This past week, Vegas hosted the 2024 Google Cloud Next event, where Google Cloud unveiled a series of groundbreaking innovations aimed at revolutionising business and everyday life through AI. Our CEO, John Cofie, had the opportunity to attend and get a good look at what’s in store.

They even had performances from Grammy® Award winners, Kings of Leon and Anderson Paak. Without further ado, here’s a comprehensive recap of the event, spotlighting the transformative potential AI holds for us all.

Innovations and Advances

Google Cloud has been on an extraordinary march toward innovation, boasting over a thousand product advances since last year. The event showcased new leaps in Google’s planet-scale infrastructure, now spanning 40 regions globally, alongside new subsea cables enhancing connectivity with low latency and their new ​​AI Hypercomputer.

A key focus of the event was the advancement of generative AI technologies. More than 300 customers and partners, including giants like Deutsche Bank, Estée Lauder, and McDonald’s, shared their successes in integrating Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities into their operations.

Did you know, more than 60% of funded gen AI startups and nearly 90% of gen AI unicorns are now Google Cloud customers, including companies like Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Contextual AI, Essential AI, and Mistral AI.

Spotlight on Generative AI

Google Cloud is pushing the envelope with its Gemini models and AI-optimised infrastructure. Among the notable announcements were the Gemini 1.5 Pro, enhancing long context understanding and the ability to process audio files, plus various enhancements across Google Workspace with Gemini technology integrating seamlessly into tools like Gmail and Docs.

The introduction of custom silicon, such as the Google Axion and the general availability of TPU v5p, is a great example of Google’s continued commitment to providing robust infrastructure to support the most demanding AI applications.

Strategic Partnerships and Expanding Ecosystem

The event wasn’t just about technological advances but also strengthening partnerships, something we at Chesamel are proud to be a part of. New collaborations were announced with leading corporations like Bayer, Cintas, and Mercedes Benz, each aiming to leverage Google Cloud’s AI solutions for enhanced operational efficiency and innovation.

Vertex AI and the Power of Agents

Google’s Vertex AI platform received significant enhancements, including expanded model access and new agent-building capabilities. This platform allows enterprises to deploy powerful AI agents that can perform a variety of tasks, from enhancing customer service to streamlining internal operations.

This also includes Vertex AI Agent Builder which brings together foundation models, Google Search, and other developer tools, to make it easy for you to build and deploy agents. It provides the convenience of a no-code agent builder console alongside powerful grounding, orchestration and augmentation capabilities.

Securing the Future with Gemini

Security was a key theme, with new AI-driven capabilities unveiled to strengthen cybersecurity. Innovations like Gemini in Threat Intelligence and Security Operations are set to provide organisations with advanced tools to safeguard their digital assets.

Gemini in Threat Intelligence: Uses natural language to deliver deep insight into threat actor behaviour. Gemini can analyse much larger samples of potentially malicious code, and the larger context window allows for analysis of the interactions between modules, providing new insight into the code’s true intent.

Gemini in Security Operations: A new assisted investigation feature converts natural language to detections, summarises event data, recommends actions to take, and navigates users through the platform via conversational chat.

What’s Next for Google Cloud?

As we look ahead, Google Cloud’s trajectory is clearly focused on making AI helpful for everyone, to improve the lives of people around the globe. What a time to be part of this AI revolution. With their extensive AI ecosystem and continuous improvements to global infrastructure and AI models, Google Cloud is well-positioned to lead the way in AI transformation.

As businesses and developers harness these tools, the possibilities are limitless. For companies like Chesamel, attending such events opens up a world of opportunities to integrate these innovations into their services, enabling them to drive transformational change for their clients.

If you would like a trusted partner to help you understand and integrate these new tools to fuel the digital transformation of your business, Chesamel is here to help. We help our clients embrace and harness cloud technologies, data & analytics, artificial intelligence, managed services and much more to accelerate their growth and give them a leg up on their competitors.

Get in touch with our team, to learn more.