At Google Cloud Next ‘24, top companies, governments, researchers, and startups showcased how they’re already using Google’s AI solutions to enhance their work.
In the corridors of Google Cloud, a profound realization has dawned upon customers and partners alike: generative AI holds the key to unlocking untapped potential, ushering in a new era of process optimization, efficiency gains, and groundbreaking innovations. Evidence of this paradigm shift abounds, with over 300 organizations prominently featured at the recent Next event in Las Vegas.
Businesses have transitioned from leveraging AI for simple inquiries to deploying sophisticated AI agents capable of predictive analysis and goal-oriented actions. These AI agents, imbued with the ability to guide shoppers, empower employees, and streamline operational workflows, represent a seismic shift in how organizations harness the power of artificial intelligence.
Central to the emergence of these AI-powered marvels is the advent of multimodal generative AI and advanced foundation models. By seamlessly integrating text, voice, video, code, and more, these next-generation agents possess unprecedented versatility and adaptability, enabling them to navigate complex tasks with finesse and agility.
The cutting-edge technologies offered by Google Cloud, including AI infrastructure, Gemini models, Vertex AI platform, Google Workspace, and Google Distributed Cloud, are paving the way for a future where AI-driven innovation knows no bounds. Augmented by a robust ecosystem of over 100 dedicated partners, these solutions are reshaping industries and propelling businesses towards unprecedented advancements.
As we delve deeper into the narratives of 101 industry leaders, it becomes abundantly clear: AI is not just a distant prospect but a tangible reality, with real-world applications poised to reshape tomorrow’s landscape. From pioneering startups to established enterprises, the journey towards AI-enabled transformation has only just begun, promising a future brimming with limitless possibilities.
Customer agents
Similar to great sales and service people, customer agents are able to listen carefully, understand your needs, and recommend the right products and services. They work seamlessly across channels including the web, mobile, and point of sale, and can be integrated into product experiences with voice and video. Here are the major companies in this field;
- ADT is building a customer agent to help its millions of customers select, order, and set up their home security.
- Alaska Airlines is developing a personalized travel search experience using advanced AI techniques, creating hyper-personalized recommendations that engage customers early and foster loyalty through AI-generated content.
- Best Buy is using Gemini to launch a generative AI-powered virtual assistant this summer that can troubleshoot product issues, reschedule order deliveries, manage Geek Squad subscriptions, and more; in-store and digital customer-service associates are also gaining gen-AI tools to better serve customers anywhere they need help.
- ING Bank aims to offer a superior customer experience and has developed a gen-AI chatbot for workers to enhance self-service capabilities and improve answer quality on customer queries.
- Magalu, one of Brazil’s largest retailers, has put customer service at the center of its AI strategy, including using Vertex AI to create “Lu’s Brain” to power an interactive conversational agent for Lu, Magalu’s popular brand persona (the 3D bot has more than 14 million followers between TikTok and Instagram).
- Mercedes Benz will infuse e-commerce capabilities into its online storefront with a gen AI-powered smart sales assistant. Mercedes also plans to expand its use of Google Cloud AI in its call centers and is using Vertex AI and Gemini to personalize marketing campaigns.
- Oppo/OnePlus is incorporating Gemini models and Google Cloud AI into their phones to deliver innovative customer experiences, including news and audio recording summaries, AI toolbox, and more.
- Samsung is deploying Gemini Pro and Imagen 2 to their Galaxy S24 smartphones so users can take advantage of amazing features like text summarization, organization, and magical image editing.
- Target uses Google Cloud to power AI solutions on the Target app and Target.com, including personalized Target Circle offers and Starbucks at Drive Up, their curbside pickup solution.
- US News saw a double-digit impact in key metrics like click-through rate, time spent on page, and traffic volume to its pages after implementing Vertex AI Search.
Employee agents
Employee agents help workers be more productive and collaborate better together. These agents can streamline processes, manage repetitive tasks, answer employee questions, as well as edit and translate critical communications. Here’s a snapshot of how 101 of these industry leaders are putting AI in this field;
- Avery Dennison empowered their employees with generative AI to enable secure, flexible, and borderless collaboration for enhanced productivity to drive growth.
- Bank of New York Mellon built a virtual assistant to help employees find relevant information and answers to their questions.
- Bayer is building a radiology platform that will assist radiologists with data analysis, intelligent search, and to create documents that meet healthcare requirements needed for regulatory approval. The bioscience company is also harnessing BigQuery and Vertex AI to develop additional digital medical solutions and drugs more efficiently.
- Box, Typeface, Glean, CitiBank, and Securiti AI discuss developing AI-powered apps across the enterprise, with measurable returns on investment for marketing, financial services, and HR use cases.
- DaVita leverages DocAI and Healthcare NLP to transform kidney care, including analyzing medical records, uncovering critical patient insights, and reducing errors. AI enables physicians to focus on personalized care, resulting in significant improvements in healthcare delivery.
- Discover Financial helps their 10,000 contact center representatives to search and synthesize information across detailed policies and procedures during calls.
- HCA Healthcare is testing Cati, a virtual AI caregiver assistant that helps to ensure continuity of care when one caregiver shift ends and another begins. They are also using gen AI to improve workflows on time-consuming tasks, such as clinical documentation, so physicians and nurses can focus more on patient care.
- McDonald’s will leverage data, AI, and edge technologies across its thousands of restaurants to implement innovation faster and to enhance employee and customer experiences.’
- Uber is using AI agents to help employees be more productive, save time, and be even more effective at work. For customer service representatives, they’ve launched new tools that summarize communications with users and can even surface context from previous interactions, so front-line staff can be more helpful and effective
- Verizon is using generative AI to help teams in network operations and customer experience get the answers they need faster.
Creative agents
Creative agents can expand your organization with the best design and production skills, working across images, slides, and exploring concepts with workers. Many organizations are building agents for their marketing teams, audio and video production teams, and all the creative people that can use a hand. With creative agents, anyone can become a designer, artist, or producer.
Here’s a snapshot of how 101 of these industry leaders are putting AI in this field;
- Canva is using Vertex AI to power its Magic Design for Video, helping users skip tedious editing steps while creating shareable and engaging videos in a matter of seconds.
- Carrefour used Vertex AI to deploy Carrefour Marketing Studio in just five weeks — an innovative solution to streamline the creation of dynamic campaigns across various social networks. In just a few clicks, marketers can build ultra-personalized campaigns to deliver customers advertising that they care about.
- Major League Baseball continues to innovate its Statcast platform, so teams, broadcasters, and fans have access to live in-game insights.
- Paramount currently relies on manual processes to create the essential metadata and video summaries used across its Paramount+ platform for showcasing content and creating personalized experiences for viewers. VertexAI Text Bison is now helping to streamline this process.
- Procter & Gamble used Imagen to develop an internal gen AI platform to accelerate the creation of photo-realistic images and creative assets, giving marketing teams more time to focus on high-level planning and delivering superior experiences for its consumers.
Data Agents
Data agents are like having knowledgeable data analysts and researchers at your fingertips. They can help answer questions about internal and external sources, synthesize research, develop new models — and, best of all, help find the questions we haven’t even thought to ask yet, and then help get the answers.
Here’s a snapshot of how 101 of these industry leaders are putting AI in this field;
- AI21 Labs offers a BigQuery integration called Contextual Answers that allows users to query data conversationally and get high-quality answers quickly
- Anthropic has partnered with Google Cloud to offer its family of Claude 3 models on Vertex AI — providing organizations with more model options for intelligence, speed, cost-efficiency, and vision for enterprise use cases.
- The Asteroid Institute is using AI to discover hidden asteroids in existing astronomical data. This is a major focus for astronomers researching the evolution of the Solar System, investors and businesses hoping to fly missions to asteroids, and for all of us who want to prevent future large asteroid impacts on Earth.
- Hugging Face is collaborating with Google across open science, open source, cloud, and hardware to enable companies to build their own AI with the latest open models from Hugging Face and Google Cloud hardware and software.
- Kakao Brain, part of Korean technology company Kakao Group, has built a large-scale AI language model that is the largest Korean language-specific LLM in the market, with 66 billion parameters. They’ve also developed a text-to-image generator called Karlo.
- Mayo Clinic has given thousands of its scientific researchers access to 50 petabytes worth of clinical data through Vertex AI search, accelerating information retrieval across multiple languages.
- McLaren Racing is using Google AI to get up-to-the-millisecond insights during races and training to gain a competitive edge.
- Mistral AI will use Google Cloud’s AI-optimized infrastructure, to further test, build, and scale up its LLMs, all while benefiting from Google Cloud’s security and privacy standards.
- MSCI uses machine learning with Vertex AI, BigQuery and Cloud Run to enrich its datasets to help our clients gain insight into around 1 million asset locations to help manage climate-related risks.
- NewsCorp is using Vertex AI to help search data across 30,000 sources and 2.5 billion news articles updated daily.
- Orange operates in 26 countries where local data must be kept in each country. They are using AI on Google Distributed Cloud to improve network performance and deliver super-responsive translation capabilities.
- Spotify leveraged Dataflow for large-scale generation of ML podcast previews, and they plan to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with data engineering and data science to build better experiences for their customers and creators.
- UPS is building a digital twin of its entire distribution network, so both workers and customers can see where their packages are at any time.
- Broward County, Florida, and Southern California Edison are using geospatial capabilities and AI to improve infrastructure planning and monitoring, generate new insights, and create regional resilience for communities facing climate challenges today and tomorrow.
- Woven — Toyota‘s investment in the future of mobility — is partnering with Google to leverage vast amounts of data and AI to enable autonomous driving, supported by thousands of ML workloads on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer. This has resulted in resulting in 50% total-cost-of-ownership savings to support automated driving.
Code Agents
Code agents are helping developers and product teams to design, create, and operate applications faster and better, and to ramp up on new languages and code bases. Many organizations are already seeing double-digit gains in productivity, leading to faster deployment and cleaner, clearer code.
Here’s a snapshot of how 101 of these industry leaders are putting AI in this field;
- Capgemini has been using Code Assist to improve software engineering productivity, quality, security, and developer experience, with early results showing workload gains for coding and more stable code quality.
- Commerzbank is enhancing developer efficiency through Code Assist’s robust security and compliance features.
- Turing is customizing Gemini Code Assist on their private codebase, empowering their developers with highly personalized and contextually relevant coding suggestions that have increased productivity around 30 percent and made day-to-day coding more enjoyable.
- Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, Replit’s software development AI, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform.
- Wayfair piloted Code Assist, and those developers with the code agent were able to set up their environments 55 percent faster than before, there was a 48 percent increase in code performance during unit testing, and 60 percent of developers reported that they were able to focus on more satisfying work.
Security Agents
Security agents assist security operations by radically increasing the speed of investigations, automating monitoring and response for greater vigilance and compliance controls. They can also help guard data and models from cyberattacks, such as malicious prompt injection.
Here’s a snapshot of how 101 of these industry leaders are putting AI in this field;
- Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSIAM, the AI-driven security operations platform, is built on more than a decade of expertise in machine-learning models and the most comprehensive, rich, and diverse data store in the industry. Backed by Google’s advanced cloud infrastructure and advanced AI services, including BigQuery and Gemini models, the combination delivers global scale and near real-time protection across all cybersecurity offerings.
- Pfizer can now aggregate cybersecurity data sources, cutting analysis times from days to seconds.
- BBVA uses AI in Google SecOps to detect, investigate, and respond to security threats with more accuracy, speed, and scale. The platform now surfaces critical security data in seconds, when it previously took minutes or even hours, and delivers highly automated responses.
- Behavox is using Google Cloud technology and LLMs to provide industry leading regulatory compliance and front office solutions for financial institutions globally.
- Charles Schwab has integrated their own intelligence into the AI-powered Google SecOps, so analysts can better prioritize work and respond to threats.
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