Insights

Google Cloud Next 2023 just wrapped up in San Francisco, and our team was thrilled to sponsor and attend in-person. There was a lot of talk about Gen AI as Google announced a range of new services and upgrades for developers and enterprise teams, some of which are already generally available. Read below for some of the highlights:

Google reveals Duet AI for Google Workspace

One of the biggest announcements at Google Cloud Next was the reveal of Duet AI for Google Workspace. In response to the release of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Duet AI focuses on enhancing enterprise productivity. For example, the Duet AI “attend for me” option in Google Meet lets users send relevant messages, take notes, and create action items during meetings. If users join a meeting late, they can even request a “summary so far” to catch up. Google Workspace will also use Duet AI to curate information from Gmail and Drive to create content for emails and chats. For the average employee, these new features can improve overall productivity and free up hours of time to work on other tasks.

Google also announced the preview of Duet AI in Looker, reinventing how users work with and present data. Duet AI in Looker lets users talk to their data quickly and easily, enabling them to drive action based on their unique business needs beyond using just questions and answers. With just a few sentences of instruction, users can create entire reports or advanced visualizations, greatly reducing the need for technical knowledge.

From a developer POV, Duet AI can now assist with code refactoring. This is an effort to improve code without changing its behavior in any way. Using connectors in Apigee, Google’s API management platform, it can also help designers and developers create APIs from natural language prompts. This can help developers save time and reduce errors in their work. Duet AI is also capable of providing real-time feedback and suggestions to help developers improve their code and collaborate more efficiently when working on projects.

Google enhances upgrades for Vertex AI

Duet AI announcements were not Google’s only focus, as Google announced Vertex AI had been upgraded and improved to become a more competitive generative AI platform. Vertex AI provides developers with the tools to quickly build and deploy AI models. It offers a range of features, including automated machine learning, data labeling tools, and cloud-based deployment. These tools enable developers to create powerful AI applications faster and with less effort. Vertex AI has been a major contributor to Google’s success in winning workloads from AI unicorns and has been a critical differentiator in the company’s strong growth around AI. Google shared that 70% of AI unicorns use Google Cloud. 

In addition, the PaLM foundation model has been expanded from 4,000 tokens to 32,000 tokens, enabling customers to input eight times more content than before. Google has also added 38 new languages for Vertex AI, bringing the total to 100 for private use and 38 for public use. These include Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, German, and Japanese.

Google looks into the future with Gen AI

It’s clear that Google is putting in the time to improve its current generative AI systems with GKE, v5e, and A3 so that Gen AI can be modeled and scaled more quickly and efficiently. As the technology industry is rapidly developing new Gen AI solutions, it raises the question about where advancement will take us next and how it can be used in location data scenarios. For example, enterprises can utilize Gen AI to create a safe route for a jogger with allergies to avoid running on a day with high pollen count. Or if users are executing a delivery route and running behind, with a simple statement into their device, Gen AI can reoptimize the best path to get them back on track.

The possibilities are endless for making AI a reality for consumer and business applications. It’s an exciting time to increase efficiency and productivity through these tools, and Google Cloud Next was the perfect place to showcase this.