As AI tools become a common presence in workflows and tasks across the business sphere, making sure your business has the right tools is increasingly important.
With providers of all sizes battling for visibility in the crowded AI space, having the capabilities to back up the hype has never been more vital.
It’s not typically an area Google struggles in, and the company was in a bullish mood at its recent Google Cloud Summit London, where TechRadar Pro got to hear the company's vision for the next steps in AI.
AI coming to life
"What's exciting for me about this period we're in right now is that the capabilities are just showing up everywhere. We're just at the beginning of the wave of at scale usage that permeates across every industry, every geography, and lots of different functions within companies,” Oliver Parker, VP - AI GTM, Google Cloud, tells us at the event.
“You're seeing AI basically come to life through very different experiences either on the business side, or the consumer side.”
This includes the rise of agents, a potentially huge breakthrough for AI in everyday life, and something Google Cloud is obviously keen to get behind, and something Parker described in his keynote speech at the event as, "the next phase of AI evolution", adding, "it's where you go from action to outcome. LLMs come to life through agents."
Google as a whole has long been a leader when it comes to AI, a fact Parker is keen to emphasize.
This status comes with a lot of perks, he says, but also means there is something of a target on their back when it comes to the competition.
"We're obviously a large company [and] there's a lot of people playing in the AI space, but not a lot of them have the technology, plus the capability to deliver an end-to-end value,” Parker says.
“That's where we differentiate other companies, or other hyperscalers. They have very large sales forces, but they don't have the knowledge around AI because they don't have an AI-first business. They haven't necessarily built along the AI business that we have - so there's other companies with the scale, but who don't know AI - we have scale, plus we are an AI-first company.”
In his keynote, Parker highlighted "the importance of not just talking about the technology, but showing what it can do" as vital in getting customers excited about AI, and was something he told us would be critically important going forward.
"It's one thing to produce great tech, it's another to actually help our customers deploy it,” he later tells us.
"Customers get smart pretty quickly - and they understand who has the capabilities, and who can help them adopt those capabilities - honestly, that's where we put our focus,” he says, noting that he and his team spend a lot of time explaining the state of the market to customers, which has largely pivoted towards ensuring that businesses are using the best AI ecosystem for their needs.
There is a shift from just focusing on AI models towards “the platform of AI”, he tells us, and if you are able to provide a full stack or platform (as Google Cloud does with Vertex) that will obviously put you at an advantage.
"From the platform, infrastructure level, there's only a few players that are there, and the reality is [that] every SaaS company, whether existing or the next generation, is rethinking their products to think how AI can make it better.”
Parker believes that this shift is nothing less than the dawning of a new generation of apps for SaaS companies, building generative AI into the core of their platform from day one - offering previously unthought-of possibilities.
Looking forward, Google Cloud is set to continue its role as a major driver of innovation when it comes to AI as a whole, with Parker understandably excited about the future.
“We have transitioned from not just being a great technology company, but actually being a great enterprise company,” he notes.
"I feel very good about the momentum,” he adds, “if we deviate from that, that's probably not a good thing - as the tech is there...for me it's accelerating and doing more of what we're doing - that for me feels like the winning formula!”
