Merlyn Mind and Google Cloud team up to bring enterprise-ready AI solutions to education, public sector, and beyond

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly makes its way into workplaces and classrooms, many people are understandably cautious about how it will impact them and their work – especially with a technology as potentially powerful as AI.

Merlyn Mind is demystifying AI for enterprises and transforming how people and computers work together, starting with educators.

“We founded Merlyn Mind to push the boundaries of how people can be more productive at work using AI and natural language understanding to improve human-computer interactions, and we focused first on education as our inaugural domain” says Dr. Satya Nitta, Merlyn Mind’s CEO and cofounder.

Merlyn Mind’s approach to tackling domain specific problems involves building domain specific AI platforms powered by small, efficient, and highly performant Large Language Models (LLMs) which are fine tuned for specific use cases in specific industries.

Challenges across industries differ due to the unique workflows, constraints, and requirements of people in various roles. In education, for example, teachers, students, and administrators have domain-specific needs, all of which custom AI assistants can help address to improve productivity and enhance outcomes. Likewise, in health care, therapists, doctors, and patients require different approaches to automation and knowledge management.

“The most meaningful solutions in a vertical domain will come when teams develop AI in a purpose-built way. Education is a great example of this approach because our platform can offer a lot of benefits given the unique workflows, privacy needs, and use of technology in education globally,” says Dr. Satya Nitta.

Merlyn Mind partnered with Google Cloud to enhance how its tools scale to benefit educational institutions and enterprises serving the education industry.

Fine-tuning AI for enterprise needs, an education case study

Google proved to be a strategic partner to help Merlyn Mind bring its platform to market. “Google is big in education, as Chromebooks, Google Classroom, and Google Workspace are all relatively ubiquitous in schools,” says Levi Belnap, Chief Revenue Officer, at Merlyn Mind. “Plus, Google Cloud is a trusted leader in AI. We know we can make good use of the infrastructure to build and grow our platform. At the same time, our alignment with Google’s approach to education is strong as we take new solutions to market.”

Merlyn Mind uses Google Cloud Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and AI infrastructure to build, train, and fine-tune its LLMs. These education-specific LLMs are used with Merlyn Mind’s generative AI platform to deliver the benefits of AI to education including operating on proprietary content, generating insights from structured and unstructured data, controlling tools, and enabling workflow automations.

The company also uses v4 of Google Cloud custom-designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) as core infrastructure for its experimentation and production deployments.

An example of a solution built on Merlyn Mind’s platform is their AI voice assistant for educators, Merlyn. Merlyn is a voice assistant that makes it easier and more effective for educators to use natural language for tool control as they teach. Merlyn is an efficient, private, and safe Generative AI (gen AI) solution built to improve teacher productivity and increase the amount of time they spend with their students. Merlyn brings the power of gen AI into classrooms and minimizes hallucinations. Merlyn does this through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) within its solutions to align responses to the appropriate grade level and curriculum.

Integrations allow educators to control the Chrome browser with voice, AI, and natural language, positively impacting classroom experiences for teachers and students.

“Many people have had a teacher who changed how they look at the world and inspired them to take new actions and perhaps even live differently,” says Belnap. “We’re excited about what we can do with AI in education because we can use it to give teachers more time to engage directly with students.”

Bringing purpose-built AI to other industries

Part of the challenge in building specialized solutions lies within the application layer closest to end users.

In addition to the education domain, Merlyn Mind works directly with enterprises across industries such as healthcare in a consultative approach to define opportunities for AI to deeply impact enterprise productivity. Merlyn Mind develops and provides APIs to enable the development of highly efficient, cost effective, safe, and impactful solutions based on Merlyn Mind’s generative AI platform for their specific domain.

“One of the hardest parts of developing AI that offers a positive impact is ensuring quality, reliable engagement with each user’s specific needs,” says Dr. Nitta. “Google Cloud provides infrastructure that scales to meet our needs. It also offers a reliable platform, so users can easily and efficiently control their everyday tools with our AI.”

A primary objective for Merlyn Mind is using AI to transform how people interact with technology. Merlyn Mind is proving how purpose-built gen AI transforms technology experiences by removing burdens in the real world.

“Our relationship with Google Cloud enables us to keep costs down as we scale. This means we can expand our platform to better serve our existing customers, while also expanding into other industries and verticals,” says Belnap.

Looking forward, Merlyn Mind is supporting workforce development in the public sector and beyond through further purpose-built AI solutions.

Merlyn Mind also adds value to the Google ecosystem

"We're pleased to support partners like Merlyn Mind that bring their industry expertise to build responsible, effective, and education-specific AI models with our best-in-class Generative AI technology,” says Brent Mitchell, VP of State & Local Government and Education. “We are hopeful that this type of innovation helps improve the quality of education and lower costs to our diverse communities of learners.”

To learn more about Google Cloud for EdTech’s gen AI solutions and partnership programs, go to https://goo.gle/edtech. To learn more about Merlyn Mind’s domain specific AI platform and solutions, go to https://merlynmind.ai. Read more about Google’s AI Principles to understand how we develop and implement AI responsibly.