Cloud AI Solutions: helping more industries solve common challenges with AI
Apoorv Saxena
Product Manager, Cloud AI
Geordy Kitchen
Cloud Group Product Manager
Last month we announced plans to introduce a range of solutions to help businesses take advantage of AI for common use cases. Today we thought we’d share more on these solutions and what they can mean for businesses.
As Google’s Chief Scientist Fei-Fei Li shared in her keynote at Next ‘18, AI has the power to revolutionize every industry—from retail to agriculture, education to healthcare. Yet many businesses still haven’t begun to adopt AI. There are a number of factors, including the need for specialized talent and hardware, the right types and quantities of data for training and refining machine learning models, and of course, the broader complexities of introducing a new way of working inside an organization. But above all, AI can be challenging to apply to very specific business needs. We want to change that, which is why we’re introducing a number of AI solutions aimed at making it easier for businesses to use AI to address many of these specific use cases.
Our AI solutions fall into two categories. The first is our set of pre-packaged AI solutions that can be easily integrated into existing workflows. To make these solutions as easy to implement as possible, we work with popular, trusted enterprise partners who have deep-domain expertise in these workflows. The majority of our pre-packaged solutions will be delivered through these partners, although we’ll be offering some directly to our customers as well.
The second category of our AI solutions is comprised of reference architectures that you can use to create highly-custom AI tools. These require more development work than our pre-packaged solutions, but simplify complexity for enterprises that need highly business-specific, integrated AI deployments. Additionally, you can build on these architectures and deploy them to market more quickly, helping your business take advantage of AI, faster. You can learn more about all our AI solutions on our website.
Our first AI solutions include two pre-packaged options: Contact Center AI, a complete solution aimed at transforming the enterprise contact center, and Cloud Talent Solution, which uses AI to improve talent acquisition. Recommendation Solution is the first of our reference architectures: it helps businesses recommend similar or complementary products to their users. Here’s more on what each of these solutions offer:
Contact Center AI: Making support more human
As Fei-Fei noted at Next ’18, the enterprise contact center is an ideal place where AI can be used to greatly improve the human experience—both for customers and the agents that serve them. Since we announced Contact Center AI, more than 800 customers have signed-up for alpha access, supporting collectively more than 300,000 agents. This huge response highlights the market need for solutions that apply AI to enhance human talent.
Most of us are familiar with the automated responses and complex phone trees offered by many interactive voice response (IVR) solutions. Contact Center AI simplifies this entire process. Instead of a phone tree, it greets callers in a natural and conversational manner. Callers can describe the reason for their call, and it will ask for and capture any relevant information needed. Whenever possible, it aims to resolve simple requests and tasks, such as billing inquiries or driving directions. And when it determines that a caller’s needs exceed its abilities to help, it seamlessly transitions the call to a live agent and switches to a supporting role. During the conversation, it surfaces information that can help the live agent, in real time, so agents have little need to put a caller on hold. It also captures important analytics, such as historical trends or whether a certain kind of contact is happening more frequently.
Many businesses have told us they want the help of partners they already use and trust to help them deploy this solution. That’s why we’re offering Contact Center AI through more than a dozen popular enterprise vendors. You can see the full list of our Contact Center AI partners in this blog post, or learn about all our AI partners on our website.
Also, be sure to watch our Contact Center AI-specific sessions from Google Cloud Next ‘18:
Cloud Talent Solution: Helping businesses find the right talent faster
Every business needs to hire, and with approximately 6 million workers changing jobs every month in the US, there’s a big opportunity to help out businesses and workers. Google’s Cloud Talent Solution is designed to support talent acquisition technology with AI to reduce time-to-hire and improve the experience for both employers and job seekers.
The job search feature of Cloud Talent Solution—formerly known as Cloud Job Discovery—is now generally available. Any developer can use our documentation to get started, then take advantage of self-service tools for configuration and debugging, and deploy it for job search workloads covering more than 100 languages. It’s globally hosted so it’s fast anywhere in the world, and it includes a personalized job search experience by desired commute time and mode of transit, creating a better candidate experience from your first touchpoint.
Job boards like CareerBuilder are already using Cloud Talent Solution to provide better results for their users and attract better candidates for their clients. “We’ve seen a 15% lift in users who click through to view jobs sent through automated job alerts,” says Humair Ghauri, Chief Product Officer, CareerBuilder. “From users who clicked through, we’ve seen a 41% increase in expression of interest actions generated from saved search alerts. With Cloud Talent Solution, we’ve improved job matching for millions of users.”
We’re also introducing a new profile search feature in Cloud Talent Solution, currently available in private beta. A recent study from Bullhorn noted that past candidates are the second best source of talent after referrals. With profile search, staffing agencies and enterprise hiring companies can easily leverage their candidate database to identify and re-engage great candidates. For example, searching for “front-end engineer” will deliver relevant candidate results with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills—no need to use Boolean search with a dozen “OR” options.
“This is reducing a big step in our recruiters’ sourcing process,” says Steve Lokam, co-founder, OpenLogix. “Candidates are being presented to them who were previously undiscoverable in our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) database. The team is excited that they are able to source faster than before, and hiring managers are amazed at the fast results. As a company, this will help us reduce hiring cycle times and be able to grow much faster."
To learn more about Cloud Talent Solution, visit our website, and express your interest in our profile search private beta program.
Recommendation Solution: Helping users find what they love
Recommendation engines can serve a variety of business needs, from content providers suggesting what users might want to watch next, to online retailers recommending complementary items for purchase. Due to the wide variety of possible use cases, we’re offering a Recommendation Solution as a reference architecture rather than a pre-packaged solution. This means you can code this solution into your existing website, taking advantage of Google Cloud’s machine learning capabilities to enhance your existing marketplace.
Recommendation Solution recommends new content or products based on users with similar on-site behavioral patterns. This solution, developed in collaboration with Google Cloud customer Kurier.at and analytics partner e-dialog, uses Google Analytics 360 to feed anonymized user data into your recommendation model. It also uses Cloud Composer to orchestrate updating the model to incorporate new data from Google Analytics, and can occur according to a schedule you can customize—daily, hourly, or even in increments of 15 minutes. This means you can serve recommendations to your users that are as fresh as you want them to be, incorporating their preferences in near-real time.
Thank you for taking the time to learn about our AI solutions. These are just the first three AI solutions we have in the works—keep an eye out for more in the future. In the meantime, you can learn more on our website. And for data scientists and developers, be sure to visit our Cloud AI page for more on our portfolio of AI products.
