The Google Data Cloud & AI Summit is an annual event and a part of Google's digital cloud summit series. It focuses on revealing insights, solutions, business transformation opportunities, and the latest innovations in Google Data Cloud for AI, databases, data analytics, and business intelligence to enthusiasts, developers, business users, and AI practitioners.

This year's event (Mar 29 Americas, Mar 30 EMEA) was the third edition of the summit and it featured keynotes and detailed opinions on the latest trends in AI and announcements from Google Cloud's technology leaders. Case studies, insights, and acknowledgments from industry leaders, Google Cloud partners, and customers were also available, as well as demos for hands-on learning and implementation.

This article is a comprehensive recap of everything that happened all through the event.

Major Announcements

Generative AI

Using a combination of foundation models, conversation AI, and enterprise search, Google Cloud has launched Generative AI App Builder and added foundation models to support Vertex AI. These products will bring the numerous capabilities of Generative AI to enterprises.

1. Gen AI App Builder

   Enables enterprises to easily develop their custom, tailor-made AI apps within their ecosystem to serve their customers through search, conversational, and other assistive experiences.

2. Gen AI support in Vertex AI

   Allows for customizable foundational models and easy API access to be used by Data Science teams and other developers in the same platform they use to build and deploy machine learning models.

Big Query Editions

In Big Query Editions, Google Cloud has introduced three packages (Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus) enabled by autoscaling with different pricing/feature components to suit different types of customers in their use of Big Query. They allow for single and multi-year discounts for heavy users and pay-as-you-go payment plans. Mixing and matching editions per price/capacity/performance is also allowed.

AlloyDB Omni

AlloyDB is a fully-managed, PostgreSQL-compatible GCP database service for demanding transactional and analytical workloads. It fuses GCP capabilities with PostgreSQL, for superior performance, scale, and availability.

AlloyDB Omni is a downloadable version of AlloyDB, which users can install on premises. It will facilitate a systematic transition to the cloud while optimizing existing legacy databases.

Looker Modeler

Looker Modeler is a metrics layer that enables a single source of truth for data for enterprises. It will support integrations with BI tools (Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio), embedded analytics, API use cases, and a wide range of other features.

Updates

• Big Query performance improvements: general availability of autoscaling for cost-effective capacity management, adaptive file sizing for Capacitor, history-based query optimizer for repeated queries, dynamic concurrency and queuing model for simultaneous queries, and capacitor dynamic metadata for identifying relevant data for a query.

• Vertex AI improvements: fusion of Generative AI onto vertex AI, model garden for model discovery - foundation, 3rd party, and pre-trained models, and Generative AI Studio: a managed environment for interaction and deployment of foundation models. Gen AI APIs will now be available in the Gen AI Studio, for direct (out-of-the-box OOTB) or customized uses. These APIs will enable code generation and completion, image and video generation, summarizations, recommendations, and dialogue.

• Databases updates: system insights have now been added to Cloud Spanner to enable database optimization at scale, point-in-time recovery has been extended to SQL Server, and real-time streaming and data replication are available on Spanner and Bigtable for integration with other systems.

• CCAI Contact Centre Supercharged with Generative AI: Google Cloud's Contact Centre AI platform has been boosted with Generative AI capabilities allowing for Auto Chatbots, Insights and Analytics, and Agent Assist features to improve the efficiency of live agents, for seamless customer service.

Customer Insights

• Booking.com, the world's largest online travel agency, uses BigQuery to scale and manage its PPC marketing campaigns across multiple channels. Dataflow and Spanner are also used for ETL on its datasets, and reduced complexity.

• FLUIDEFI, a Web3 platform providing auditable decentralized financial data, migrated 2 billion Web3 analytics insights from Amazon Aurora to GCPs AlloyDB and now has 3x faster performance and 60% cost reductions.

  https://twitter.com/FLUIDEFI_OFC/status/1641828376301256704?s=20

• Tabnine, an AI assistant for software developers, uses Google Cloud to provide assistive code features for over 1 million developers monthly.

• Orange, a global leader in telecommunications, uses GCP BigQuery and VertexAI for serverless applications and MLOps in deploying customized edge computing and 5G solutions for driving connectivity services. It increased its revenues, maximized cost savings, and improved experiences for its customers.

• ShareChat, an Indian social media platform, uses Spanner and Bigtable for its relational and non-relational databases, enjoying flexible vertical scalability and cost-savings in building data-rich applications and features for non-English speakers.

• Oakbrook Finance, a medium-sized financial services company, launched 2 new products, implemented a fully automated collections strategy, and makes better lending decisions and options available to its customers, by leveraging the Databricks, Kubernetes engine, and Looker on Google Cloud.

• CNA Insurance, one of the largest commercial property and casualty insurance companies in the USA, migrated a 20-year-old legacy data warehouse to Google Cloud using BigQuery and now enjoys the benefits of a highly scalable and fully managed cloud data warehouse.

Partnerships

Google Cloud x Nvidia

Google has strengthened its partnership with Nvidia to provide Google Cloud customers with high-performance AI Infrastructure for Generative AI and accelerated cloud computing in an energy-efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable way.

• first cloud provider to offer the NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU, purpose-built for Gen AI applications

• the NVIDIA h100 Tensor Core GPU has been added to the google cloud for large-scale training of intense and complex machine-learning models

• NVIDIA AI Enterprise is now available on GCP Marketplace, for accelerated development of AI applications and multi-faceted support from Nvidia

• Google Cloud now offers the GPU-accelerated Apache Spark on Cloud Dataproc, using the Nvidia Rapids Library to increase ML and ETL workloads

Juicy Bits

• Google Cloud's AI Tester Truster Program

  Google is providing access for people to learn about, experience, and give feedback on its current and emerging generative AI capabilities through a waitlist for its trusted tester program, as availability is expanded.

• AlloyDb Omni

  The Technology preview for AlloyDB Omni is available, alongside detailed download and installation instructions.

• Looker Modeler

  The Looker Modeler is available on preview for enterprises.

• GCP Roadmaps

  Google Cloud customers are allowed to request access to the latest GCP roadmaps. It can be made available under the guidelines of a strict NDA.

Into the Future

• Continuous Innovation in BigQuery

  

  Google Cloud will robustly improve more aspects of BigQuery, in its Migrations, Usability, Data Sharing, Integration, and lots more.

• APIs for Vertex AI

  More APIs are on the way for Vertex AI, to help developers to be more efficient in their production process.

Summary

Google has introduced Generative AI capabilities powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) across its entire Cloud, Data, and Artificial Intelligence portfolio, in line with its core strategy of building a unified open and intelligent data cloud.

The summit is available on-demand here for viewing.

Learning and Resources

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