Google Cloud continues to gain traction as businesses deploy artificial intelligence (AI). Its data management and analysis tools also benefit from significant improvements. And Google is improving the connections between its AI tools and the rest of its technology stack.
Google Cloud EMEA President Tara Brady told attendees at the London edition of the Google Cloud Summit that the majority of AI companies in Europe and the UK run on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Up to 90% of AI “unicorns” are in the cloud, and more than 60% of funded AI startups are Google Cloud customers. Google Cloud itself would rank as the world’s fourth-largest software company if it were a standalone company, he said.
Google is increasing its investment in the UK’s startup scene, with a Startup Hub in London forming a new “digital native community space”, and the company has introduced a range of AI and cloud-based businesses.
These range from OXA, an Oxford University spin-off that equips existing vehicles with an autonomous driving kit, to VEED, a video tool that uses AI to create ultra-soft video avatars. realistic ones that individuals can then use to read presentations, in their own voice. , from a script.
More prosaically, DIY retailer Kingfisher showed how it was using Google’s image recognition and generative AI (GenAI) tools to enable its Screwfix business customers to find spare parts in the company’s online catalog. business using their phone’s camera.
Intelligent agents
Alongside its reference customers, Google Cloud announced several developments in its AI technology, in particular to connect GenAI tools to corporate data.
Lloyds Banking Group uses Google AI tools in back office and engineering functions. One of its first applications is code translation for developers working on application modernization. According to Ranil Boteju, the bank’s head of data and analytics, AI has enabled efficiency gains of between 30 and 40 percent. The bank also made significant savings in origination processes, which have long been a labor-intensive part of financial services.
Lloyds Banking Group is just one organization using AI to improve the efficiency of software development.
Changes to Google’s AI toolset announced in London include Gemini Code Assist Enterprise, which claims to offer developers “more accurate and relevant code for their applications”, and goes beyond AI-based coding assistance.
Google also promotes the idea of “Agentic AI”, where AI-based agents will be able to create workflows and query data – as well as interact with external systems – without direct intervention from humans.
Agentic systems promise to allow businesses to solve problems directly with AI tools, rather than using AI as an assistant with a “human in the loop” to create the prompts including large language models ( LLM) currently need to be effective.
With agentic AI, chains of agents can pass actions or data to each other, much like humans do in a current workflow, but they also have the intelligence to improve the process gradually.
These autonomous agent chains may still be a long way off, according to Yasmeen Ahmad, product manager for data, analytics and AI at Google Cloud, but she expects them to become increasingly important as businesses attempt to extract value from ever-increasing volumes of data.
To create agentic AI, Google has around 130 models in its Vertex AI platform, with the promise of even more to come, particularly in the area of data analysis. “We are on the brink of a revolution, driven by data and algorithms,” Ahmad said.
Conversational analysis
As Ahmad suggests, progress in AI will depend on – and may also be limited by – access to relevant, high-quality data. Google Cloud announced investments in both business analytics tools and its underlying infrastructure.
Businesses need additional ways to query data. One area where GenAI has been successful is enabling businesses to use more conversational approaches, rather than relying on structured queries written by data experts.
Gemini will now be available in Looker Conversational Analytics so organizations can ensure they have a “single source of truth” for their data.
And Gemini in BigQuery is now generally available, allowing “entire teams to chat with their data” for insights, according to Google. These are part of Google Cloud’s strategy to improve connections between companies’ proprietary – and often sensitive and confidential – data and AI.
When it comes to analytics, Google Cloud has added a number of enhancements to BigQuery, including a managed experience for Iceberg, Hudi, and Delta file formats, BigQuery’s unified catalog now available to everyone, and semantic search for BigQuery, now in preview.
There will also be additional governance tools in BigQuery and support for open data formats including Flink and Kafka.
For UK customers, Google Cloud has expanded its offering data residency. This allows customers to perform all Gemini 1.5 Flash machine learning processing in the UK. They will be able to store their data at rest, as well as ML processing, “entirely in the UK”.
Google Cloud now has more than 40 cloud regions and 121 zones, according to UK sales director Anne-Marie Lamb, with 10 more under construction, as well as 32 subsea cables. One of them, Grace Hopperwas laid in 2021 and has a Kevlar construction that is even shark resistant. Google spends $1 billion on a new UK data center at Waltham Cross. The site will run on carbon-free energy by 2030.
Competitive advantage
Google Cloud believes that its investments in infrastructure, its developments in AI and its work on its data analysis tools give it a strong value proposition compared to other hyperscalers.
The company also continues to invest in its productivity toolset, Workspace. Future developments include Vids, a tool that allows non-specialists to create video content, linking both Google-sourced media and company assets.
At the same time, Google files complaint against Microsoft with the European Commissionaccusing its rival of anti-competitive practices, including punitive pricing for customers wanting to use Microsoft’s server in non-Azure cloud environments.
But Google Cloud says the integration of AI and business intelligence gives it an edge.
“Our data and analytics capabilities enable organizations to leverage our industry-leading ML and AI capabilities, such as Gemini, so companies can transform their business operations and unlock significant business value,” said Adrian Poole, Director of Digital Natives at Google Cloud UK and Ireland.
“OUR Summit platform also gives customers the choice to use many other (AI) models such as Anthropic or Mistral. At Google Cloud, we have a strong competitive advantage in key areas such as ML/AI, data analytics, and multi-cloud flexibility, to name a few. »
Poole added that 75% of leading independent software vendors are already using agentic AI technology within Google Cloud to carry out their business functions.
Even though we are talking more and more about cloud repatriation Among CIOs, Google Cloud believes that cloud growth will continue, even as some companies seek hybrid solutions.
“We recognize that these types of conversations are important,” Poole said. “However, the broader trend continues to be focused on the adoption of hybrid cloud and multicloud environments. Google Cloud’s hybrid and multicloud approach allows solutions like Vertex AI and BigQuery to be deployed in hybrid configurations, giving businesses the flexibility to place their workload where it best suits their needs.
