ICYMI - Top AI Announcements and Sessions from Google Cloud Next ‘21

Google Cloud Next is our chance to share what we’ve been working on with customers, partners, and the AI/ML community, and, I am excited to say that we didn’t disappoint. 

At Next 2021, we continued to build successfully on our promise of making AI more accessible, more focused on business outcomes, and fast-tracking the time-to-value for customers. We shared new announcements across ConversationalAI, DocumentAI and Ease of Deployment and Implementation. Besides these announcements, we also presented a variety of content designed to help you expand your AI & ML skills and expertise with perspectives from Googlers, partners, and customer experts. 

Here are details on each announcement and how you can learn more: 

Better Document Understanding 

What’s new: Contract DocAI, now in preview, lets users extract insights from the unstructured text in contracts, helping to accelerate contract lifecycles and reduce the cost of contract processing. This offering is part of Google Cloud Document AI solution, a scalable cloud-based AI platform to help businesses efficiently scan, analyze, and understand documents. 

You can read more about the Contract DocAI launch at Google Cloud expands CCAI and DocAI solutions to accelerate time to value

See it for yourself: View DocAI in action at the Next 2021 Developer Keynote hosted by Urs Holzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure, Google Cloud 

Hear from our customers:

“With Contract DocAI, we built Smart Import for existing contracts, which has helped customers gain more access, visibility, and insights for all their contracts. Our customers can now upload contracts 75% faster while saving up to 40% on costs. Smart Import also unlocks contract data that was previously inaccessible and enables other parts of the business to make better, faster decisions. With the power of Google Cloud’s Contract DocAI, we’ve been able to focus on unlocking greater value for our customer, instead of having to spend time, effort, and money pursuing AI innovation ourselves.” Cai GoGwilt, CTO, Ironclad 

Learn more: Watch the session with Ironclad to learn how they are leveraging the power of Contract DocAI to help customers turn contracting into a hub where business happens, instead of being a blocker.

Reimagine Customer Experience with Conversational AI

What’s new: Contact Center AI (CCAI) Insights is now generally available. CCAI Insights provides out-of-the-box and custom modeling techniques to make it easier for contact center teams to better understand customer interaction data. CCAI Insights extends the impact of Google Cloud’s CCAI solution, which lets businesses enable rich and conversational customer experiences via capabilities such as AI-powered virtual agents and live Agent Assist. 

You can read more about the CCAI Insights launch at Google Cloud expands CCAI and DocAI solutions to accelerate time to value 

See it for yourself: Check out this CCAI Insights demo to start unlocking insights from conversations. 

Hear from our customers:

“With CCAI Insights, TELUS is looking at processing 20 million voice calls for analytics. This will help agents resolve customer inquiries faster and with less effort, which will lead to significant savings via agent effort reduction in the first year of production. Our goal is also to save our customers tens of thousands of hours by using AI to guide them to the channel that best supports their needs and allows for quicker resolutions such as self-serve and digital applications, making it easier to perform transactions on-line. This leads to customers spending reduced time with customer care and improved customer experiences."—Mike Kellner,  Director, AI Data & Analytics, TELUS 

Learn more: Watch the CCAI Insights session with Telus Digital or check out the “Customer impact with Conversational AI” session featuring Home Depot. 

Unlock Rapid ML Modeling

What’s new: With the launch of Vertex AI in May 2021, we empowered data scientists and engineers to build reliable, standardized AI pipelines that take advantage of the power of Google Cloud’s data pipelines. At Next 2021, we took this a step further with the preview launch of Vertex AI Workbench, a unified user experience to build and deploy ML models faster, accelerating time-to-value for data scientists and their organizations. Data scientists can now build and train models 5X faster on Vertex AI than on traditional notebooks. This is primarily enabled by integrations across data services (like Dataproc, BigQuery, Dataplex, and Looker), which significantly reduce context switching.  

You can read more about the Vertex AI Workbench launch at Turn data into value with a unified and open data cloud

See it for yourself: View a technical demo of Vertex AI Workbench integration with BigQuery and Earth Engine. 

Hear from our customers:

“From managing our online catalog and inventory, to building a strong logistics network, to making it easier to share product data with suppliers, we rely on services including BigQuery to ensure that we are able to access high-performance, low-maintenance data at scale. Vertex AI Workbench and Vertex AI Training accelerate our adoption of highly scalable model development and training capabilities.” —Matt Ferrari, Head of Ad Tech, Customer Intelligence, and Machine Learning; Engineering and Product at Wayfair  

Learn more: Watch the customer panel on Vertex AI with Twitter and Wayfair 

Beyond Announcements

We offered a total of 13 sessions and 6 developer focused Hands on Labs within the AI & ML track at Next 2021. In case you missed them, see our “Guide to all things AI & ML at Google Cloud Next” to catch up with all our content, now available on-demand content.