Google Cloud has announced a range of new enterprise AI offerings, along with the successful deployment of its existing AI agents to deliver productivity and security gains across its enterprise suite.
Organizations looking to optimize their customer-facing operations using generative AI now have a dedicated suite for this within Google Cloud, called Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI.
This end-to-end app combines the features of Google Gemini 1.5 Flashits lightweight, low-latency multimodal model, with an omnichannel contact center as a service (CCaaS) offering.
The result is a central platform through which customer service workers can manage turnkey conversational agents, 'generative knowledge assistance' that provides customer service workers with insights based on the ongoing conversation, and 'smart reply' that offers suggested responses to give to customers.
Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI is supported via web interfaces, phones, or the customer relationship management (CRM) system of your choice. It also includes native analytics in the form of Conversational Insights, a feature that can automatically score customer interactions to help with quality control.
In a livestream from the Gemini at Work global event, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian gave the example of a customer who handed over a phone to his cellular carrier and was able to upload a picture of his device via web chat.
A customer agent then automatically checks for cosmetic damage and can provide a quote in accordance with company policy.
“Our platform can be grounded to provide maximum accuracy, in addition to simply retrieving accurate results from operational systems,” Kurian said.
All of this can be connected to any customer service application, whether it is a SaaS application like Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle or even an on-premise application.”
Bell Canada was cited as a success story for its Customer Engagement Suite, having already saved $20 million by using customer service agents.
“We launched the first Google AI-powered Infobot in Canada, providing instant answers to customer questions and directing them to self-service options and links,” said Mirko Bibic, CEO of Bell Canada, in a statement. earnings call cited by Google.
“Our deployment of Google’s AI platform for call centers is a world first for a contact center of this scale. The virtual assistant we have deployed, first for Lucky Mobile Chat and now for our Bell and Virgin brands, has resulted in over 1.1 million interactions with virtual assistants so far this year across all three brands.”
New announcements for Google Cloud's AI roster include a Security Advisor, a new set of tools for cyberattacks that will be rolled out to all Workspace Business edition subscribers. It takes the form of a natural language interface that can answer complex, business-specific security questions.
Kurian presented five main use cases for security officers:
- Summarize ongoing cases in natural language, so customers can understand how threats are being addressed.
- Research and analysis of the current threat landscape and its relationship to the company's current attack surface.
- Provide recommendations on next steps to strengthen defenses against threats.
- Generate queries on security-specific schemes such as Exact Data Matching (EDM).
- Creation of new rules and manuals to prevent further incidents.
Kurian noted that financial services firm Fiserv is one of many customers using Gemini in security operations to summarize threat reports, detect new threats and accelerate their overall response to security incidents.
Overall, Google Cloud said it has seen an 11-fold increase in the number of security operations performed in the past 12 months, with three times as much enterprise data ingested in the name of AI security.
In addition to the products it launched during the livestream, Google Cloud highlighted some custom AI solutions its customers have built using its AI agent ecosystem. For example, Warner Bros. Discovery worked with the company to produce “Caption AI,” a Vertex AI-based solution that automatically generates subtitles for TV content.
Warner Bros. Discovery said the tool, which still requires manual oversight to fine-tune captions before showing them to viewers, has cut the time it takes to produce captions for a typical 30-minute TV episode from four hours to about an hour and unlocked an 80% overall reduction across all media.
The year AI became “agency”
Google first AI Agents Announced at its annual conference Google Cloud Next 2024 in April 2024. At the time, he emphasized the degree to which companies could customize agents to perform specific tasks within their business workflows and explained that multimodal AI, enabled by its extended language model (LLM) Gemini 1.5 Pro – was an integral part of the process.
Nearly six months later, Google is vying for space in the “agent” AI space. Microsoft recently… announced Copilot Agents for 365 Copilot, through which companies can automate tasks and create custom chatbots based on their business data.
Salesforce also placed great emphasis on the importance of agents in Dream Force 2024promising that its new Agentforce service, which similarly allows customers to create agents that can automate complex business tasks, could help deliver AI as it was “always meant to be”.
While Google and Microsoft have relied on their broad enterprise productivity suites to highlight the convenience of adopting their AI agents, Salesforce has instead emphasized its open, walled garden approach as a way to offer customers true choice and security.
Google's announcements yesterday show that customers are already finding value in its AI offerings. While we've seen multiple examples of competing services like Microsoft Copilot delivering value to customers, such as Atlantic VirginThese gains have largely materialized in efficiency improvements in the traditional sense of productivity.
On the other hand, “agency” AI has the potential to automate tasks entirely, rather than simply offering suggestions or drafts to human users in a side panel. And it’s taking off: Kurian said 75% of the world’s top independent software vendors (ISVs) are already building agents within Google Cloud to support their business functions.
Much of Google Cloud’s livestream focused on the individual benefits customers have already realized through the company’s AI agents, and the statistics are undeniable.
But what exactly differentiates its offering from the competition remains to be seen, and it will only be a matter of time before Microsoft, Salesforce and others come up with similar numbers for their own AI agents.
While ROI may finally be within reach for companies that embraced generative AI last year, none of the hyperscalers have yet delivered a killer app that would make their product an absolute must-buy over the rest.