Generative AI Takes Center Stage at Google I/O Conference 2023
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Over the past decade, artificial intelligence has evolved from experimental prototypes and early successes to mainstream enterprise use. And the recent advancements in generative AI have begun to change the way we create, connect, and collaborate. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in his keynote, every business and organization is thinking about how to drive transformation. That’s why we’re focused on making it easy and scalable for others to innovate with AI.
In March, we announced exciting new products that infuse generative AI into our Google Cloud offerings, empowering developers to responsibly build with enterprise-level safety, security, and privacy. They include Gen App Builder, which lets developers quickly and easily create generative chat and enterprise search applications, and Generative AI support in Vertex AI, which expands our machine learning development platform with access to foundation models from Google and others to quickly build, customize and deploy models. We also introduced our vision for Google Workspace, and delivered generative AI features to trusted testers in Gmail and Google Docs that help people write.
Last month we introduced Security AI Workbench, an industry-first extensible platform powered by our new LLM security model Sec-PaLM, which incorporates Google’s unique visibility into the evolving threat landscape and is fine-tuned for cybersecurity operations.
Today at Google I/O, we are excited to share the next steps not only in our own AI journey, but also those of our customers and partners as well. We’ve already seen a number of organizations begin to develop with and deploy our generative AI offerings. These organizations have been able to move their ideas from experimentation to enterprise-ready applications with the training models, security, compute infrastructure, and cost controls needed to provide their customers with transformative experiences. Our open ecosystem, which provides opportunities for every kind of partner, continues to grow as well. And we are also pleased to share new services and capabilities across Google Cloud and Workspace, including Duet AI—our AI-powered collaborator—to enable more users and developers to start seeing the impact AI can have on their organization.
Customers bringing ideas to life with generative AI
Leading companies in a variety of industries like eDreams ODIGEO, GitLab, Oxbotica, and more, are using our generative AI technologies to create engaging content, synthesize and organize information, automate business processes, and build amazing customer experiences. A few examples we showcased today include:
- Adore Me, a New York-based intimate apparel brand, is creating production-worthy copy with generative AI features in Docs and Gmail. This is accelerating projects and processes in ways that even surprised the company.
- Canva, the visual communication platform, uses Google Cloud’s rich generative AI capabilities in language translation to better support its non-English speaking users. Users can now easily translate presentations, posters, social media posts, and more into over a hundred languages. The company is also testing ways that Google’s PaLM technology can turn short video clips into longer, more compelling stories. The result will be a more seamless design experience while growing the Canva brand.
- Character.AI, a leading conversational AI platform, selected Google Cloud as its preferred cloud infrastructure provider because we offer the speed, security and flexibility required to meet the needs of its rapidly growing community of creators. We are enabling Character.AI to train and infer LLMs faster and more efficiently, and enhancing the customer experience by inspiring imagination, discovery, and understanding.
- Deutsche Bank is testing Google’s generative AI and large language models (LLMs) at scale to provide new insights to financial analysts, driving operational efficiencies and execution velocity. There is an opportunity to significantly reduce the time it takes to perform banking operations and financial analysts’ tasks, empowering employees by increasing their productivity while helping to safeguard customer data privacy, data integrity, and system security.
- Instacart is always looking for opportunities to adopt the latest technological innovations, and by joining the Workspace Labs program, they have access to the new features and can discover how generative AI will make an impact for their teams.
- Orange is exploring a next-generation contact center with Google Cloud. With customers in 26 countries, the global telecommunications firm is testing generative AI to transcribe the call, summarize the exchange between the customer and service representatives, and suggest possible follow up actions to the agent based on the discussion. This experiment has the potential to dramatically improve both the efficiency and quality of customer interactions. Orange is working closely with Google to help ensure data protection and make sure that systematic employee review of Generative AI output and transparency can be implemented.
- Replit is developing a collaborative software development platform powered by AI. Developers using Replit’s Ghostwriter coding AI already have 30% of their code written by generative AI today. With real-time debugging of the code output and context awareness of the program’s files, Ghostwriter frees up developers’ time for more challenging and creative aspects of programming.
- Uber is creating generative AI for customer-service chatbots and agent assist capabilities, which handle a range of common service issues with human-like interactions with the aim of achieving greater customer satisfaction and cost efficiency. Additionally, Uber is working on using our synthetic data systems (a technique for improving the quality of LLMs) in areas like product development, fraud detection, and employee productivity.
Wendy’s is working with Google Cloud on a groundbreaking AI solution, Wendy’s FreshAI, designed to revolutionize the quick service restaurant industry. The technology is transforming Wendy’s drive-thru food ordering experience with Google Cloud’s generative AI and LLMs—with the ability to discern the billions of possible order combinations on the Wendy’s menu. In June, Wendy’s plans to launch its first pilot of the technology in a Columbus, Ohio-area restaurant, before expanding to more drive-thru locations.
Partnering creates a strong ecosystem of real-world options for customers
At Google Cloud, we are dedicated to being the most open hyperscale cloud provider, and that includes our AI ecosystem. Today, we are excited to expand upon the partnerships announced earlier this year for every layer of the AI stack—chipmakers, companies building foundation models and AI platforms, technology partners enabling companies to develop and deploy machine learning (ML) models, app-builders solving customer use cases with generative AI, and global services and consulting firms that help enterprise customers implement all of this technology at scale.
We announced new or expanded partnerships with SaaS companies like Box, Dialpad, Jasper, Salesforce, and UKG; and consultancies including Accenture, BCG, Cognizant, Deloitte, and KPMG. Together with our previous announcements with companies like AI21 Labs, Aible, Anthropic, Anyscale, Bending Spoons, Cohere, Faraday, Glean, Gretel, Labelbox, Midjourney, Osmo, Replit, Snorkel AI, Tabnine, Weights & Biases, and many more, they provide the a wide range of options for businesses and governments looking to bring generative AI into their organizations.
Introducing new generative AI capabilities for Google Cloud
To help cloud users of all skill levels solve their everyday work challenges, we’re excited to announce Duet AI for Google Cloud, a new generative AI-powered collaborator. Duet AI serves as your expert pair programmer and assists cloud users with contextual code completion, offering suggestions tuned to your code base, generating entire functions in real-time, and assisting you with code reviews and inspections. It can fundamentally transform the way cloud users of all skill sets build new experiences and is embedded across Google Cloud interfaces—within the integrated development environment (IDE), Google Cloud Console, and even chat.
For developers looking to create generative AI applications more simply and efficiently, we are also introducing new foundation models and capabilities across our Google Cloud AI products. And to continue to enable and inspire more customers and partners, we are opening up generative AI support in Vertex AI and expanding access to many of these new innovations to more organizations.
- New foundation models are now available in Vertex AI. Codey, our code generation foundation model, helps accelerate software development with code generation, code completion, and code chat. Imagen, our text-to-image foundation model, lets customers generate and customize studio-grade images. And Chirp, our state-of-the-art speech model, allows customers to more deeply engage with their customers and constituents inclusively in their native languages with captioning and voice assistance. They can each be accessed via APIs, tuned through our intuitive Generative AI Studio, and feature enterprise-grade security and reliability, including encryption, access control, content moderation, and recitation capabilities that let organizations see the sources behind model outputs.
- Text Embeddings API is a new API endpoint that lets developers build recommendation engines, classifiers, question-answering systems, similarity matching, and other sophisticated applications based on semantic understanding of text or images.
- Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows organizations to incorporate human feedback to deeply customize and improve model performance.
Underpinning all of these innovations is our AI-optimized infrastructure. We provide the widest choice of compute options among leading cloud providers and are excited to continue to build them out with the introduction of new A3 Virtual Machines based on NVIDIA’s H100 GPU. These VMs, alongside the recently announced G2 VMs, offer a comprehensive range of GPU power for training and serving AI models.
Extending generative AI across Google Workspace
Earlier this year, we shared our vision for bringing generative AI to Workspace, and gave many users early access to features that helped them write in Gmail and Google Docs. Today, we are excited to announce Duet AI for Google Workspace, which brings together our powerful generative AI features and lets users collaborate with AI so they can get more done every day. We’re delivering the following features to trusted testers via Workspace Labs:
- In Gmail, we’re adding the ability to draft responses that consider the context of your existing email thread—and making the experience available on mobile.
- In Google Slides and Meet, we’re enabling you to easily generate images from text descriptions. Custom images in slides can help bring your story to life, and in Meet they can be used to create custom backgrounds.
- In Google Sheets, we’re automating data classification and the creation of custom plans—helping you analyze and organize data faster than ever.
Moving the industry forward, responsibly
Customers continue to amaze us with their ideas and creativity, and we look forward to continuing to help them discover their own paths forward with generative AI. While the potential for impact on business is great, we remain committed to taking a responsible approach, guided by our AI Principles. As we gather more feedback from our customers and users, we will continue to bring new innovations to market, with a goal to enable organizations of every size and industry to increase efficiency, connect with customers in new ways, and unlock entirely new revenue streams.
Largest Beauty Retailer in the US Powers Digital Transformation with Google Cloud Smart Analytics
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Digital technology offers increasing flexibility and choice to consumers. As a result, the retail industry is dramatically shifting toward more tailored and personalized experiences for shoppers, and businesses are rethinking how they deliver value to customers.
This couldn’t be more true for the beauty retailing industry where leading companies are turning to digital technology to create customized shopping experiences.
At Google Cloud, we’re particularly excited about our work with Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the United States with more than 1196 stores in all 50 states, and how the company is using Google Cloud technology solutions to power personalization and redefine beauty retailing.
Established in 1990, Ulta Beauty has had incredible success as a company, and as customers become more discerning and curious about their purchases, the company is finding new ways to meet their changing needs.
Recently, leaders at Ulta Beauty recognized a huge opportunity to complement and enhance the shopping experience by helping beauty enthusiasts navigate through more than 500 brands and 25,000 products carried in their stores and online channel.
They decided to leverage the data from Ulta Beauty’s successful Ultamate Rewards loyalty program to create and offer more unique and personalized user experiences.
With more than 30 million members generating data through sales, transactions, product reviews, and social media engagement, Ulta Beauty’s Loyalty Program creates a comprehensive data set, and the company sought the right technology partner to help organize, analyze and transform that data into valuable insights for its customers.
Ulta Beauty’s leaders knew they had an opportunity to leverage data analytics and machine learning to reach customers in new ways, enhance the guest experience, and continue to grow their active loyalty member base. After considering a number of cloud providers, they chose to expand their existing partnership with Google Cloud.
“Google Cloud listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team to address our challenges,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “The ease of working with the Google Cloud team and their breadth of experience made the decision a no-brainer, laying the foundation for a great partnership.”
In 2019, Ulta Beauty announced it was working with Google Cloud Platform to unify and organize its data, using:
- BigQuery to perform data analysis and generate dynamic content, personalized product recommendations, and event-based messages for customers.
- Cloud Storage to provide highly available, secure, resilient and cost-effective access to data across the entire enterprise.
- Compute Engine for the high-performance scalability needed to grow with customer demand while painlessly migrating existing applications to the cloud.
- Anthos to build a hybrid cloud foundation that allows their applications to take advantage of all this data, combining the power and flexibility of GKE with the ability to leverage their existing investment in secure infrastructure on-premises.
Our partnership with Ulta Beauty has enabled increased engagement with customers in store and online, and the creation of new tools and capabilities, including a new Virtual Beauty Advisor tool to deliver tailored recommendations and help shoppers choose the right products, and a Customer Conversation Platform that’s enabling deeper connections with guests, ultimately driving customer loyalty.
“It’s been a really efficient process so far due in part to the ease of working with the Google team,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “They’re experienced, approachable, and their can-do style makes for a great partnership. They listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team, figuring things out, and getting it done.”
Everything You Want to Know About Google Cloud’s AI-Enabled Talent Solution: From What It Is to How to Use it
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First, What is Google Cloud Talent Solution?
Cloud Talent Solution is a service that brings machine learning to the job search experience, returning high quality results to job seekers far beyond the limitations of typical keyword-based methods. Once integrated with your job content, Cloud Talent Solution automatically detects and infers various kinds of data, such as related titles, seniority, and industry.
Show Me How it Works
Try it online now.
Show Me an Example of Who’s Using It
There’s a number of enterprises leveraging this service. Here are a few easy-to-watch examples
Watch how FedEx Ground Employs Google Cloud Talent Solution
Read how Johnson & Johnson is Reimagining Recruiting with Jibe and Google
How Much Does it Cost?
Ok, Let’s See How it Works
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Baking Gets Sweeter: Build ML Models that Help Predict the Best Recipe!
Baking recipes and ML models have one thing in common—they follow a pattern. Machine Learning is all about finding pattern in data sets, you can predict what you are baking based on the core ingredients and their respective amounts! Bread, cake or cookies, watch the video to make you make your baking experiences and learning with ML sweeter.
AutoML Tables, a no-code Google Cloud tool for ML models analyzes data from the databases and spreadsheets to help creates an automatic stats and dashboard with lists of ingredients and their values to predict a new recipe. Watch more episodes from Making with Machine Learning.
Speak Now to Book a Flight: easyJet’s Uses AI to Improve Customer Experience
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With a growing fleet of 325 aircraft that cover more than 1,000 routes across 158 airports, easyJet is one of Europe’s most popular airlines. And easyJet serves an average of 90 million passengers each year, so a helpful mobile experience for its customers is a top priority.
Travellers today are inherently mobile-first, so finding new ways to make it easier for them to search and book flights is key. To do exactly that, easyJet partnered with technology company Travelport to develop Speak Now, a new feature on easyJet’s mobile app that interprets voice searches to deliver accurate and relevant flight information to travelers.
See how it works:
Powered by Dialogflow, Google Cloud’s natural language understanding tool for building conversational experiences, Speak Now lets customers ask questions to determine exactly what they’re looking for—from destinations, to dates and times, to airports they want to fly from.
Dialogflow, a core component of Google Cloud Contact Center AI, makes it easy to build accurate, flexible conversation interfaces that allow users to ask questions and accomplish tasks in everyday language.
How do we create conversational experiences across devices and platforms for enterprises?
It’s clear that the rise in voice search is changing the way we go about our daily lives. Twenty-seven percent of the global online population already uses voice search on mobile, and the rapid adoption of this technology is reshaping entire industries. It’s no surprise that easyJet looked to adopt this technology to positively transform experiences for their customers.
Dialogflow, a core component of Google Cloud Contact Center AI, makes it easy to build accurate, flexible conversation interfaces that allow users to ask questions and accomplish tasks in everyday language. It understands the nuances of human language and translates end-user text or audio during a conversation to structured data that apps and services can understand.
Speak Now is a great example of how we’re using cloud technologies and AI to make the experience of buying and managing travel continually better for everyone.
Daniel Young, Head of Digital Experience, easyJet
Daniel Young, Head of Digital Experience at easyJet commented: “We picked Dialogflow due to its strengths and ease with which a powerful conversational agent can be built. Speak Now is a great example of how we’re using cloud technologies and AI to make the experience of buying and managing travel continually better for everyone. This is the latest in a series of innovative features that will make booking travel as easy as it can possibly be, giving easyJet customers a helpful digital experience.”
Consumers already rely on voice assistants to play their favorite music, add items to a shopping list, and order taxis, Speak Now is a great example of how voice assistants can now make the customer experience better and more intuitive for travel.
Startup Success Blueprint: Insights on Cloud Provider Selection from One AI
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From the newsroom to the boardroom, everywhere we turn these days the topic of conversation is artificial intelligence (AI). From the smallest startups to the largest enterprises, every business is looking for ways to incorporate generative AI technology into their products or services.
Generative AI is a new breed, able to not only discern patterns in data but generalize from them and create new data—and it’s moving fast. With new technologies rapidly emerging, there’s a lot to consider when choosing a tech stack that’s right for your startup.
Our mission is to empower startups to build generative AI applications quickly, efficiently, and responsibly. In addition to our technology, we offer a variety of fresh educational and consulting initiatives, as well as comprehensive plans tailored to specific industry applications.
At the recent Google Cloud Startup Summit, leaders from One AI and MongoDB weighed in on various decisions startups face when choosing a development platform to integrate AI into their products. (You can watch the full conversation here.) They shared key insights into the challenges startups face when applying AI technology to real-world business and product use cases.
In this blog, we’ll explore why One AI – a platform that empowers businesses to deploy tailored AI solutions – relies on MongoDB on Google Cloud for performance, scale, functionality, and TCO. We will also cover the things that startups should keep in mind when building their generative AI stack.
Fine-tuning generative AI for startups
First, let’s start with a little background.
AI-based capabilities have been around for decades now, but generative AI is distinct. It’s a more mature version of AI, powered by models pre-trained on very large datasets composed of massive quantities of images, text, and data. These models are known as foundation models, and they include large language models (LLMs), text-to-image models, multimodal models, and more. Foundation models let intelligent applications generate new images, text, and data based on queries or prompts. This in turn allows companies to deploy those capabilities in their products and services faster since they don’t have to retrain the whole AI from scratch.
Over the course of their diverse startup careers, Amit Ben, CEO at One AI and his team have built AI-based capabilities from the ground up for various products in various fields.
“And each time, we had to rebuild the tech stack over again,” Amit explains. “With the advent of generative AI, startups now have the ability to deploy much faster — with a lower TCO and higher confidence — and deliver the capabilities they need into their products and services. It finally makes sense for every company to have AI in its product portfolio.”
“For us to be able to focus on that,” Amit adds, “we need to make sure we have a rock-solid foundation that we can build on.”
That foundation is MongoDB on Google Cloud.
Helping startups build fast and with flexibility
Startups can scale from ideation to growth with Google Cloud’s global availability, market-leading sustainability, and the same zero-trust security model that Google itself depends on.
With MongoDB, startups can take advantage of iteration cycles that are 3-5X faster, reduce sprawl and complexity, and benefit from the scalable infrastructure and advanced analytics tools on Google Cloud.
With MongoDB on Google Cloud, Amit and his team are confident they can adapt to new schemas, to new data, and to the scale they need for both writing and reading, all while operating on a scalable platform and infrastructure they can rely on for the long haul.
A common mistake for startups is turning to niche, single-point solutions. But this can backfire when they realize their solution doesn’t provide the security, scalability, and performance they need to grow.
Additionally, startups tend to have tight iteration cycles as they find their ideal product market fit. The ability to build fast and with improved flexibility is a key differentiator in a startup environment.
From cutting-edge automation to rock-solid redundancy and performance, there are many reasons why startups choose MongoDB on Google Cloud. And now, a dedicated partnership helps startups like One AI scale more quickly, more securely, and more successfully.
Google Cloud and MongoDB for startups
Choosing the right technology to accelerate time to market is critical to a startup’s success. Not only is it easy to get started, but Google Cloud and MongoDB also provide the foundation for users to scale without limits — so startups can focus on innovating and growing their businesses.
Learn more about the powerful startup programs available from Google Cloud and MongoDB.
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