The recent Google Cloud Next 24 conference was perhaps unsurprisingly dominated by AI, with a range of new announcements and launches from the company proving the latest salvo in what is set to be an increasingly AI-dominated future.
Google Cloud has been at the forefront of pushing AI innovation forward for some time, with CEO Thomas Kurian saying he was proud to have an entire AI-ready tech stack, from the company's own Axiom hardware all the way through to software solutions ranging from chatbots to video creation apps.
To find out more on why AI is set to have such dramatic changes sooner rather than later, TechRadar Pro sat down with some of the leading Google Cloud AI experts.
Skyrocketing
“Generative AI is now real, and creating value in enterprises in almost every industry…I’m not aware of an industry where AI isn’t being applied in some way," noted Will Grannis, VP & Chief Technology Officer, Google Cloud.
"Just in eight months, the pace and scale of adoption, of usefulness, of utility and real world use cases has really skyrocketed...every company will be able to benefit."
The AI industry is moving from being an exciting new breakthrough technology into the production at scale stage, and this increasing usage, in line with adoption, comes alongside a growing awareness of responsibility and safety from Google Cloud itself.
"These kinds of technologies supercharge the work we go and do every day," Oliver Parker, Vice President, Global GenerativeAI GTM at Google Cloud, tells us at the event when asked about the possibilities of AI, "(and) it's an amazing technology, but it needs to be applied very thoughtfully."
“In many ways, we’re being recognized as a leader in AI now," adds Grannis. "AI has always been a foundational aspiration and strategy - if you go right back to the beginning of Google, if you want to create AI, you have to have structure, you have to have an index, and you have have data, and you have to structure that data, so that eventually these models will be useful…and now we’ve brought these capabilities to customers so that they can go on that same journey."
The company has long utilized the power of its AI infrastructure and services internally, a process Parker calls, "drinking out own champagne."
“I don't want to underplay what that means in terms of being able to deliver an end-to-end set of capabilities for a company," he notes.
“The ability to take the generative AI capabilities, this big context window and start extracting data - that’s how you start to open up some use cases that I think people wouldn’t have thought of before, because the technology wasn’t even there."
He's not the only one to highlight this point, with Brad Calder, Vice President and GM, Google Cloud Platform, also telling us how this stance proves an incredibly useful differentiator in the field.
“I think what's special about Google is that we actually created the innovations around Gen AI," he says, highlighting the "huge pivot" the company made at the start of 2023 to focus on AI.
“If you look at what our opportunity is…how we have bet on innovating around AI both from the model standpoint, and the platform serving standpoint…this has given us a huge opportunity when it comes to cloud," Calder adds.
“We’re the only company that actually has the models, the hardware, the stack, the cloud, all in one place to vertically and horizontally integrate and optimize...I do believe this is putting us ahead - you haven’t seen anything close to this from AWS…in terms of how we’re actually empowering AI."
Parker adds how Google is also being viewed as a strong transformation partner - especially concerning its understanding of data and AI. “We’ve proven that we understand how that technology stack gets applied to business outcome, and digital transformation, better than any of the other options in the market," he says.
"AI is the manifestation of the potential of cloud," states Grannis. "The tools and capabilities around infrastructure, platforms, applications, development - this used to be the domain of large organizations, only because they had a lot of developers, a lot of machines, a lot of business processes, that allowed them to create applications."
"Cloud was the first wave of democratization, because without having data centers and without having tens of thousands of developers, you could create experiences that defined markets...so now in AI, you have a foundation, which is really provided by cloud...you have tools and capabilities that allow customers to use their own data and their own business process knowledge, their own understanding to combine with these models and really create competitive advantage."
So with AI set to take a myriad of roles away from real-life workers, what is the role of the human in the AI-powered enterprise of the future?
Parker is optimistic, noting, “Integrating with the human experience is a really important thing, and I don’t think you will ever displace human interaction experiences - you will just provide augmented experiences that really just amplify it.”
“There’s always a level of concern when these kinds of technologies show up, but we've always been very thoughtful as a company to understand and recognize the impact."
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