4 key learnings to kickstart your startup's generative AI journey

In recent months, AI has been the name of the game. Businesses and consumers clamor to get their hands on the latest technology. At Google Cloud, we’re excited about the value AI holds for society, businesses and for the billions of people who use our products every day. To make the most of the technology, our AI experts shared their industry insights and practical tips in our recent ‘Generative AI for Startups’ webinar. 

Making the most of generative AI for startups

To give you a peek into what has been discussed, we have summarized our key learnings for you:

1. The top 4 generative AI powered use cases for startups

While generative AI is applicable to basically any business function, we've identified four core use cases with significant value for startups: 

• First, you can make complex data easily accessible. You can improve time-to-value to search, navigate, and extract insights and understanding from large amounts of data. 

• Second, it helps improve customer experience, reaching a larger client base by making online interactions more natural, conversational, and rewarding. 

• Further, using generative AI, you can maximize employee productivity with content generation at the click of a button, generating text, code and images quickly and multi-modally, speeding up every business process. 

• Finally, it allows you to accelerate research processes by finding complex subject domain information across many disparate sources and synthesizing the findings.

2. Mastering your industry

Generative AI can also help create a competitive advantage in industry-specific challenges. Take the media industry for example: there, generative AI can be leveraged to create interactive streaming experiences that allow viewers to control the content they see and how they see it. In financial services, generative AI can be used to simulate fraudulent transactions and identify patterns that may indicate fraud. For the gaming industry, perhaps the most radical change that generative AI can bring is the ability to help create entirely new game experiences in real time as the game is played. By automating tasks, generating new content, and creating more immersive experiences, generative AI can make games more fun, engaging, and cost-effective.

3. 101: How to prompt

Prompt design allows for fast experimentation and customization, and because you’re not writing any complicated code, you don’t need to be an ML expert to get started. However, designing the right prompt is more art than science and takes some iterations and thought to get to the results you want. The output is also highly dependent on the data the model was trained on, and the exact wording and the order of the words in the prompt matter to the output. In our event, we covered the zero-shot, one-shot and few-shot prompting and showed how to get the LLM to give you the output you need. 

4. What’s possible with generative AI on Google Cloud?

Google has made significant contributions to open-source AI, sharing its breakthroughs with the world. This includes the defeat of the AlphaGo champion, the development of eye disease detection, the Word-2-vec language model, the BERT transformer language model, and AlphaFold, which was able to predict the structures of known proteins. Most of these models are open source, allowing other researchers to build on Google's work.

With generative AI, we’ve taken this to a whole new level. We offer products on the consumer side (Bard), and the enterprise side (Vertex AI). The enterprise products offer higher control over your data and access security and also have built-in options to make your models accurate and explainable. With Model Garden in Vertex AI, you have access to many pre-trained models that you can customize, tune, and access via the API to connect to your own solutions. In all these steps your data is encrypted and stays under your control.

We also introduced Generative AI App Builder, a tool that allows you to build apps within minutes and connect it to your data in the background. Watch the on-demand material to see how to get started with Generative AI App Builder and Model Garden and see some concrete use cases for startups starting their generative AI journey. 

Catch the full content and watch the webinar on demand to learn more about how generative AI can help transform your business.

Google for Startups Cloud Program AI benefits 

The Google for Startups Cloud Program offers seed-Series A AI-first startups up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits to use over two years, dedicated startup success managers, technical support, advanced AI training, access to exclusive events, and more!

These benefits are designed to give AI startups the technology, resources, and community they need to build and scale faster, smarter, and more cost-effectively. AI startups can leverage Google’s leading AI research and technology, best-in-class AI and ML solutions, and open AI ecosystem by joining the program and our growing AI startup community. Apply today.