Google Cloud Next ’24 Keynote: The New Way to Cloud Leads Directly to AI and Enterprise Choice

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and his senior leaders opened Google Cloud Next ’24 with a jam-packed roster of major AI and Generative AI (GenAI) related announcements and previews. Taken collectively and when compared to recent GenAI announcements from other hyperscalers, they illustrate how competition in the GenAI market is quickly becoming a contest of how well major hyperscalers position themselves as having the better GenAI infrastructure and offerings – while simultaneously demonstrating that they’re strong advocates of enterprise choice, not vendor lock-in.

Despite some public setbacks, Google made it unquestionably clear that it is marching full speed ahead with the rapid development of its Gemini GenAI chatbot and Vertex AI platform, with the goal of offering broad choices to developers, tech practitioners, and enterprise business leaders.  

The features and capabilities unveiled during the Google Cloud keynote (and there was something for everyone – developers, data scientists, customer service leaders, marketers, and salespeople) were also a tacit acknowledgment that enterprise sophistication around GenAI continues to grow steadily, as companies become more familiar with the technology, and explore the most optimal platforms and large language models (LLMs) to power GenAI for specific use cases and price requirements.

Enterprises are eager to explore GenAI’s benefits, and Google Cloud leaders spotlighted how the company is working with a list of impressive industry heavyweights – Goldman Sachs, Mercedes Benz, Uber, and Walmart, to name just a few. However, enterprises (particularly mid-sized companies) also do not want to put themselves in a position where they are locked into one GenAI platform, tool set, or large language model (LLM). Many are still recovering from the early days of cloud lock-in and are actively engaged in cloud modernization projects to optimize workloads and costs in a multi-cloud environment. By mirroring previous announcements from AWS and Microsoft, Google Cloud made it clear during the opening keynote that they want to enable GenAI choice, not hinder it. As Kurian said: “We’re the only cloud to offer widely used first-party, third-party, and open-source models [for Gemini].”

GenAI’s accelerating rate of adoption will continue to spur new GenAI and AI innovations from hyperscalers and, at the same time, open up new opportunities for service providers that can survey the GenAI landscape, match the right LLMs and offerings with specific use cases, and enable GenAI applications at scale. It also demonstrates the importance of working with providers who are properly trained and certified on hyperscalers’ AI platforms to understand their potential impact fully.

At Google Cloud Next, before Kurian and Google Cloud leaders lead the 30,000 conference attendees through a whiz-bang list of back-to-back GenAI-related announcements, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared via video to remind the audience that Google is the fastest-growing cloud provider. Pichai pointed out that Google Cloud had a $36 billion annual revenue run-rate in Q4 – five times its run-rate of five years ago.

Here are just a few highlights from the Day 1 keynote.

• Enabling integrated GenAI infrastructure: Several announcements focused on how GenAI requires highly scalable cloud infrastructure that must generate constantly rising levels of compute power – a welcome reminder of the cloud’s importance for GenAI’s future. To that end, Google Cloud highlighted its AI Hypercomputer (originally unveiled in December) as a core GenAI infrastructure component with its TPUs for advanced machine learning workloads, GPUs, and AI software. The company also announced Google Axion, its first chip for the data center, which Kurian said is 60% more energy efficient than current processors.
• GenAI agents everywhere: With the release of Gemini 1.5 Pro (available in public preview) and Vertex AI Agent Builder, Google Cloud made some strong strides toward enabling enterprises to plan, design, build, test, and fine-tune GenAI-powered virtual agents across industries and use cases before deployment. This can have massive implications in transforming not only customer service but also employee experiences. Google Cloud also highlighted the ability to build GenAI-powered Data Agents to draw insights from enterprise data sets that can drive consumer personalization to new levels.
  
  

  

• Gemini’s expanded role in Google Workspace: Gemini will play an even greater role in Google Workplace, which will expose more end users to GenAI’s potential productivity, efficiency, and creative benefits.  Aparna Pappu, GM and VP of Google Workspace, and her team highlighted a list of GenAI-driven add-ons, culminating in the unveiling of Google Vids, which allows businesses to create professional-quality videos through simple prompts, ones that can be fully edited and customized.
  

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