Reduces Costs

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By leveraging AI and ML to help manage operational processes, startups and tech companies can allocate more resources to innovation and growth. Here are 4 ways AI and ML can help you reduce costs and promote innovation. Read More!

“Cloud Wisdom Weekly: for tech companies and startups” is a new blog series we’re running this fall to answer common questions our tech and startup customers ask us about how to build apps faster, smarter, and cheaper. In this installment, we explore how to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for faster innovation and efficient operational growth.

Whether they’re trying to extract insights from data, create faster and more efficient workflows via intelligent automation, or build innovative customer experiences, leaders at today’s tech companies and startups know that proficiency in AI and ML is more important than ever.

AI and ML technologies are often expensive and time-consuming to develop, and the demand for AI and ML experts still largely outpaces the existing talent pool. These factors put pressure on tech companies and startups to allocate resources carefully when considering bringing AI/ML into their business strategy. In this article, we’ll explore four tips to help tech companies and startups accelerate innovation and reduce costs with AI and ML.

4 tips to accelerate innovation and reduces costs with AI and ML

Many of today’s most innovative companies are creating services or products that couldn’t exist without AI—but that doesn’t mean they’re building their AI and ML infrastructure and pipelines from scratch. Even for startups whose businesses don’t directly revolve around AI, injecting AI into operational processes can help manage costs as the company grows. By relying on a cloud provider for AI services, organizations can unlock opportunities to energize development, automate processes, and reduce costs.

1. Leverage pre-trained ML APIs to jumpstart product development

Tech companies and startups want their technical talent focused on proprietary projects that will make a difference to the business. This often involves the development of new applications for an AI technology, but not necessarily the development of the AI technology itself. In such scenarios, pre-trained APIs help organizations quickly and cost-effectively establish a foundation on which higher-value, more differentiated work can be layered.

For example, many companies building conversational AI into their products and services leverage Google Cloud APIs such as Speech-to-Text and Natural Language. With these APIs, developers can easily integrate capabilities like transcription, sentiment analysis, content classification, profanity filtering, speaker diarization, and more. These powerful technologies help organizations focus on creating products rather than having to build the base technologies.

See this article for examples of why tech companies and startups have chosen Google Cloud’s Speech APIs for use cases that range from deriving customer insights to giving robots empathetic personalities. For an even deeper dive, see

2. Use managed services to scale ML development and accelerate deployment of models to production

Pre-trained models are extremely useful, but in many cases, tech companies and startups need to create custom models to either derive insights from their own data or to apply new use cases to public data. Regardless of whether they’re building data-driven products or generating forecasting models from customer data, companies need ways to accelerate the building and deployment of models into their production environments.

A data scientist typically starts a new ML project in a notebook, experimenting with data stored on the local machine. Moving these efforts into a production environment requires additional tooling and resources, including more complicated infrastructure management. This is one reason many organizations struggle to bring models into production and burn through time and resources without moving the revenue needle.

Managed cloud platforms can help organizations transition from projects to automated experimentation at scale or the routine deployment and retraining of production models. Strong platforms offer flexible frameworks, fewer lines of code required for model training, unified environments across tools and datasets, and user-friendly infrastructure management and deployment pipelines.

At Google Cloud, we’ve seen customers with these needs embrace Vertex AI, our platform for accelerating ML development, in increasing numbers since it launched last year. Accelerating time to production by up to 80% compared to competing approaches, Vertex AI provides advanced end-to-end ML Ops capabilities so that data scientists, ML engineers, and developers can contribute to ML acceleration. It includes low-code features, like AutoML, that make it possible to train high performing models without ML expertise.

Over the first half of 2022, our performance tests found that the number of customers utilizing AI Workbench increased by 25x. It’s exciting to see the impact and value customers are gaining with Vertex AI Workbench, including seeing it help companies speed up large model training jobs by 10x and helping data science teams improve modeling precision from the 70-80% range to 98%.

If you are new to Vertex AI, check out this video series to learn how to take models from prototype to production. For deeper dives, see

3. Harness the cloud to match hardware to use cases while minimizing costs and management overhead

ML infrastructure is generally expensive to build, and depending on the use case, specific hardware requirements and software integrations can make projects costly and complicated at scale. To solve for this, many tech companies and startups look to cloud services for compute and storage needs, attracted by the ability to pay only for resources they use while scaling up and down according to changing business needs.

At Google Cloud, customers share that they need the ability to optimize around a variety of infrastructure approaches for diverse ML workloads. Some use Central Processing Units (CPUs) for flexible prototyping. Others leverage our support for NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for image-oriented projects and larger models, especially those with custom TensorFlow operations that must run partially on CPUs. Some choose to run on the same custom ML processors that power Google applications—Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). And many use different combinations of all of the preceding.

Beyond matching use cases to the right hardware and benefiting from the scale and operational simplicity of a managed service, tech companies and startups should explore configuration features that help further control costs. For example, Google Cloud features like time-sharing and multi-instance capabilities for GPUs — as well as features like Vertex AI Training Reduction Server — are built to optimize GPU costs and usage.

Vertex AI Workbench also integrates with the NVIDIA NGC catalog for deploying frameworks, software development kits and Jupyter Notebooks with a single click—another feature that, like Reduction Server, speaks to the ways organizations can make AI more efficient and less costly via managed services.

4. Implement AI for operations

Besides using pre-trained APIs and ML model development to develop and deliver products, startup and tech companies can improve operational efficiency, especially as they scale, by leveraging AI solutions built for specific business and operational needs, like contract processing or customer service.

Google Cloud’s DocumentAI products, for instance, apply ML to text for use cases ranging from contract lifecycle management to mortgage processing. For businesses whose customer support needs are growing, there’s Contact Center AI, which helps organizations build intelligent virtual agents, facilitate handoffs as appropriate between virtual agents and human agents, and generate insights from call center interactions. By leveraging AI to help manage operational processes, startups and tech companies can allocate more resources to innovation and growth.

Next steps toward an intelligent future

The tips in this article can help any tech company or startup find ways to save money and boost efficiency with AI and ML. You can learn more about these topics by registering for Google Cloud Next, kicking off October 11, where you’ll hear Google Cloud’s latest AI news, discussions, and perspectives—in the meantime, you can also dive into our Vertex AI quickstarts and BigQuery ML tutorials. And for the latest on our work with tech companies and startups, be sure to visit our Startups page.

How-to

Learn to Deploy Custom Models on Vertex AI

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After its launch in May, Vertex AI along with its pre-trained models for building models on variety of infrastructure demonstrated many use-cases. Refresh your learning to start using Vertex AI and deploy custom models on the unified AI platform.

In May we announced Vertex AI, our new unified AI platform which provides options for everything from using pre-trained models to building your models with a variety of frameworks. In this post we’ll do a deep dive on training and deploying a custom model on Vertex AI. There are many different tools provided in Vertex AI, as you can see in the diagram below. In this scenario we’ll be using the products highlighted in green:

in green

AutoML is a great choice if you don’t want to write your model code yourself, but many organizations have scenarios that require building custom models with open-source ML frameworks like TensorFlow, XGBoost, or PyTorch. In this example, we’ll build a custom TensorFlow model (built upon this tutorial) that predicts the fuel efficiency of a vehicle, using the Auto MPG dataset from Kaggle.

If you’d prefer to dive right in, check out the codelab or watch the two minute video below for a quick overview of our demo scenario: https://www.youtube.com/embed/bHoAXR26hWo?enablejsapi=1&

Environment setup 

There are many options for setting up an environment to run these training and prediction steps. In the lab linked above, we use the IDE in Cloud Shell to build our model training application, and we pass our training code to Vertex AI as a Docker container. You can use whichever IDE you’re most comfortable working with, and if you’d prefer not to containerize your training code, you can create a Python package that runs on one of Vertex AI’s supported pre-built containers.

If you would like to use Pandas or another data science library to do exploratory data analysis, you can use the hosted Jupyter notebooks in Vertex AI as your IDE. For example, here we wanted to inspect the correlation between fuel efficiency and one of our data attributes, cylinders. We used Pandas to plot this relationship directly in our notebook.

Table chart

To get started, you’ll want to make sure you have a Google Cloud project with the relevant services enabled. You can enable all the products we’ll be using in one command using the gcloud SDK:

  gcloud services enable compute.googleapis.com         \
                       containerregistry.googleapis.com  \
                       aiplatform.googleapis.com

Then create a Cloud Storage bucket to store our saved model assets. With that, you’re ready to start developing your model training code.

Containerizing training code

Here we’ll develop our training code as a Docker container, and deploy that container to Google Container Registry (GCR). To do that, create a directory with a Dockerfile at the root, along with a trainer subdirectory containing a train.py file. This is where you’ll write the bulk of your training code:

training code

To train this model, we’ll build a deep neural network using the Keras Sequential Model API:

  model = keras.Sequential([
  layers.Dense(64, activation='relu', input_shape=[len(train_dataset.keys())]),
  layers.Dense(64, activation='relu'),
  layers.Dense(1)
])

We won’t include the full model training code here, but you can find it in this step of the codelab. Once your training code is complete, you can build and test your container locally. The IMAGE_URI in the snippet below corresponds to the location where you’ll deploy your container image in GCR. Replace $GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT below with the name of your Cloud project:

  IMAGE_URI="gcr.io/$GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT/mpg:v1"
docker build ./ -t $IMAGE_URI
docker run $IMAGE_URI

All that’s left to do is push your container to GCR by running docker push $IMAGE_URI. In the GCR section of your console, you should see your newly deployed container:

deployed container

Running the training job 

Now you’re ready to train your model. You can select the container you created above in the models section of the platform. You can also specify key details like the training method, compute preferences (GPUs, RAM, etc.) and hyperparameter tuning if required.

if required

Now you can hand over training your model and let Vertex do the heavy lifting for you.

Deploy to endpoint

Next, let’s get your new model incorporated into your app or service. Once your model is done training you will see an option to create a new endpoint. You can test out your endpoint in the console during your development process. Using the client libraries, you can easily create a reference to your endpoint and get a prediction with a single line of code:

  from google.cloud import aiplatform

endpoint = aiplatform.Endpoint(
         endpoint_name="projects/YOUR-PROJECT-NUMBER/locations/us-central1/endpoints/YOUR-ENDPOINT-ID"
)

. . .  

endpoint.predict(test_instances)

Start building today

Ready to start using Vertex AI? We have you covered for all your use cases spanning from simply using pre-trained models to every step of the lifecycle of a custom model. 

  • Use Jupyter notebooks for a development experience that combines text, code and data
  • Fewer lines of code required for custom modeling
  • Use MLOps to manage your data with confidence and scale

Get started today by trying out this codelab yourself or watching this one hour workshop

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