Introducing Intelligent Products Essentials: helping manufacturers build AI-powered smart products, faster

Expectations for both consumer and commercial products have changed. Consumers want products that evolve with their needs, adapt to their preferences, and stay up-to-date over time. Manufacturers, in turn, need to create products that provide engaging customer experiences not only to better compete in the marketplace, but also to provide new monetization opportunities. 

However, embedding intelligence into new and existing products is challenging. Updating hardware is costly, and existing connected products do not have the capability to add new features. Furthermore, manufacturers do not have sufficient customer insights due to product telemetry and customer data silos, and may lack the AI expertise to quickly develop and deploy these features. 

That’s why today we’re launching Intelligent Products Essentials, a solution that allows manufacturers to rapidly deliver products that adapt to their owners, update features over-the-air using AI at the edge, and provide customer insights using analytics in the cloud. The solution is designed to assist manufacturers in their product development journeys—whether developing a new product or enhancing existing ones. 

With Intelligent Products Essentials, manufacturers can:

• Personalize customer experiences: Provide a compelling ownership experience that evolves over the lifetime of the product. For example, a chatbot that contextualizes responses based on product status and customer profile.

• Manage and update products over-the-air: Deploy updates to products in the field,  gather performance insights and evolve capabilities over time with monetization opportunities.

• Predict parts and service issues: Detect operating thresholds, anomalies and predict failures to proactively recommend service using AI, reducing warranty claims, decreasing parts shortages and increasing customer satisfaction.

In order to help manufacturers quickly deploy these use cases and many more, Intelligent Products Essentials provides the following:

• Edge connections: Connect and ingest raw or time-series product telemetry from various device platforms utilizing IoT Core or Pub/Sub and enable deployment and management of firmware over-the-air and machine learning models with Vertex AI at the edge.

• Ownership App Template: Easily build connected product companion apps that work on smartphones, tablets, and computers. Use a pre-built API and accompanying sample app that can incorporate product or device registration, identity management, and provide application behavior analytics using Firebase.

• Product fleet management: Manage, update and analyze fleets of connected products via APIs, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Looker.

• AI services: Create new features or capabilities for your products using AI and machine learning products such as DialogFlow, Vision AI, AutoML, all from Vertex AI.

Enterprise data integration: Integrate data sources such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and others using Dataflow and BigQuery.

Intelligent Products Essentials helps manufacturers build new features across consumer, industrial, enterprise, and transportation products. Manufacturers can implement the solution in-house, or work with one of our certified solution integration partners like Quantifi and Softserve. 

“The focus on intelligent products that Google Cloud is deploying provides a digital option for manufacturers and users. At its heart, systems like Intelligent Product Essentials are all about decision making. IDC sees faster and more effective decision-making as the fundamental reason for the drive to digitize products and processes. It's how you can make faster and more effective decisions to meet heightened customer expectations, generate faster cash flow, and better revenue realization,” said Kevin Prouty, Group Vice President at IDC. “Digital offerings like Google’s Intelligent Product Essentials potentially go the last mile with the ability to connect the digital thread all the way through to the final user.”

Customers adopting Intelligent Products Essentials

GE Appliances, a Haier company, are enhancing their appliances using new AI-powered intelligent features to enable:

• Intelligent cooking: Help cook the perfect meal to personal preferences, regardless of your expertise and abilities in the kitchen.

• Frictionless service: Build smart appliances that know when they need maintenance and make it simple to take action or schedule services.

• Integrated digital lifestyle: Make appliances useful at every step of the way by integrating them with digital lifestyle services – for example, automating appliance behaviors according to customer calendars, such as oven preheating or scheduling the dishwasher to run in the late evening.

“Intelligent Products Essentials enhances our smart appliances ecosystem, offering richer consumer habit insights. This enables us to develop and offer new features and experiences to integrate with their digital lifestyle.“ —Shawn Stover, Vice-president Smart Home Solutions at GE Appliances.

Serial 1, Powered by Harley-Davidson, is using Intelligent Product Essentials to manage and update its next generation eBicycles, and personalize its customers’ digital ownership experiences. 

“At Serial 1, we are dedicated to creating the easiest and most intuitive way to experience the fun, freedom, and adventure of riding a pedal-assist electric bicycle. Connectivity is a key component of delivering that mission, and working together to integrate Intelligent Product Essentials into our eBicycles will ensure that our customers enjoy the best possible user experience."— Jason Huntsman, President, Serial 1. 

Magic Leap, an augmented reality pioneer with industry-leading hardware and software, is building field service solutions with Intelligent Products Essentials with the goal of connecting manufacturers, dealers, and customers to more proactive and intelligent service.

“We look forward to using Intelligent Products Essentials to enable us to rapidly integrate manufacturers' product data with dealer service partners into our field service solution. We’re excited to partner with Google Cloud as we continue to push the boundaries of physical interaction with the digital world.” — Walter Delph, Chief Business Officer, Magic Leap

Intelligent Product Essentials is available today. To learn more, visit our website.