DOMINIK WEE: Hi, everybody.
Thanks for joining us today for a session
on transforming manufacturing to meet
changing customer expectations.
My name is Dominik Wee.
I'm the Managing Director of Manufacturing and Industrial
Solutions at Google Cloud.
And joining me today is Viren Shah,
Chief Digital Officer at GE Appliances, a Haier company.
Thanks so much, Viren, for joining us today.
The context of our discussion, today,
is that expectations on what the good manufactured product looks
like are changing.
Customers expect intuitive ease of use as a standard today.
They also expect hyper personalization and integration
with their digital lives, right, for instance,
having the music they're listening
to at home everywhere.
And there's a multitude of new hybrid physical and digital
experiences, hardware products that
have been enriched with new digital services.
But it's not just for the customer expectations.
Also, manufacturing companies are
looking to generate new value from their products.
Understanding their customers better
enables them to capture new growth opportunities
and also create new digital revenue streams from services.
This has been a journey that's been going on for a while.
First, we had electronic products
with some embedded computing.
Think about your automated lawnmower
that would switch on at a certain time in the morning.
Then these products have become connected, right,
being able to start the lawnmower from your phone.
Then products became smart, talking to each other,
right, being able to automate-- for instance,
making sure that your watering system in the garden
doesn't start when the lawn mower is driving.
And so, now, the next generation,
we expect to be intelligent products, hardware products
that have AI infused so they can adjust their behavior to what
the user is expecting.
For consumer products, this clearly is very important.
Consumer products, as we are all very well aware of, right,
and that are getting enriched with these new AI-driven
experiences.
But it's not just for consumer products.
Also, in the industrial space, user expectations
are changing based on the experiences
people make with their consumer devices at home.
And, also, on the B2B and industrial side,
there are huge new opportunities for manufacturing companies
to capture new digital revenue streams.
At Google, we've had a lot of experience
in creating these intelligent products
and services, many, many different consumer
devices that you may be familiar with from your own home.
So what we're doing today is providing that power
to enterprises through a new solution
that we call Intelligent Products Essentials.
What Intelligent Products Essentials does
is to deliver these AI capabilities
to your own products and assets.
It's an end-to-end solution making it easy to deploy.
And it's also fast to launch and flexible,
meeting you where you are on your product connectivity
roadmap.
Intelligent Products Essentials applies for different product
categories.
It applies for consumer products, electronic devices,
connected appliances.
It applies to industrial assets, for instance,
manufacturing equipment.
For commercial B2B components, like sensors or batteries
that go into other hardware products,
and also B2B components that go into transportation,
for instance, train engines.
There's five key capabilities that we
enable through the Intelligent Products Essentials solution.
Number one, enabling you to run AI from the cloud,
but also directly on your device.
Then providing a digital experience
on companion devices, for instance, on phones or tablets.
Personalizing the digital experiences from the learnings
you have from other customer interactions.
And then, also, integrating that data
you have from the product and the user with the data
you have on your back-end and making sure
you have a holistic view and are able to deliver
more value to your customer.
And then, lastly, making sure your devices and products
stay up-to-date and you have all the best intelligence
on what the devices are doing in the field.
With that, I would like to hand over
to Viren, who is joining us to talk
about how GE Appliances has been working with us.
Thanks so much for the great collaboration, Viren.
We are very proud to be able to work with you in this space.
VIREN SHAH: Thank you for the opportunity, Dominik,
and it is an honor to be sharing a platform on the Google Cloud
to share what we are doing in the connected world.
So at GE Appliances, our story began many, many years
ago as our technology organization and champion,
our CEO, Kevin Nolan, who had this amazing vision of just
what you talked about.
How are we going to connect businesses to people?
And we came up with this thought of connected appliances.
What you see on the map, here, it's
not a Verizon cellular coverage.
It's actually the number of connected appliances
that are talking to us on a regular basis.
We send just about 100 billion-plus transactions
to the cloud, just to capture what's
going on with these appliances.
We are able to see many, many interactions
with our mobile apps as well as many voice interactions
that you can do with our smart appliances.
And, by the way, we have just begun.
What I feel, with the help of Google Cloud,
our smart appliances will be made further intelligent,
and we'll talk about that on the next slide.
What we are doing at GE Appliances
is we are becoming an ecosystem appliance company.
What that basically means is we are enhancing and using
the power of data and technology to truly become
a hardware and a software-focused organization.
Our goal, here, is to use the Google Cloud to make
our smart products very intelligent,
to enable every consumer's digital lifestyle
and create an amazing frictionless experience.
Because, imagine this, today, just cooking dinner, that
requires so many interactions, right from the point of you
begin going from work to the time
you reach home, all the recipes you need, all the ingredients
you need, the prep work you need, the power you need,
and then making sure that the appliance is working fine.
We are trying to take all of these interactions
and create a seamless experience.
So what do I mean by that?
Imagine this.
If you are watching something on YouTube and say,
that's what I want to cook by the time I'm home,
our appliance can actually order it from the grocery store.
By the time you come, the groceries are delivered.
And, at the same time, all you have to do is put, for example,
say, the pizza, as given in an example here, in the oven.
And the camera in the oven recognizes
what it needs to cook to your customization
and personalization needs, right to the level
of the crispness you want.
Having said that, we also very sustainability-focused,
and our appliances can recognize how
to use off-peak energy during peak times.
And that is going to be a great functionality that a consumer
gets, not only to have the environment,
also have some cost savings.
On top of that, with the billions of transactions
I was talking about on the previous slide,
we are able to proactively diagnose
the performance of the appliance so that either to help tune,
you know, like we would do with the software,
just like I talked about a minute ago, or also
being able to troubleshoot it pretty fast.
Imagine this.
With our over-the-air upgrade functionality,
we were able to turn on air frying functionality
in many ovens, just about 200,000 of them,
very recently, just like that.
We are very much focused using technology
to enable us to become the ecosystem appliance company.
So having said that, you have heard me talk a lot.
Let's see what the art of the possible looks about.
Let's move on to a video which explains this way better than I
can share.
And thank you, Dominik, for allowing
me to share this platform with you because we are so looking
forward to this journey with Google Cloud
helping us become better and enabling
many digital lifestyles.
Thank you.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- GE Appliances are powered by Android and Google Cloud.
This allows their engineers to create
AI models that monitor and predict when food is cooked.
These AI models can be trained in the cloud
by analyzing sensor and image data from thousands
of appliances and then deployed over the air
to the appliance using Vertex AI at the edge.
On the appliance, machine learning
leverages the oven camera and sensor data.
AutoML Vision identifies what's being cooked
and predicts its doneness by analyzing
the regions and temperature.
Real-time monitoring controls oven temperature and time
to ensure a perfectly done turkey.
GE appliance engineers can analyze
product telemetry and AI model performance in the cloud.
This helps them continually improve cooking features
with over-the-air updates.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
DOMINIK WEE: I hope you enjoyed the demo as much as I did.
Thanks so much for the great collaboration, Viren.
It's a real pleasure and privilege
to be working with you, and I'm very much looking forward
to the innovation we're going to be driving together
in the Consumer Appliances space.
What I want to share in closing is
that we have a number of partners
that we are working very closely together with in order
to make it easier for our customers to bring
their technology to life.
We have Comodule, Afero, and Ayla Networks
who help us on the edge, bringing connectivity
and intelligence to your products.
And then we have GFT, Quantiphi, SoftServe, and Clear Object
who are helping us build the end-to-end integration
into your existing IT and product stack.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
I hope you found this session interesting.
Have a good day.
Bye-bye.