MICHAEL BALDWIN: Hi, everyone.
I'm Michael Baldwin.
I'm a group product manager in Google Cloud, focused
on AI and industry solutions.
My team leads product management across several of our priority
industries.
Thanks for joining us today.
The pandemic has clearly caused a tremendous amount
of rapid change for all of us.
Today, I want to speak about ways
that artificial intelligence has helped enterprises
adapt to those changes.
Today I'll cover trends that we're
seeing as we work with our customers, the impact
on key industries, and how AI can be helpful
in these moments of change, with some specific examples of how
Google Cloud has helped.
As we monitor our own business, and especially as we
partner closely with our customers,
there's a number of common themes related to the pandemic.
First, a number of industries are
seeing significant shifts in demand,
along with increased volatility.
Second, with this uncertainty comes cost pressures
for many businesses.
And as these businesses adapt, they often
face supply chain uncertainties.
In some cases, suppliers may be disrupted themselves
by the pandemic.
In other cases, they may be struggling to keep up
with spikes in demand.
And across the board, it's becoming much more difficult
to accurately forecast.
Customer support cases have risen,
with channels like call centers getting overwhelmed,
and virtual work has become the new normal for many of us
as people continue to social distance.
And across the board, from retail to banking to media
and beyond, we're seeing companies
accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.
And today, I'll talk to you about how
AI is helping with these digital transformations.
IDC recently said, "no doubt, the pandemic
is impacting how every industry is conducting business,
in some industries AI spend will actually increase."
Why is this happening?
Well, we think the benefits of AI in the industries
that we'll talk about today are going
to be amplified by the pandemic, as we'll discuss
in detail in the next section.
So there are six industries that I'll talk through today.
Retail and CPG, financial services, manufacturing, health
care and life sciences, media, entertainment and gaming,
and the public sector.
So first let's start with retail.
We're all consumers of retail in one way or another.
Retailers have seen massive shifts in demand.
There's overwhelming demand for food and drug,
while specialty and department stores and non essentials are
experiencing declining demand.
There's increased need for visibility into supply chains
and added need to quickly replenish in demand items.
Also, it's much harder now to rely on historical data
for demand forecasting.
In addition, retailers need to be
able to handle an increase in returns
from e-commerce channels, and be able to adapt
to using their stores as distribution centers,
for fulfillment through buy online and pickup in store.
We also see an acceleration in digital-first customer
journeys, in some cases, an abrupt shift from in-store
to online purchasing that puts a strain on e-commerce platforms,
fulfillment operations, and customer service and support.
Finally, during these difficult times,
some retailers are closing stores
and are hyper focused on expense reduction
to preserve liquidity.
As COVID-19 accelerates the transformation to digital,
retailers are looking for more tools
to personalize experiences and sell online.
Google Cloud's Recommendations AI solution
can help retailers adapt to the changing environment by helping
them sell the right product at the right time
to the right customer.
As an example of this, one of our customers, Digitec Galaxus,
saw a 40% increase in click-through rate
compared to a previous period.
Next, let's talk about financial services.
In banking, digital banking has increased rapidly
from 63% in 2019 to 72% today.
When we look at insurance, almost 50% of insurance agents
cited building new customer relationships
remotely as the biggest challenge during COVID-19.
In the payments industry, nearly 80% of consumers
use contactless payments today.
And finally, the financial services industry as a whole
is facing new and creative types of fraud.
The dollar value of attempted fraudulent transactions
grew 35% in April, year over year.
We've been working with our customers
using our Document AI technology to help.
For example, with mortgage rates low,
there's a surge in mortgage applications.
Using Document AI, we've created a bundle of specialized models
focused on specific document types used in lending,
and are working with lenders to speed up
the processing of paper-intensive mortgage
applications.
Also, when the US Congress authorized the Paycheck
Protection Program, or PPP, earlier this year,
we made the same technology available to help
with the processing of PPP loans.
Next, in manufacturing, like in many of these industries,
there's increased cost pressures.
Also, workforce capacity is expected
to decline due to things like age, absenteeism,
skill shortage, and economic pressures,
all accelerated by COVID-19.
The pandemic has brought about an increased focus
on safety and health mandates.
And finally, as many of these manufacturers
are supporting the supply chains of these other industries,
they themselves are facing unpredictable demand cycles.
An example of how Cloud AI is helping related to the safety
and health mandates that I mentioned earlier
is how our Vision API can be used for worker safety.
The Cloud Vision API uses AI to detect objects, motions, text,
and more to help derive insights.
So for this example, it can be used
to detect essential protective gear,
including hard hats, gloves, face masks and goggles.
Also, it can be used to detect distancing compliance
from other workers in close environments,
and to monitor proximity to machinery in hazardous sites.
The health care industry has been
on the front lines of many of the pressures and changes
brought about by the pandemic.
Large health system saw revenue plummet
in areas like elective care.
And elective care has been slowly resuming
after a 10-week hiatus, however smaller hospitals in some cases
are struggling to stay open.
Providers are beginning to embrace telehealth
with many visits now being conducted virtually.
And this is a trend that we expect to largely persist.
Payers have seen a surge in COVID-19 claims,
however these have been offset by a reduction
in overall claims.
And payers are working to adapt their plans
to cover telehealth.
The pharma supply chains are stretched thin,
and there's a need to transport time sensitive COVID-19 tests
and vaccines around the world.
And finally, the industry is moving
to a virtual clinical trials.
So an example of how cloud AI is helping here,
is how a US hospital used our Natural Language API
to analyze unstructured data from patient inquiries
across multiple channels to more accurately predict and triage
COVID-19 patients.
Next, there's media, entertainment, and gaming.
If your family is anything like my family,
shelter in place policies have increased media
streaming consumption and gaming.
But content production has been paused in many cases,
with sports leagues, physical productions, and major gaming
titles experiencing slowdowns in production throughput.
Because of the slowdown in production,
it's more important than ever to leverage existing content
and find flexible ways to produce new content.
And all of this like, in other industries,
is placing additional emphasis on cost efficiency
and flexibility.
An example of how AI is helping is the collaboration
between Google Cloud and Fox Sports
to enable Fox's employees to seamlessly search video
archives for specific footage using artificial intelligence.
By surfacing relevant videos quickly,
media companies are able to activate library content
faster.
And also, as live sports come back,
this capability will allow producers
to more quickly take library footage
and integrate it with live clips.
The public sector at all levels of government
is working to rapidly modernize the delivery
of essential services, as millions seek support
for unemployment, health care, payroll, and public health
measures.
Government agencies and academic institutions,
just like their counterparts in the private sector,
are moving to digital platforms and collaboration tools
to maintain operations.
And amid this rapid shift, there's
a continued focus on data privacy and security.
Finally, like we talked about in other areas of the economy,
governments and schools are facing cost pressures
and are being asked to operate with efficiency
and flexibility.
The state of New Jersey's Department of Labor
worked with Google Cloud to deploy
an AI-powered virtual chat bot to provide real time
answers to the 20 most common unemployment questions.
And we'll talk through some more examples from the public sector
later.
Now let's go into more detail with some specific examples
where Google Cloud AI has been partnering closely
with our customers.
I'll talk about three areas.
First, Contact Center AI, including virtual agents.
Second, applying our Lending AI solution
to the Paycheck Protection Program.
And third, how new features in Google Meet
have been supporting remote work.
First, let me share a quick overview of our Contact Center
AI solution.
Contact Center AI helps deliver exceptional customer service
and increased operational efficiency
using artificial intelligence.
It does this in a few ways.
First, with Dialogflow, it automates basic chat and voice
interactions.
Next, with Agent Assist, it makes
human agents more effective.
And third, with Contact Center AI insights,
it unlocks insights about call drivers and customer service
interactions.
As the pandemic took hold and we saw that many call centers were
becoming overwhelmed, our Cloud AI teams quickly
built and implemented a customized Contact Center AI
virtual agent to respond to questions related to COVID-19.
The rapid response virtual agent has
been deployed across government and health care.
I mentioned the state of New Jersey's Department of Labor
earlier.
In addition, the state of Illinois' Department
of Employment Security also used this solution
to address unemployment inquiries,
with more than 2.6 million voice and chat interactions handled
by the virtual agent so far.
In health care, Penn Medicine has enabled 24/7 access
to COVID-19 information for concerned citizens
using this capability.
Next, Document AI is a solution that
helps organizations unlock insights
from their mountains of documents
using artificial intelligence.
It turns unstructured data into structured data,
which means you can now understand it and utilize it.
In the United States, the Small Business Administration's
Paycheck Protection Program made funding
available to help businesses keep their workforces employed
during the COVID-19 crisis.
As you might expect, this led to a massive increase
in loan applications that needed to be processed.
Building on top of our Document AI solution,
we created the Paycheck Protection Program Parser
to enable lenders to use artificial intelligence
to extract structured information from loan documents
submitted by applicants.
This can save time, can be implemented quickly
and securely, and improves the customer experience
by making the loan process more efficient.
Finally, many of us are now familiar with remote work
as the new normal.
Our customers at Google Cloud have not only
adopted video for traditional team meetings,
but have also adopted video for new use cases,
including virtual all hands, frontline trainings,
and customer engagement.
In fact, these are all ways me and my team at Google
have used video just in the past week,
and we see our customers doing the same.
However, when you're having a virtual meeting,
there's nothing more distracting than noise interference.
Perhaps people chatting in the background, a colleague
pounding on their keyboard as they take notes,
or the shuffling of papers.
The Google Meet team has used AI to limit these distractions
by intelligently filtering out background noises in real time.
Now we'll play a short video showing you how this works.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: Hey, I'm boarding in a minute.
Sorry, it's kind of loud here.
Hey, I'm boarding in a minute.
But let's dive in real quick.
[END PLAYBACK]
MICHAEL BALDWIN: As you can see, with artificial intelligence,
we can limit these distractions and make the meeting much more
efficient.
As another example of this, earlier we
talked about how the health care industry
is shifting to telehealth.
For example, the Cambridge Health Alliance
is an example of a health system with over 6,000 staff
and 140,000 patients in Massachusetts
that uses Google Meet to support staff and caregivers,
and the solution has become an integral part
of the team's work.
They've conducted more than 1,200 telemedicine visits
to date, and their teams are conducting
over 1,000 Meet sessions per day for collaboration.
And that brings us to the end.
So to wrap things up, we know this is a difficult time.
The pandemic has forced companies and governments
to evolve at a rapid pace.
At Google Cloud, we're here to help you reach your goals more
quickly and to adapt to your unique needs using AI and ML.
And as you can see from the examples
that we've talked through today, AI isn't a science experiment.
It's being used to solve real world problems in business
and the public sector.
Thanks for tuning in.
And we wish you, your family, your friends, and colleagues
all the best during these challenging times.
If you're interested in learning more about any of the solutions
that I discussed today, you can visit
cloud.google.com/solutions/ai to get in touch and get started.
We look forward to hearing from you and thank you.