If you’ve been exploring recently-launched consumer generative AI tools like Bard and thinking about how to build similar experiences for your business, Generative AI App Builder, or Gen App Builder for short, is here to get you started.

Gen App Builder is part of Google Cloud’s recently announced generative AI offerings and lets developers, even those with limited machine learning skills, quickly and easily tap into the power of Google’s foundation models, search expertise, and conversational AI technologies to create enterprise-grade generative AI applications. 

“Google Cloud’s leading AI technology enables STARZ customers to discover more relevant content, increasing engagement with, and the likelihood of completing the content served to them,” says Robin Chacko, EVP Direct-to-Consumer, STARZ. “We’re excited about how generative AI-powered search will help users find the most relevant content even easier and faster.”

Gen App Builder is exciting because unlike most existing generative AI offerings for developers, it offers an orchestration layer that abstracts the complexity of combining various enterprise systems with generative AI tools to create a smooth, helpful user experience. Gen App Builder provides step-by-step orchestration of search and conversational applications with pre-built workflows for common tasks like onboarding, data ingestion, and customization, making it easy for developers to set up and deploy their apps. With Gen App Builder developers can: 

• Build in minutes or hours. With access to Google’s no-code conversational and search tools powered by foundation models, organizations can get started with a few clicks and quickly build high-quality experiences that can be integrated into their applications and websites. 
• Combine the power of foundation models with information retrieval to find relevant, personalized information. Enterprises can build apps that understand user intent via natural language, and surface the right information with associated citations and attributions from a company’s public and private data. They can also fully control what data their applications access and the content or topics they want to address.
• Build multimodal apps that can respond with text, images, and other media. Gen App Builder supports not just text, but also other modalities such as images and videos. It allows developers to build apps using a combination of text and images as inputs to find information across documents, photos, and video content, enabling richer customer interactions. 
• Combine natural conversations with structured flows. Developers can granularly blend the output of foundation models with controls to ground answers in enterprise content, and step-by-step conversation orchestration to guide customers to the right answers.
• Provide the ability to transact and connect to third party apps and services. Gen App Builder makes it simple to create digital assistants and bots that not only serve content, but also connect to purchasing and provisioning systems to enable transactions from the conversational UI, and escalate customer conversations to a human agent when the context demands.

A new generation of conversational AI experiences and assistants 

Consumers of enterprise applications expect to interact with technology in a seamless, conversational way to quickly find the information they need and act on it. Gen App Builder can help reinvent these customer and employee experiences by ingesting large, complex datasets that are specific to your company–from websites, documents, and transactional systems like billing and inventory, to emails, chat conversations, and more. These AI-powered apps can synthesize information across all of these sources to provide specific, actionable responses, using only the data you have provided. 

Some of the most popular uses are in customer service, where generative apps can contribute to increasing revenue, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. For example, if a retail customer reaches out to modify an order, a virtual agent can help them change it to another product. The customer doesn’t even need to provide the new product name—they can just upload an image and let the agent guide them through the rest. Watch this demo to see how a retail chatbot can use multimodal capabilities to help a consumer navigate various options on the website, including giving the customer ideas on how to use the product and even helping them complete the purchase with the ability to transact within the conversational UI. This scenario could apply to multiple industries and use cases, ranging from consumer goods and public services, to finance and internal corporate systems like intranets.

Combining the power of Google-quality search with foundation models

Finding the right information from data across the organization is a critical requirement within any enterprise. Yet it can be challenging to build high-quality enterprise search experiences with existing tools. Current systems struggle to understand user intent, are difficult to implement and customize, and don’t provide a high-quality user experience. 

One of the most exciting features of Gen App Builder is the ability to combine the power of Google-quality search with generative AI to help enterprises find the most relevant and personalized information when they need it. With Gen App Builder, enterprises can build conversational search experiences across their public and private data in minutes or hours with no coding experience. 

Enabling multimodal search across text, images and video within the enterprise is a key aspect of the search experiences in Gen App Builder. In addition to providing high-quality search results, Gen App Builder can conveniently summarize the results and provide corresponding citations in a natural, human-like fashion. Gen App Builder also automatically extracts key information from the data and enables personalized results for users. Watch this demo to see how these capabilities can come together to transform the search experience for employees at a financial services firm. The ability to integrate Google-quality search within the enterprise’s applications means they can enjoy a new level of data utilization, drive increased process efficiencies, and provide delightful experiences to their employees and customers.

“Customers have been shopping at Macy’s for generations. Being able to deliver 360° personalization and contextual recommendations will help ensure that Macy’s is still providing future generations of shoppers with a seamless, exceptional experience,” said Bennett Fox-Glassman, Senior Vice-President, Customer Journey, Macy’s. “We’ve already realized an increase in revenue per visit and conversion rates had great success using Google Cloud’s AI technology and are looking forward to exploring how these latest announcements bring together Natural Language Processing and Generative AI capabilities to deliver next-gen search and conversational experiences for our customers.”

The ability to intuitively interact with complex data across a variety of sources allows organizations to better serve their customers and deliver more relevant offerings. Combined with conversational and fulfillment abilities, the potential for improving customer engagement and employee productivity is immense. We’re excited to see how developers and enterprises use a mix of these capabilities to power new experiences and revenue opportunities.

If you’re interested in a closer look at the Gen App Builder, tune into this session at the Data Cloud & AI Summit. Take a step forward to getting hands-on and join the waitlist for our trusted tester program. And finally, bookmark our generative AI landing page to keep abreast of the latest news, updates and possibilities from this exciting new world of Gen Apps.

Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection

Since the early days of the pandemic, we’ve partnered with government organizations and academic institutions to serve communities at scale with Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI). I sat down with Bill MacKenzie, IT liaison for the Upper Grand School District in Ontario, and Marco Palermo, director of digital government and modernization, to discuss how they embraced CCAI to introduce scalable service delivery to residents and students alike. I’m sharing more on their stories below, and for the full overview, check out our Google Cloud Public Sector Summit session, Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection.

Upper Grand School District: Answering questions with speed and accuracy

Bill MacKenzie described the Upper Grand School District’s struggles at the beginning of the pandemic, particularly helping parents with IT issues. The staff-oriented help desk was not equipped to assist parents trying to securely login for students as young as kindergarten. Without sufficient support for parents, the District was struggling to handle thousands of phone calls a day.

To alleviate the manual strain, they turned to Quantiphi, a Google Cloud partner, to implement Google Cloud Dialogflow. They were fully functional within a few weeks. The new website provided real-time responses as well as clear documentation to help parents get up and running quickly.

“In the first 10 days, we had over 5,000 hits, and the accuracy rate was 92%,” MacKenzie said. 

The district doesn’t know what the future holds, but now that they have been through the process, they are confident they now understand how to create their own bots to meet critical needs.

City of Toronto: Getting critical information to the community

Marco Palermo explained how the city of Toronto was facing a very rapid and fluid situation at the beginning of the pandemic. Getting information to constituents was extremely important, and they needed alternative channels to deliver that information.

Toronto has been committed to workforce equity and inclusivity in order to best represent the diversity of its residents. As a result, solutions had to be accessible to all. The bot handled 25,330 unique users and addressed 20,174 total questions with an 80% accurate response rate in the first four months. It’s been a huge success for the city, with plans to expand its capabilities.

Personalized response to the pandemic challenge

I noted that even before the pandemic, government leaders were asking for a way to provide more flexible personal experiences and better support outside of normal business hours. Around 60% of constituents want more self-service options and 75% would happily interact with digital resources if they could get the answers they needed.

Google Cloud CCAI  addresses these needs with a single core of intelligence that provides a consistently high-quality conversational experience—human or virtual—across all channels and platforms. It can be deployed on legacy infrastructure without upgrades in an average of two weeks.

CCAI operates with a conversational core that centralizes the ability to talk, understand, and interact, orchestrating high-quality conversations at scale. It provides services in three different ways:

• Virtual Agent AI allows natural conversation with customers to identify and address their issues effectively
• Agent Assist AI helps human agents by providing real-time turn-by-turn guidance so they can better serve constituents
• Insight AI determines metrics and trends in real-time to enable faster and more accurate insights

CCAI provides consistency across every application. It can go off-script when answering complex questions, adjusting human conversation with the capacity to handle unexpected stops and starts, odd word choices, or implied meanings. It can also handle multiple use cases for the customer, such as taking payments, updating information, providing information, and more. By allowing agencies to automate routine tasks and reduce the amount of time employees need to dedicate to answering calls, the solution created cost savings for the agency.

Explore more on this session by visiting the Public Sector Summit on-demand video.

With the advent of the pandemic, contact center traffic has increased by as much as 300%, taxing center capabilities. To help handle the surge, and keep up with heightened customer demands, many customer experience providers have deployed automation in the form of virtual agents that serve as the first—and, sometimes the last—line of customer support. How effective these virtual agents are in delivering timely, complete customer service depends in large part on the contact center’s infrastructure and the power of the automation solution.

Customer support providers can now start to reimagine customer experience with Conversational AI and take advantage of the Google Cloud-Automation Anywhere partnership to modernize their operations. 

Bringing together the Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) solution and the Automation Anywhere cloud-native Automation 360 platform, the partnership helps contact centers remain competitive by improving their performance metrics and customer satisfaction to exceed the continuously growing expectations.

Information here, there, anywhere—with limited access

Over the years, many contact centers have accumulated a multitude of systems, often creating a disconnected infrastructure. As a result, both human and virtual agents alike are challenged to keep up with growing customers’ expectations for timely, accurate, and complete service. Without up-to-date software and infrastructure, human agents have to perform a “swivel-chair” maneuver, logging in to the different systems, sifting through records, copying the needed information, and deciding what the next action should be. This approach is not conducive to achieving lower average handle times (or AHT), reduced processing errors, or increased customer satisfaction.

In such a siloed environment, virtual agents may not connect to all the relevant data systems and applications. That also limits what they can do to support human agents. Typically, a virtual agent can handle basic customer requests, such as providing banking customers with their account balances. For more complex requests, such as applying for a line of credit, a virtual agent still must transfer customers to human agents, and the swivel-chair maneuver begins. 

Enter the RPA-assisted AI-powered virtual agent

The combination of Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Automation Anywhere’s Automation 360 RPA platform can help contact centers get the maximum benefit from utilizing virtual agents, enriching customer engagements. Further, by integrating automation, opening up APIs, and creating new processes for virtual agents, customer experience teams can help streamline operations by enabling users to quickly access the information they require. This helps minimize the need for the “swivel-chair” maneuver.

Automation 360 makes it possible for the CCAI virtual agents to access all systems and applications in both legacy and modern infrastructure, helping resolve every case quickly and easily. Not only can the virtual agents respond faster with answers, but they can complete more complex end-to-end requests. With RPA, customers are reporting 66% improved efficiency of contact center operations while exceeding their AHT reduction goals. 

This video illustrates how such automation can dramatically reduce the processing time of a customer service request, and you can read more about the details of contact center automation, as well.

Additionally, a comprehensive development platform, the Google Cloud CCAI Dialogflow, powers virtual agents—chatbots and voicebots—with Conversational AI to deliver lifelike customer experiences anytime a customer reaches out to a brand. CCAI Agent Assist helps human agents with turn-by-turn guidance, ready-to-deliver answers, and ready-to-send responses. CCAI Insights identifies key metrics such as call drivers and customer sentiment for workflow optimization. 

Living up to their potential

TELUS International, a leading digital customer experience provider and long-time partner of both Google Cloud and Automation Anywhere, has been leveraging virtual agents to enhance the employee and customer experience.  

“We are very proud of the enormous value that we can provide our clients through combining our expertise in customer experience and digital transformation alongside the innovative solutions of our technology partners,” Jim Radzicki, CTO of TELUS International, explains. “For instance, through leveraging Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Automation Anywhere’s RPA integration, we are able to expand the capabilities of virtual agents to process a wider variety of customer requests while allowing our team members to focus on the most critical conversations and creating a meaningful connection with every customer.” 

With CCAI and Automation 360, virtual agents can help contact centers deliver 24/7, comprehensive, accurate service, all of which helps eliminate wait times—even with heavy traffic. And this is just the start. 

With deeper integration planned between Automation 360 and CCAI, RPA can augment CCAI Agent Assist’s abilities to help human agents by bringing untapped case-sensitive information to their fingertips. Furthermore, Automation 360 Bot Insight can complement CCAI Insights’ as well as TELUS International’s Intelligent Insights, a tool-agnostic platform to monitor and manage RPA solutions and bots, with backend data access metrics.

At Google Cloud and Automation Anywhere, we’ll continue developing our contact center solution to extend automation capabilities for better customer service and greater customer satisfaction. Instead of constantly swiveling, agents can once again be at the center of the call center action, taking their work—and the experience of their customers—to the next level.

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.