Tyson Foods’ Story of Unlocking Opportunities by Integrating Real-time Analytics with AI and BI

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As data environments become more complex, companies are turning to streaming analytics solutions that analyze data as it’s ingested and deliver immediate, high-value insights into what is happening now. These insights enable decision makers to act in real time to take advantage of opportunities or respond to issues as they occur.
While understanding what is happening now has great business value, forward-thinking companies are taking things a step further, using real-time analytics integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) and business intelligence (BI) to answer the question, “what might happen in the future?” Arkansas-based Tyson Foods has embraced AI/BI analytics to enable predictive insights that unlock new opportunities and drive future growth.
Creating a digital twin for connected intelligence company wide
Before using AI/BI, Tyson’s analytics capabilities consisted of traditional BI solutions focused on KPIs and simplifying data so that humans could understand it. Tyson wanted to leverage its data to uncover ways to improve current processes and grow its business. But with BI alone, Tyson struggled to use data to run the simulations and scenarios essential to make educated decisions. To keep growing, it had to embrace the complexity of its data, building ways to analyze it and use it to inform decision making.
Tyson’s on-premises analytics solutions limited its ability to be aggressive and make intelligent, timely, prescriptive decisions. The solution was to create a digital twin to scale optimizations within business processes, moving from local optimizations to system-wide connected optimizations. Doing so meant shifting entirely to cloud computing, with an initial focus on building the ingestion component of the digital twin platform.
Investing in a digital twin enabled Tyson to accelerate new capabilities like supply chain simulation “what-if” scenarios, prescriptive price elasticity recommendations, and improvement of customer intimacy.
Solving the ingestion problem for faster time to insights
Before its migration to Google Cloud, analytics projects that Tyson suffered from uncertainty over how to obtain the data. This problem was prolific and caused project times to be extended for weeks or even months due to the need to write and support one-off data ingestion processes at the front end. This problem also prevented the IT team from delivering analytics solutions fast enough for the business to take full advantage of them.
To solve this analytics problem, the team created Data Ingestion Compute Engine (DICE). DICE is a Google Cloud-hosted, open-source, cloud-native ingestion platform developed to provide configuration-based, no-ops, code-free ingestion from disparate enterprise data systems, both internal and external. It is centered on three high-level goals:
- Accelerate the speed of delivery of IT analytics solutions
- Enable growth of IT capabilities to produce meaningful insight
- Reduce long-term total cost of ownership for ingestion solutions
Creating DICE ingestion platform with Google Cloud services
Teams use DICE to set up secure data ingestion jobs in minutes without having to manage complex connections or write, deploy, and support their own code. DICE enables unbound scale, highly parallel processing, DevSecOps, open source, and the implementation of Lambda Data Architecture.
A DICE job is the logical unit of work in the DICE platform, consisting of immutable and mutable configurations persisted as JSON documents stored in Firestore. The job exists as an instruction set for the DICE data engine, which is Apache Beam running Dataflow to instruct which data to pull, how to pull it, how often to pull it, how to process it, when it changes, and where to direct it.
Two of DICE’s primary layers include the metadata engine and the data engine. The metadata engine is responsible for the creation and management of DICE job configuration and orchestration. It is made up of many microservices that interact with multiple Google Cloud services, including the job configuration creation API, job build configuration helper API, and job execution scheduler API.
The data engine is responsible for the physical ingestion of data, the change detection processing of that data, and the delivery of that data to specified targets. The data engine is Java code that uses the Apache Beam unified programming model and runs in Dataflow. It is comprised of streaming, jobs, and Dataflow flex template batch jobs. Logically, the data engine is segmented across three layers: the inbound processing layer, the DICE file system layer, and the target processing layer, which takes the data from the DICE file system and moves it to targets.

Rolling DICE for thousands of ingestion jobs each day
DICE was first deployed to a production environment in November 2019, and just two years later, it has more than 3,000 data ingestion jobs from more than a hundred disparate data systems, both internal and external to Tyson Foods. Most of these jobs run multiple times a day. On a daily basis the DICE environment sees more than 25,000 Dataflow jobs running and an average of 3.25 terabytes of new data being ingested.

DICE supports ingestion from many different types of technologies, including BigQuery, SQL Server, SAP HANA, Postgres, Oracle, MySQL, Db2, various types of file systems, and FTP servers. Additionally, DICE supports target platform technologies for ingestion jobs that include multiple JDBC targets, multiple file system targets, and BigQuery and queue-based store and forward technologies.
The platform continues to see linear growth of DICE jobs, all while keeping platform costs relatively flat. With increasing demand for the platform, Tyson’s IT team is constantly enhancing DICE to support new sources and targets.
This intelligent platform keeps adding new value and makes it simple for Tyson to take advantage of its data. This innovation is a necessity in this fast-changing world of digital business in which companies must transform a high volume of complex data into actionable insight.
Manipal Group: Delivering High-Quality Patient Care with Google Cloud

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One of India’s best-known healthcare brands, Manipal Group prides itself on clinical excellence and a patient-centric approach. From humble beginnings in 1953 as a single teaching hospital—the Kasturba Medical College—in a university town in Karnataka, India, Manipal Group has grown to a presence in seven cities in India and operations in Malaysia and Nigeria. “Our founder, Dr T. M. A. Pai, established Kasturba Medical College just six years after India gained independence,” says C. G. Muthana, Chief Operating Officer, Teaching Hospitals, Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd, part of Manipal Group.
Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd operates 11 corporate, or for-profit, hospitals and five teaching hospitals. “We have about 7,000 beds India-wide, and on that measure, we are the third-largest private-sector healthcare provider in India today,” says Muthana. The organization now employs about 6,000 people in its corporate hospitals and 5,000 people in its teaching hospitals.
Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd acquires and operates world-class medical technologies in its teaching and corporate hospitals. However, with 75% of corporate hospital wards allocated to fee-paying private patients—compared to just 25% of the wards in teaching hospitals—the differences in information technology budgets are significant. “In the general wards that comprise most of the wards in teaching hospitals, patients are typically treated for free or at heavily subsidized rates,” explains Muthana. “So revenues and costs of delivery vary between hospitals, while employee costs remain similar.”
Rostering nurses a critical task
Rostering nurses to work shifts is one of the most important tasks at Manipal Group corporate and teaching hospitals. As at all hospitals, nurses administer medications, monitor patients, maintain records, manage intravenous lines, and work with doctors to heal patients. They can also provide advice and support to patients and loved ones, including teaching them how to administer medication outside a hospital setting. If too few nurses are rostered for a particular shift, the quality of patient care may suffer.
Google Cloud results
- Enabled the hospital to correctly size its nursing workforce
- Lowers stress on nurses by delivering more equitable rostering
- Presents opportunity to better manage nurses’ leave and other administration tasks
However, rostering at the group’s hospitals was a time-consuming exercise. Senior nurses on each ward would have to spend up to 45 minutes per day manually amending paper-based rosters to accommodate requested changes to duty shifts for personal or other circumstances. The organization began receiving complaints from patients, doctors, and other hospital staff that, on occasion, too few nurses were rostered on for certain shifts—particularly at its flagship hospital in Bangalore. “We had based our rostering calculations on the number of beds occupied by patients and, when we investigated, we found at a macro level, we were rostering on the correct number of nurses,” says Muthana. “However, on some days, on wards optimally staffed by, say, 10 nurses per shift, we might have 14 nurses rostered on for one shift and seven rostered on for another shift. Those times we had seven, we had a clear shortage.”
In 2012, Muthana asked a consultant to develop algorithms to help automate the rostering. “Unfortunately, there were so many variables, the consultant failed to solve the problem,” he says. The Chief Operating Officer’s next step was to ask the founder and Chief Executive Officer of predictive analytics business Retigence Technologies—already working with the business on a materials management project—to develop an application to manage rostering.
Removing the daily drudgery
“Our plan with the automation project was to relieve our senior nurses of the daily drudgery of amending the rosters and to deliver rosters that were as fair as possible to all our staff,” says Muthana. “We also saw an opportunity to reduce our costs by reducing the overall number of nurses needed to look after our patients.”
Retigence Technologies’ team members then worked with the group’s nurses to capture the variables and requirements for the project. For example, a minimum number of nurses with one year experience or more needs to be rostered on for each shift. Retigence Technologies then started building an application using compute resources available through Compute Engine, a Google Cloud product. “We selected Google primarily because of its pioneering work in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning,” says Srinibas Behera, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Retigence Technologies.
With the nurses rostering application developed, Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd undertook several pilots to build user acceptance. “Some of our senior nurses took time to accept the fact automation removed their control over rostering assignments, but were finally convinced by the better transparency the product offered,” says Muthana. The organization deployed the application to a smaller hospital and secured user support before rolling out the application to its Bangalore flagship.
Eliminating stress
Deploying the application has enabled Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt. Ltd to remove a buffer of about 100 nurses retained to accommodate the variations in number of nurses rostered for individual shifts. “The savings on those salaries more than paid for the cost of developing the application,” says Muthana.
The application also enabled the organization to reduce the stress on nurses—both the nurses in charge of the rosters and the nurses subject to the rosters. “Night shifts were more equitably distributed among the nurses, while we have been able to reduce the 45 minutes per day required to amend rosters to just 10 minutes,” says Muthana. “In Bangalore alone, we have 51 nurses in charge of rostering—so the combined saving there equates to nearly 30 hours per day.” This is freeing up these senior nurses to complete more important tasks.
The application was subsequently implemented at Kasturba Hospital, Manipal, again reducing the time needed to generate complete nursing rosters to less than 10 minutes.
Managing leave and training
The organization now plans to extend the application to manage leave and training for its nurses and other employees. “I would like to see every employee given an annual leave plan that is added to the roster at the start of the year,” says Muthana. “The flexibility and control afforded by the application would enable us to address challenges such as managing leave across a workforce with high attrition rates.” The organization would also be able to create a calendar to ensure nurses receive all their required training.
“We also plan to keep fine-tuning the application to deploy nurses more efficiently and continue to reduce their stress levels,” adds Muthana. “We also want to create a nursing load indicator tailored to patients’ specific circumstances. For example, a sedated patient may not require much nursing care, whereas a patient who comes in with a broken leg and may be on a ventilator may require assistance from three nurses at once.” The business plans to use Google’s AI and machine learning APIs in the future to improve the value and user experience of the product.
How Toyota’s Google Cloud-powered Voice Assistant Gives a Turboboost to Drivers’ Experience

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Over the decades, technology has helped us organize large amounts of physical information in ways that are streamlined, efficient, and easily accessible. Rows upon rows of encyclopedias are no longer needed; simply punch in or speak a query into Google Search and find numerous results at your fingertips. There’s no need to haul around cases of CDs or cassettes either, when you can access hundreds of thousands of songs on music streaming services.
We wanted to bring that same level of accessibility to one specific type of publication: the printed car manual. Here’s how we shifted the paper manual to become an easy-to-access, voice-activated digital experience for owners of the all-new Sienna. It’s helped this resource become just as modern and useful as Toyotas themselves.
Putting cloud technology in the driver’s seat
Far too often, the printed car manual remains unused, collecting dust in the glove compartment—that is, until it’s needed during a roadside emergency or to solve the meaning of a mysterious light popping up on the dashboard. Even then, thumbing through hundreds of pages during high-stakes moments can be stressful. On top of that, these manuals can be expensive to print and update.
Digital versions, such as a PDF file, are a nice start. But, they’re often little more than reformatted flat documents. In poor visual conditions on the side of a road, the last thing a driver wants to do is squint at a phone or scroll through pages of tiny text. And similar to printed manuals, digital versions don’t facilitate ongoing, real-time conversations between drivers and automakers when it matters the most; they’re often only text and pictures, and at best, schematic drawings.
With that in mind, we set out to elevate and personalize the car manual by creating a voice-activated digital owner’s manual experience, all powered by Google Cloud. A voice-based assistant was the clear choice because, as it felt like the most intuitive, natural option, especially while driving. In fact, 51% of U.S. adults have used a voice assistant while driving, and 95% of all drivers expect to use a voice assistant in the next three years.
We’re now putting this technology on the road by powering the Toyota Driver’s Companion for the all-new 2021 Toyota Sienna model. Accessible through the existing Toyota app, this companion provides real-time assistance, any time of the day. Drivers can ask questions and the companion will efficiently provide helpful answers in convenient ways, from voice to 3D walkthroughs and explorable environments.
What a modern car manual should do
The Toyota Driver’s Companion has interactive features to help drivers discover the Sienna’s dashboard, set up the car’s interior and exterior appearance, better understand vehicle maintenance, and explore Dynamic Radar Cruise Control, Lane Departure Alert and other features.
Here are a few other additional key features to call out within the Toyota Driver’s Companion:
- An easily accessible virtual voice through the Toyota Driver’s Companion lets app users ask personal questions about their 2021 Sienna such as “what’s the height of my car?” and receive immediate answers either by voice, display or interactive input.
- The manual automatically connects with the purchased vehicle’s VIN number to create a completely personalized experience, curated specifically for the driver. For example, if an unfamiliar light on the dashboard pops up, the Toyota Driver’s Companion can help identify the light’s meaning.
- Interactive hotspots throughout the vehicle’s interior let drivers explore the cabin virtually. Drivers can discover button functionalities, find specific dials, and learn more about car functions, such as how to slide seats or open doors, to become acclimated with their new vehicle.
To bring this experience to life, we tapped into some of our key Google Cloud solutions:
- APIs powered by Google Cloud artificial intelligence technology make accessing specific vehicle information easy and effortless, by leveraging Google’s natural language processing:
- Google Cloud DialogFlow API serves as the decision tree that gives intelligence for both finding an answer for a question, i.e., how the Companion responds to the end user’s questions.
- One of our Text-to-Speech APIs—called Wavenet—creates the Companion’s realistic voice.
- And finally, our Speech-to-Text API “listens” to the user’s voice and finds the correct information to craft responses. That means a driver can ask a question multiple ways, and the Companion will still respond with the right answer.
Our Firebase mobile app dev platform gleans analytic insights that help improve the overall experience and services for OEMs and drivers alike.https://www.youtube.com/embed/66QxWS-PzIM?enablejsapi=1&
We’re encouraging better consumer experiences by providing faster access to fresh information, in a natural, accessible format—voice. But these new voice-activated experiences aren’t only an opportunity to help out drivers; it’s also about strengthening connections between drivers, their vehicles, and automakers, too.
Our hope is that through this information exchange, drivers can provide feedback on the most frequently misunderstood features, enabling OEMs to address questions early on. By understanding the most requested features, OEMs can also predict and inform driver questions about features. We’re incredibly excited to help make the driver’s experience more connected and helpful.
Wayfair: Carving the path towards MLOps excellence with Vertex AI

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Editor’s note: In part one of this blog, Wayfair shared how it supports each of its 30 million active customers using machine learning (ML). Wayfair’s Vinay Narayana, Head of ML Engineering, Bas Geerdink, Lead ML Engineer, and Christian Rehm, Senior Machine Learning Engineer, take us on a deeper dive into the ways Wayfair’s data scientists are using Vertex AI to improve model productionization, serving, and operational readiness velocity. The authors would like to thank Hasan Khan, Principal Architect, Google for contributions to this blog.
When Google announced its Vertex AI platform in 2021, the timing coincided perfectly with our search for a comprehensive and reliable AI Platform. Although we’d been working on our migration to Google Cloud over the previous couple of years, we knew that our work wouldn’t be complete once we were in the cloud. We’d simply be ready to take one more step in our workload modernization efforts, and move away from deploying and serving our ML models using legacy infrastructure components that struggle with stability and operational overhead. This has been a crucial part of our journey towards MLOps excellence, in which Vertex AI has proved to be of great support.
Carving the path towards MLOps excellence
Our MLOps vision at Wayfair is to deliver tools that support the collaboration between our internal teams, and enable data scientists to access reliable data while automating data processing, model training, evaluation and validation. Data scientists need autonomy to productionize their models for batch or online serving, and to continuously monitor their data and models in production. Our aim with Vertex AI is to empower data scientists to productionize models and easily monitor and evolve them without depending on engineers. Vertex AI gives us the infrastructure to do this with tools for training, validating, and deploying ML models and pipelines.
Previously, our lack of a comprehensive AI platform resulted in every data science team having to build their own unique model productionization processes on legacy infrastructure components. We also lacked a centralized feature store, which could benefit all ML projects at Wayfair. With this in mind, we chose to focus our initial adoption of the Vertex AI platform on its Feature Store component.
An initial POC confirmed that data scientists can easily get features from the Feature Store for training models, and that it makes it very easy to serve the models for batch or online inference with a single line of code. The Feature Store also automatically manages performance for batch and online requests. These results encouraged us to evaluate the adoption of Vertex AI Pipelines next, as the existing tech for workflow orchestration at Wayfair slowed us down greatly. As it turns out, both of these services are fundamental to several models we build and serve at Wayfair today.
Empowering data scientists to focus on building world-class ML models
Since adopting Vertex AI Feature Store and AI Pipelines, we’ve added a couple of capabilities at Wayfair to significantly improve our user experience and lower the bar to entry for data scientists to leverage Vertex AI and all it has to offer:
- Building a CI/CD and scheduling pipeline
Working with the Google team, we built an efficient CI/CD and scheduling pipeline based on the common tools and best practices at Wayfair and Google. This enables us to release Vertex AI Pipelines to our test and production environments, leveraging cloud-native services.

Keeping in mind that all our code is managed in GitHub Enterprise, we have dedicated repositories for Vertex AI Pipelines where the Kubeflow code and definitions of the Docker images are stored. If a change is pushed to a branch, a build starts in the Buildkite tool automatically. The build contains several steps, including unit and integration tests, code linting, documentation generation and automated deployment. The most important artifacts that are released at the end of the build are the Docker image and the compiled Kubeflow template. The Docker image is released to the Google Cloud Artifact Registry and we store the Kubeflow template in a dedicated Google Cloud Storage Bucket, fully versioned and secured. This way, all the components we need to run a Vertex AI Pipeline are available once we run a pipeline (manually or scheduled).
To schedule pipelines, we developed a dedicated Cloud Function that has the permissions to run the pipeline. This Function listens to a Pub/Sub topic where we can publish messages with a defined schema that indicates which pipeline to run with which parameters. These messages are published from a simple cron job that runs according to a set schedule on Google Kubernetes Engine. This way, we have a decoupled and secure environment for scheduling pipelines, using fully-supported and managed infrastructure.
Abstracting Vertex AI services with a shared library
We abstracted the relevant Vertex AI services currently in use with a thin shared Python library to support the teams that develop new software or migrate to Vertex AI. This library, called wf-vertex, contains helper methods, examples, and documentation for working with Vertex AI, as well as guidelines for Vertex AI Feature Store, Pipelines, and Artifact Registry.
One example is the run_pipeline method, which publishes a message with the correct schema to the Pub/Sub topic so that a Vertex AI pipeline is executed. When scheduling a pipeline, the developer only needs to call this method without having to worry about security or infrastructure configuration:
@cli.command()
def trigger_pipeline() -> None:
from wf_vertex.pipelines.pipeline_runner import run_pipeline
run_pipeline(
template_bucket= f"wf-vertex-pipelines-{env}/{TEAM}", # this is the location of the template, where the CI/CD has written the compiled templates to
template_filename="sample_pipeline.json", # this is the filename of the pipeline template to run
parameter_values= {"import_date": today()} # it’s possible to add pipeline parameters
)Most notable is the establishment of a documented best practice for enabling hyperparameter tuning in Vertex AI Pipelines, which speeds up hyperparameter tuning times for our data scientists from two weeks to under one hour.
Because it is not yet possible to combine the outputs of parallel steps (components) in Kubeflow, we designed a mechanism to enable this. It entails defining parameters at runtime and executing the resulting steps in parallel via the Kubeflow parallel-for operator. Finally, we created a step to combine the results of these parallel steps and interpret the results. In turn, this mechanism allows us to select the best model in terms of accuracy from a set of candidates that are trained in parallel:

Our CI/CD, scheduling pipelines, and shared library have reduced the effort of model productionization from more than three months to about four weeks. As we continue to build the shared library, and as our team members continue to gain expertise in using Vertex AI, we expect to further reduce this time to two weeks by the end of 2022.
Looking forward to more MLOps capabilities
Looking ahead, our goal is to fully leverage all the Vertex AI features to continue modernizing our MLOps stack to a point where data scientists are fully autonomous from engineers for any of their model productionization efforts. Next on our radar are Vertex AI Model Registry and Vertex ML Metadata alongside making more use of AutoML capabilities. We’re experimenting with Vertex AI for AutoML models and endpoints to benefit some use cases at Wayfair next to the custom models that we’re currently serving in production.
We’re confident that our MLOps transformation will introduce several capabilities to our team, including: automated data and model monitoring steps to the pipeline, as well as metadata management, and architectural patterns in support of real-time models requiring access to Wayfair’s network. We also look forward to performing continuous training of models by fully automating the ML pipeline that allows us to achieve continuous integration, delivery, and deployment of model prediction services.
We’ll continue to collaborate and invest in building a robust Wayfair-focused Vertex AI shared library. The aim is to eventually migrate 100% of our batch models to Vertex AI. Great things to look forward to on our journey towards MLOps excellence.
Google is a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics

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As organizations continue to produce vast quantities of data, they increasingly need platforms that allow them to analyze, store, and extract meaningful insights from that data. And research from analyst firms like Gartner offer an important way for organizations to evaluate and compare cloud data warehouse providers.
Earlier this year, Gartner named Google a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics (DMSA) (report available here). This evaluation covers Google Cloud’s core data analytics offerings, including BigQuery, a serverless, managed data warehouse, Cloud Dataproc, a managed Spark and Hadoop service, and Cloud Dataflow, which enables you to stream and batch-process your data. Here are a few takeaways:
Simplicity and speed
BigQuery’s performance permits complex queries on large-scale data sets to return in seconds, and a substantial number of BigQuery customers maintain data warehouses that store more than 50 terabytes (and a few customers now use more than 100 petabytes). More than half of these customers are loading data either continuously or many times per day. These customers value the ability to extract, transform, load, and analyze their data on a serverless platform, all without maintaining any underlying infrastructure.
A versatile serverless data warehouse
One of BigQuery’s major advantages is its ability to allow customers to address a wide variety of use cases—from a traditional data warehouse to data science. Over the past year, we’ve worked hard to introduce new features in BigQuery like data types for financial and monetary uses, BigQuery GIS for geospatial data, and machine learning capabilities through BigQuery ML. BigQuery’s continuous ingest capabilities make it suitable for an operational—or a real-time—serverless data warehouse.
An expanding ecosystem
With overall increased market adoption, our analytics offerings continue to benefit from a fast-growing partner ecosystem of service providers, and business intelligence (BI) and data integration vendors. In particular, in 2018 we expanded our partnerships with established industry providers, including Confluent, Dell Boomi, Informatica, Looker, Reltio, Tableau, and ThoughtSpot.
More and more organizations are finding value in Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse and analytics offerings. If you’d like to learn more, you can download a complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics on the Google site (requires an email address).
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Advance Your Cloud Career: Seven New No-Cost Generative AI Training Courses

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Editor’s note: This blog has been updated since it originally published to reflect the total number of generative AI courses that have become available since the publish date.
An AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) career path can be a great specialty area within the cloud—and one of the most accessible! Because this area is constantly developing, most recently with the rise of generative AI, I want to share some recommendations to help you chart a sustainable career as AI/ML continues to evolve.
Generative AI falls under the overall category of AI and offers a new and exciting way of interacting with information, brands, and other people. Let’s talk about how these disciplines work together and about materials available to help you upskill in these areas.
To this end, we are happy to announce a new set of generative AI training content available at no cost. So, whether you are just getting started or already have a more advanced role, read on to find ways to help reach your desired position.
ML compared to AI
While the terms ML and AI are often used interchangeably, there are distinct differences. AI is an umbrella concept wherein machines are taught to perform tasks normally associated with human intelligence, such as decision-making and language interaction. ML is a subset of AI dedicated to taking data from the past and training algorithms to create models that can perform highly complex tasks without being explicitly programmed. It’s the basis for most forms of AI that people interact with, like virtual assistants, music recommendations, and chatbots.
Data engineers and ML engineers work with data scientists to get insights from data. They are needed to create software models and get clear results, and develop deployable applications. These skilled roles are needed in every industry!
Change the world for the better with generative AI
I recently wrote about four key pillars of technology trends expected in the next decade, including the role of AI/ML in the cloud environment as one of those pillars, and how you can bridge the skills gap and build your career.
Generative AI is a new type of ML that has made a lot of headlines recently. Research from CIO Dive finds that seven in 10 executives say their companies are investigating or exploring generative AI. Now is a great time to become an expert, while we are at the cusp of this technology becoming more widely adopted.
To get to generative AI, we need to talk first about deep learning. Deep learning is a subset of ML that uses artificial neural networks to process more complex patterns than traditional ML. Generative AI sits still further down the funnel, as a subset of deep learning that typically involves the Transformer architecture. Essentially, it’s a type of AI that can map long-range dependencies and patterns in large training sets, then use what it learns to produce new content, including text, imagery, audio, and synthetic data.

Generative AI relies on large models, such as large language models (LLMs) that can classify and generate text, answer questions, and summarize documents. For more detail about how this works, check out the video below from Google I/O 2023, which features great information from Dr. Gwendolyn Stripling, Artificial Intelligence Technical Curriculum Developer for Google Cloud.
How Google is offering generative AI
Here at Google, we’ve been heavily invested for decades in research and innovation aimed at helping businesses, governments, and developers maximize the potential of AI. Our vision is to empower builders, innovators, developers, and doers to use AI in unique, responsible, productive ways.
To deliver on this, we recently announced a variety of solutions to bring generative AI into our offerings, beginning with Generative AI support on Vertex AI and Gen App Builder.
Vertex AI is Google Cloud’s ML platform for training and deploying ML models and AI applications. With Generative AI support on Vertex AI, data science teams and developers can access foundation models from both Google and other sources, helping them to quickly build, customize, and deploy models for their own use cases.
As part of generative AI support on Vertex AI, Model Garden and Generative AI Studio are now in preview, including access to PaLM 2 for Text and Chat and Embeddings API for Text, while other features and services are available to select trusted testers. If you’d like early access to Google Cloud’s AI products, join the waitlist here.
We announced our latest PaLM model in production at I/O 2023: PaLM 2. Today, it powers more than 25 products! Additionally, we’ve fine-tuned PaLM 2 for specific use cases, including security and medical domains. You’ve probably also heard of Bard, our experiment for conversational AI, which is fully running on PaLM 2.
Our Gen App Builder aims to make customer, partner, and employee interactions more effective and helpful. With it, developers — even those with limited data science expertise — can quickly create bots, chat apps, digital assistants, custom search engines, and more. Gen App Builder even makes it possible to create some generative AI apps without any coding skills.
Now, let’s bring these products to life! Not sure exactly the use case or in need of a little inspiration? Check out this blog from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian to see how customers and partners in the ecosystem are bringing ideas to life with generative AI. And watch this video to see generative AI in action!
Build your AI/ML skills and validate your knowledge to grow your career
There is a lot of excitement around generative AI—it’s truly a brand new path to consider for your AI/ML career! Check out my recommendations below for training options for AI/ML roles. These will help you gain critical skills as generative AI becomes more widely available.
*NEW* training materials, specific to generative AI technologies
Generative AI Learning Path – no cost training
- [Course] Introduction to Generative AI (1 day)
- [Course] Introduction to Large Language Models (1 day)
- [Course] Attention Mechanism (1 day)
- [Course] Transformer Models and BERT Model (1 day)
- [Course] Introduction to Image Generation (1 day)
- [Course] Create Image Captioning Models (1 day)
- [Course] Encoder-Decoder Architecture (1 day)
Additional AI/ML training – varying learning credits required to complete on Google Cloud Skills Boost
Introductory level
- [Course with completion badge] How Google Does Machine Learning (1 day)
- [Course with completion badge] MLOps: Getting Started (1 day)
- [Skill badge] Get started with TensorFlow on Google Cloud (8 hours)
- [Skill badge] Perform foundational ML, AI and data tasks in Google Cloud (7 hours)
- [Course with completion badge] Language, Speech, Text, and Translation with Google Cloud APIs (5 hours)
Intermediate/Multi-level
- [Learning Path] Machine Learning Engineer (Collection of 15 video courses and labs)
- [Skill badge] Build and Deploy Machine Learning Solutions on Vertex AI (1 day)
Advanced
- [Training + certification exam] Google Cloud Professional ML Engineer Certification (varied time)
- [Skill badge] Machine Learning with TensorFlow in Vertex AI (90 minutes)
- [Course with completion badge] Natural Language Processing in Google Cloud (1 day)
You can also catch up on hands-on demos in our most recent Cloud OnBoard: From Data to AI with BigQuery and Vertex AI. In it, we guide you through all steps of the data-to-AI solution.
Coming up on June 29, we are hosting Getting Started with Vertex Generative AI as part of Innovators Live. Register now!
I also encourage you to consider an Innovators Plus subscription. You get access to over 700 labs, skill badges and courses (including many that are specific to AI/ML), a certification exam voucher, and up to $1,000 in Google Cloud credits. You’ll also get access to live learning events and technical briefings with Google Cloud experts, plus 1:1 consultations (talk with us about your upcoming generative AI project!). It’s a $1,500 package for only $299. Learn more!
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