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SPEAKER 1: In yesterday's keynote,
we heard all about modernization with Google Cloud.
Today's keynote took us a step further,
focusing on infrastructure, insight, and innovation.
Director of Cloud AI Strategy and Operations, Tracy Frey
is here with us to tell us more.
Tracy, give us the highlights from today's keynote.
TRACY FREY: So I think one of the most exciting things,
is that we're really starting to see how customers are
leveraging the Cloud and building Cloud
strategy no matter where they're starting.
Whether that's starting from on prem, hybrid,
all of these things are now available.
And we as an overall Cloud organization
have been working really hard to make it incredibly
easy for customers to start where they are and leverage
our products and services to really update
their infrastructure and drive innovation for their companies.
And that was really clear to me today,
and it was really exciting to see it all come together.
SPEAKER 2: Now, AI is embedded in everything we do.
What are you most excited for about AI and Google Cloud
and other parts of Google?
TRACY FREY: You know, it's a little bit of a similar answer,
to be honest.
So over the last year and a half,
I've spoken with hundreds of customers.
And everybody is really excited about AI.
But a lot of organizations don't know what that means.
And they don't know how AI can impact
their business and the business problems
that they're facing today.
And we've been working really hard to create
a set of products and solutions and services that
can help address some of those mission
critical problems very easily for customers.
And so I'm really excited to see some of those
examples really start to come to light.
Things like Salesforce working with Hulu
on our contact center, our natural language
processes being a part of the Einstein Bot.
Things like what Baker Hughes GE is doing with our Cloud AI
platform.
It's really exciting to see these tactical examples of how
AI can impact an enterprise.
SPEAKER 1: Absolutely.
We saw a lot of great demos showing Google Cloud products
at work.
How are these new products helping our customers
manage data reliably and securely,
so they can modernize scale and can really be successful?
TRACY FREY: Well, if you look at what
we saw in the smart analytics demo,
you could really see the end-to-end experience
for customers.
And that's a lot of where the pain has been.
So for example, in Cloud AI, we own
Kaggle, which is the world's largest
community of data scientists.
And they often joke that data scientists will
say that 90% of the pain in machine learning
is cleaning the data and 10% is complaining
about cleaning the data.
And that is an experience that I think
anybody who has worked to extract insights
from their data can relate to.
Because it can be extraordinarily painful.
And when you see all of the products that
are coming together across our smart analytics platform,
everything from BigQuery and Data Fusion, all
of those pieces, AutoML Tables, you
can start to see how easy it can be
for customers to extract those insights at scale very quickly.
SPEAKER 2: And speaking of these features that help our data
analytics workflows, we saw some great demos highlighting
some new features, like Cloud Data Fusion, BigQuery BI
Engine and AutoML Tables.
How can developers, scientists, and analysts
apply these to support their hybrid workloads?
TRACY FREY: So I can speak specifically to AutoML Tables,
because that's the product that our team works on.
And one of the things that I have really
loved about the AutoML suite is that it really
doesn't require machine learning expertise to use it.
And at the same time, it's an extraordinarily helpful tool
for people who are machine learning experts and builders.
And it has the ability to stretch
across those populations and make
it really useful for anybody.
We have heard over and over that structured data is
a real challenge for customers.
And so being able to leverage something
like AutoML Tables, where customers
can start to piece together information from disparate data
sets, build them all together, allow machine learning models
to be created for you through the AutoML tool,
without having to write any code.
It just is really exciting to see what that can do.
SPEAKER 1: Absolutely.
And can you give us some examples from today's keynote
of how our viewers will be able to use
machine learning and Google AI?
Especially those in companies just starting out
who may not already have a lot of ML experience.
TRACY FREY: Yeah, absolutely.
So there are a couple problems that we've
heard from customers that are really
common across the landscape of enterprise customers.
A top one is in contact centers and customer service.
And this is a challenge that almost every organization
I've spoken with faces in some form or fashion.
Our AI has worked really hard to enhance the human agents who
are working in contact centers, give them
everything they need at their fingertips in a really
efficient and beautiful way.
And what we've done there is integrate
our AI with the key players in the contact center space
so that it doesn't require customers to do a full rip
and replace on hardware they've already purchased.
And so that's a very easy way to get started.
We've also heard from almost every customer
that another area they really struggle with is dark data.
And that exists in documents that
are both physical documents, digital documents.
That challenge, if you think about a paper that you read
or a PDF where you have graphs and tables
and all kinds of information-- and the ability to actually
be able to extract those pieces, those components using AI,
make sense of them, and then pull insights out
of that through our document understanding AI,
we really believe is going to help customers gain efficiency
and information much faster.
And that's another way that I think
would be great for customers to get
started that we've seen today.
SPEAKER 2: Now, many people may know
that we build AI into a lot of our products,
like G Suite, Google Maps.
How can our customers use those tools
to build their innovative features into their own tools
and products?
TRACY FREY: So we offer a range of products.
Everywhere from pre-trained APIs to AutoMLs,
where you can customize to meet your specific needs,
through to our Cloud AI platform,
where you can very easily build your own machine
learning models if you have that expertise.
And so across that range there's an opportunity
for customers to really be able to leverage
the power of Google AI in almost every business problem
they face.
And that can be very exciting.
And it can be a little bit daunting
if you don't know exactly where to get started.
And so we are offering a number of solutions,
through things like our professional services
organization.
For customers who aren't sure where to start,
we can help them.
And then we have a series of demos
of tools, all kinds of information
that you can gather to really help
you figure out where AI can help make your business better.
SPEAKER 1: So as the Director of AI Strategy,
is there anything you can tell us
about what we can look forward to in the near future?
TRACY FREY: That's a great question.
So I think what's top of mind for me is all of the ways
that we can make AI easier for companies to use.
How we can help them scale their businesses.
And so we are spending a lot of time
in really building that ease of use into everything we offer.
Another area that you will likely start to see from us
is continuing our efforts around explainability.
So I really firmly believe that in order for AI
to be successful it really has to be trusted.
And in order for it to be trusted
it has to be built and deployed and thought of responsibly.
And part of that is about understanding
what is in those machine learning models
and how they're making decisions.
And so we have a lot of exciting efforts around explainability
and interpretability.
SPEAKER 1: Also, trust is such an important feature in all
of the things that we do.
TRACY FREY: That's right.
SPEAKER 1: Tracy, thank you so much for helping
us understand the power of AI to improve our work.
TRACY FREY: You're so welcome, glad to be here.
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