Data-savvy businesses increasingly rely on images and videos for critical functions, and yet are challenged by the sheer mass of information—more than 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video are created daily. This explosion in visual data has paved the way for the growth of computer vision, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers to “see” the world similarly to the way people do, but with unblinking consistency, and greater accuracy. 

The transformational impact and value of computer vision solutions are significant and has been a guiding objective for companies and AI developers. And yet, even as the applications for computer vision increase dramatically, architecting and implementing vision AI solutions remain highly complex. Visual data, such as images and video, are made up of thousands of pixels of information that represent millions of different patterns and meanings, which can make interpreting even a single image overwhelming from a computational perspective.

Many organizations struggle with deployments and fail to operationalize vision AI solutions due to development delays, machine learning and data science hiring challenges, inaccurate output, a lack of integration with existing infrastructure, difficulty of use, and high cost. Plainsight, with the power of Google Cloud resources, is addressing all these challenges and helping businesses by enabling the deployment of vision AI within enterprise private networks that can be managed easily and scaled economically.

Plainsight has announced availability of its vision AI platform on Google Cloud Marketplace. Businesses can now easily deploy end-to-end vision AI to private clouds to realize the full value of their video and other visual data for accurate, actionable insights across diverse use cases.

Delivering on the Promise of AI: Seeing What’s Hiding In Plain Sight

For organizations to integrate AI and machine learning into their businesses successfully, the technology must be powerful enough to solve real challenges, yet fast, easy, and accessible enough to ensure the innovation potential is realized. Plainsight on Google Cloud delivers the power of enterprise vision AI that’s quick and easy to use with Google Cloud resources that enable global scale, increased security, bolstered privacy, unified billing, and cost savings. 

To streamline vision AI workflows, Plainsight facilitates the entire pipeline, from visual data ingestion and annotation, through continuous model training, deployment, and monitoring for easier innovation and faster time-to-production. Our platform accelerates vision AI development in a manner that is complete, accurate, and accessible to non-technical business leaders. We believe that AI should be available and accessible to anyone and everyone—so that teams across entire organizations can reap the benefits. 

By integrating Plainsight into their private networks, companies worldwide can now leverage one intuitive platform for centralized control of streamlined vision AI model creation and training with optimized visual data handling for diverse enterprise solutions. These use cases include: social distancing monitoring, medical imaging, drug compound screening, defect detection in manufacturing processes, identifying gas leaks, or even livestock counting and crop health monitoring for agriculture, to name a few.https://www.youtube.com/embed/A7U_0UkjvEg?enablejsapi=1&

We enable customers so they can create successful solutions that enable them to clearly see their business from all angles and to take advantage of the knowledge visual data can reveal by simply and quickly operationalizing practical vision AI applications.

AI-Powered Dataset Creation, Automated Model Training & Easy Deployment Without A Single Line Of Code 

For vision AI applications, success is inextricably dependent on the quality and quantity of the datasets required to train the relevant models. To aid enterprises in this vital stage, the Plainsight platform provides built-in data annotation for the fast and easy creation of datasets. This includes AI-powered features that accelerate the speed and quality of labeling such as SmartPoly, for the automated polygon masking of objects, TrackForward, to predict and automatically label objects from frame to frame in video annotations, and AutoLabel for automated object recognition and labeling based on pre-trained machine learning models, to highlight a few.

In addition, to ensure the success of AI integration, we significantly reduce time-intensive processes with Plainsight vision AI’s automated machine learning with continuous model training and easy deployment capabilities. In just a few clicks, users can leverage optimizations for the most reliable model training without endless experimentation cycles. And, models are easily deployed at scale all within one, easy-to-manage model operationalization process for the business.

Growing With Google Cloud

Plainsight is a vision AI innovation leader, developing solutions that address unmet needs for challenger brands and Fortune 500s across vertical markets. As a team recognized for succeeding where others have failed, our expanding partnership with Google Cloud provides a powerful combination that helps customers see and activate the value of their visual data with a suite of services in a secure and private manner.

Our vision AI Platform simplifies building and operationalizing AI to solve business problems enterprises are facing every day—and the demand is increasing. To accelerate our journey to faster, more accessible AI for enterprises, we knew we needed strong support to grow Plainsight and scale our backend tools to match our vision. 

Google Cloud delivered everything, and more, in one program. The Startup Program by Google Cloud provided the technology and services for scale and the support we needed to maximize the value the Program provided us. The Startup Program has been a springboard for architecting Plainsight vision AI in the cloud, accelerating our goals and optimizing innovation, efficiency, and growth. The team also helped us optimize Google Ads campaigns, fueling adoption of Plainsight. 

After launching the SaaS version of Plainsight Data Annotation in November 2020, we grew our user base by nearly 110x in just three short months. Google Ads has also dramatically increased website traffic, growing new users by nearly 5.75X and page views by over 5X. The Google team helped us identify where Google Cloud offerings could be leveraged instead of developing in-house solutions and offered best practices that enabled us to deliver faster on our initiatives. 

Kubernetes was already the underlying component of our platform and leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as a managed service removed a layer of complexity. By combining GKE and Anthos, we were able to standardize our deployments, aligning to how our customers leverage Anthos for enterprise applications in their own organizations. In addition, as a fast-moving, customer-centric company we use Google Workspace to help us centralize and manage our day-to-day work internally. By leveraging multiple products across Google’s ecosystem, we take advantage of a holistic partnership that has helped our business tremendously as we scale. 

Leveraging Google’s Partners for Strategic Consultation

To facilitate this expansion of our partnership with Google and to maximize our use of Google Cloud services, we are working with DoiT International, a Google Managed Services Provider and 2020 Global Reseller Partner of the Year. DoiT provides us with ongoing technical consultation for cloud-native architecture, Google Cloud Marketplace integration, production-grade Kubernetes support, Google Cloud cost optimization, and technical support. The DoiT team has been invaluable in compiling best practices, tips, and strategies from their vast experience with various cloud customers to ease our Marketplace integration and is providing input for infrastructure strategy to support our continued rapid growth.

Plainsight Delivers Enterprise Vision AI Through The Google Cloud Platform Marketplace

Plainsight vision AI is now available to Google Cloud Customers on Google Cloud Marketplace enabling organizations across industries to deploy private Plainsight instances within their own environments. Marketplace customers will benefit from Google Cloud privacy, security, scalability and unified billing through their Google Cloud account. 

Combining the powerful benefits provided by Google Cloud resources with Plainsight’s vision AI Platform into private networks, enterprises worldwide can now leverage one intuitive platform for centralized control of streamlined vision AI model creation and training with optimized visual data handling for diverse enterprise solutions. 

Through our Google partnership, we’re able to leverage a powerful foundation that allows us to rapidly innovate, scale and accelerate delivery on our vision AI platform capabilities. By executing on our vision to make AI easier, faster and more accessible for all users across entire enterprises, we’re helping businesses see more and by seeing more, they’ll have the power to solve more. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here where you can apply for our Startup Program, and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

It’s no secret that many organizations and job seekers find the hiring process exhausting. It can be time consuming, costly, and somewhat risky for both parties. Those are just some of the experiences we wanted to change when we started Gyfted, a pre-vetted talent marketplace for people who complete tech training or degree programs and are looking for the right career move. At the same time, we’re helping businesses save time and improve recruiting outcomes with our automated candidate screening and sourcing tools.

Our vision is clear: To take a candidate through one structured hiring process, and then put them in front of thousands of companies. It’s similar to the common app system in higher education. Sounds simple, but it is a herculean technical and UX task. To succeed we had to combine advanced psychometric testing, machine learning, the latest in behavioral design, and develop the highest quality structured, relational dataset to represent candidate and manager profiles and preferences on our network. Fortunately, we were cofounded by world-leading experts in these areas including Dr. Michal Kosinski, one of the world’s top computational psychologists, and Adam Szefer, a gifted young technologist. We’ve been joined by a group of equally talented employees, most of whom work remotely in Poland, US, Switzerland, UK, Israel, and Ukraine.

The influence of dating platforms and matching

When seeking inspiration, we were influenced by the success of dating platforms, especially Bumble with its focus on commitment. These platforms have done a great job using design to match people together.

We like to think we’re doing the same for recruiters and candidates in terms of not only role and culture fit matching, but also through a fundamental feature of Gyfted, which is that our job-seekers are anonymous. This helps recruiters meet one of their goals today, which is to minimize bias in the hiring process and enable objective, diversity-oriented recruiting.

Another of our unique selling points is that we conduct candidate screening that is gamified and automated, with a structured interview, where the interview remains with the candidate’s profile. We roughly estimate that just for the 15 million open jobs on LinkedIn, if companies fill in 50% of those via external recruiting, and conduct a screening interview with 10 candidates per job filled at $50/hour paid to an employee to do the screening, that’s $3.75 billion and 75 million hours in direct costs. This is on top of applying for jobs, selecting CVs, and coordinating the process, which takes an even bigger financial and time toll on both applicants and recruiters. Instead, it would be better to take one interview for 1000 companies. The impact of what we want to achieve with our vision is enormous.

We also offer career discovery and career search tools for job candidates. This includes free, personalized feedback for every job-seeker. Right now, we’re aiming the service at students, bootcamp graduates and juniors, helping them to land jobs in tech and the creative industry at large. Next, we’ll expand into mid and senior roles. In the long run we want to reshape how recruiting happens through a common app that saves everyone in the market significant time and resources, helping people find jobs not only faster, but jobs that truly fit them.

Developing advanced AI applications with Google Cloud

We obtained our original funding from angel and institutional investors, and we were selected into the Fall 2021 batch of StartX, the non-profit start-up accelerator and founder community associated with Stanford University. But like most startups our budgets are tight, and we need to find ways to operate as efficiently as possible, especially when building out our technology stack and developer environment.

That’s where Google Cloud comes in. It’s a lot more affordable and flexible than competing solutions, and our developers love it. We use Google App Engine for the hosting and development of our applications giving us enormous flexibility. Vertex AI enables us to build, deploy, and scale machine learning models faster, within a unified artificial intelligence platform. On top of that we use Google Vertex AI Workbench as the development environment for the data science workflow, which allows us to have everything that we need to host and develop innovative AI-based applications.

BigQuery, Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse, is another stand-out solution for us. We use it to crunch big data from all our systems and the UX is very intuitive and easy to use, allowing us to use it across the business and get insights from a wide range of employees, not just technical experts.

Above all, Google Cloud helps us solve the main platform challenges facing Gyfted including scalability and identity management, so we are perfectly positioned for growth. Right now, we handle about 2 million candidate interactions, a volume we expect to grow exponentially. As that number grows, we rely on Google Cloud to help us scale securely and with reliability.

Eliminating bias from the hiring process

Our technology partners have also been integral to helping us get to an advanced stage of our beta program. MongoDB on Google Cloud takes the data burden off our teams and reduces time to value of our applications. We can stay nimble and can scale database capacity at the push of a button.

Our collaboration with the Google team has been fantastic. Our Startup Success Manager is an expert when it comes to Google Cloud solutions, and he also understands our business from his own experience as an entrepreneur and an investor. It’s great to have an internal point of contact who can help us navigate all of Google’s resources.

I’d also stress the extent to which Google Cloud values align with ours. For example, a key benefit for our customers is the ability to strip unconscious bias out of the hiring process. Google Cloud tools support this commitment to diversity, especially when we are building out our AI models.

On a team level, we also appreciate the support that Google Cloud has shown through its Google Support Fund for Start-ups in Ukraine. This has helped many Ukrainian businesses to continue to operate at a very challenging time, including startups with remote, distributed teams in Poland where most of us stem from.

If I had to sum up Google Cloud and our collaboration with Google for Startups in a phrase, I’d say that it adds enormous value to our business while removing much of the risk when scaling up a start-up. We’ve seen the addition of many new tools and features in the past two years and our Google mentors are always looking at the best way these can be integrated with Gyfted’s own roadmap. That means that we can continue to transform recruiting and hiring processes with the support of one of the world’s most advanced tech companies as a strategic growth partner.

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

Customers reach out to contact centers for help in moments of urgent need, but due to increasing demands, new channels, peak times, and operational pressures, contact centers often struggle to provide timely help. To bridge this gap, enterprises are increasingly investing in AI-driven solutions that balance addressing customer expectations with operational efficiency.

But building and generating value from such solutions can be complicated and challenging. Google Cloud built Contact Center AI (CCAI) to streamline and shorten this time to value, and CCAI Platform, our newest addition, takes a crucial step in this effort by introducing end-to-end call center capabilities. After debuting these new capabilities in March, we are excited to announce that CCAI Platform is now generally available across the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain—with more markets soon to come.

Delivering world-class customer experiences and accelerating time-to-value with CCAI

CCAI encompasses a comprehensive set of offerings to address the top pain points of the three main user groups in the contact center: contact center owners, their agents, and the customers they serve.

Dialogflow lets the contact center manager scale their operations while balancing cost and customer satisfaction, including reducing painful, long waiting times endured by end users. Using Dialogflow, contact center managers can build complex chat and voice virtual agents—a proven, cost-effective way to scale contact centers while continuing to provide great customer experiences. Available 24/7, without any waiting queue, these virtual agents can converse naturally with customers, identify their issues, and address them effectively.

Agent Assist reduces overall handling time and coaches human agents to become more effective and helpful. The service uses AI to “listen” to the voice and chat conversations between the human representative and the customer, then provides real-time guidance and recommendations to the agent, based on historical conversations, knowledge bases, and best practices of experienced agents. It also automates post-call actions such as transcription and call summarization, saving significant time and overhead at the end of every call.

CCAI Insights stores and analyzes all the customer conversations in the contact center, whether with human or virtual agents, to provide leaders with real-time, actionable data points on customer queries, agent performance, sentiment trends, and opportunities for automation.

At the heart of these technologies is our conversational AI brain. It uses Google Research’s technology to talk, understand, and interact, enabling and orchestrating high-quality conversational experiences at scale.

CCAI Platform: a modern CCaaS and the shortest path to CCAI value

While the value of the CCAI offerings is clear to our customers, we also hear from them that integrating these solutions with legacy infrastructure takes too long.

To minimize these integration difficulties, accelerate time-to-value using the CCAI offerings, and help businesses provide outstanding customer experiences, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of CCAI Platform, the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution from Google Cloud built in partnership with UJET.

CCAI Platform is a modern, turnkey Contact Center as a service solution, designed with user-first, AI-first, and mobile-first principles. It offers:

• Turnkey core Contact Center capabilities out-of-the-box, for faster time to production, lower implementation overhead, and custom development needed
• AI-powered experiences, from routing to better handling customer interactions
• Deep integration with CCAI’s offerings, to provide a unified end-to-end experience for contact center transformation
• Mobile-first design that enables interactions in line with the way people expect to communicate across channels
• CRM-centered design with automated updates, so agents can focus on the customer
• Deployment flexibility, with customer data residing in their CRM and the flexibility to bring their own telephony carrier to minimize cost

All of this is available without the typical need to integrate complex technologies from multiple providers.

“With Google Cloud and CCAI Platform, we will quickly move our contact center to the cloud, supporting both our customers and agents with industry-leading CX innovations, all while streamlining operations through more efficient customer care operations,” said Dean Kontul, Division CIO of KeyBank.

For customers looking to change platforms for a cloud-native CCaaS with deep Google AI integrations, CCAI Platform offers end-to-end capabilities that accelerate call center transformations. We also remain strongly committed to customer choice, and customers will continue to have the option to integrate our latest and greatest CCAI offerings through our existing OEM partners.

The Contact Center conversation is just beginning

This launch is part of a broader effort to deliver more value, faster, to more CCAI customers. As companies replace interactive voice response (IVR) with intelligent virtual agents (IVA) and begin to collect and analyze data, use cases are likely to grow more sophisticated—which is one reason Google Cloud is continuing to invest in technologies to make our CCAI offerings even more useful, as well as best practices like the following:

• CCAI Agent Assist and Insights are a great first step in AI transformation. They let contact center owners enable call transcription and use Topic Modeling to identify conversation themes that demand attention. Human agents can automatically generate high-quality conversation summaries to reduce call wrap-up time, and the associated costs, while improving business insights. We are working to make these features available both in CCAI Platform and with our partner ISVs.
• Chat and call steering are the first step for IVA automation. Another area of broad impact is conversational chat or call steering, in which friction is reduced by routing customers to the correct virtual or live agent experience. Many call centers rely on IVR systems in which customers have to use a keypad to select an option. Enterprise leaders tell us that attrition is very high throughout this process: some customers angrily hang up without resolution and, just as bad, many simply pound a single key in hopes of reaching a human agent, leading to the customer reaching the wrong person because their issue was never correctly identified or routed. Using Dialogflow’s natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities can sweep away such problems, with the customer more likely to not only reach the appropriate resources, but also share conversational data from which insights can be gleaned. It’s an approach that can pay dividends right away, and a quick first step to IVA automation.

In coming months, we will continue to work on these and other capabilities that are targeted to deliver higher and quicker value to our customers. We plan to release pre-built components to help companies tackle call center use cases in specific industries, for example. We’ll also continue to partner with companies that share our vision of transforming customer experiences with AI, such as TTEC, a provider of customer experience technology and software.

“TTEC Digital and Google Cloud have a shared vision for transforming global CX delivery through artificial intelligence, digital innovation, and operational excellence,” said Sam Thepvongs, VP of TTEC Digital. “With CCAI Platform, we can offer our largest enterprise customers a strategic blueprint for moving to the cloud while adopting a leading, AI-powered contact center platform. We couldn’t be more excited about this evolution of Google Cloud’s groundbreaking CCAI portfolio, and the opportunity to help our customers digitally transform their CX through this partnership.”

To get started with CCAI Platform, visit our solutions page or checkout our new omni channel demo video—and don’t forget to join us at Google Cloud Next ’22, where I’ll be sharing exciting new updates for CCAI in my session, “Delight customers in every interaction with Contact Center AI.”