Better Banking and Vertex AI Growth Strategy

Google's Q3 2024 earnings call showcased an impressive performance across Search, YouTube, and, notably, Google Cloud. Within Cloud, Vertex AI is proving to be a standout product, aligning with Google’s ambitious AI strategy. CEO Sundar Pichai emphasized Google’s commitment to a full-stack approach, pairing leading infrastructure, groundbreaking research, and far-reaching products. Vertex AI is a perfect embodiment of these three components, especially as it addresses the expanding demand for powerful and adaptable AI solutions in enterprise settings.

?Vertex AI’s Role in Google’s AI Strategy

Vertex AI represents Google’s answer to the growing need for an enterprise-grade AI platform that combines advanced machine learning (ML) tools with seamless integration capabilities. Its mission is clear: to allow businesses to leverage Google’s powerful AI technology to build, deploy, and scale customized ML models. Vertex has distinguished itself in several ways:

1. Foundation Models and API Growth: Vertex AI has seen a remarkable 14x growth in Gemini API calls within just six months. Google’s Gemini models, built with leading multimodal capabilities, offer businesses cutting-edge tools for complex AI applications. For example, companies like Snap have leveraged these capabilities to enhance user engagement with its My AI chatbot. This growth illustrates how Vertex AI is fueling innovation and supporting highly interactive applications.

2. AI and Data Synergy with BigQuery: Google’s decision to integrate Vertex AI with BigQuery, a leading analytics platform, offers businesses real-time, multimodal data analysis. This combination has proven beneficial for clients like Hiscox, which can now process complex insurance quotes from days to mere minutes. The seamless blend of AI with data science is a compelling proposition for companies looking to make faster, data-driven decisions.

3. Support for Diverse Industries and Use Cases:?

• Insurance: Vertex AI and BigQuery are enabling Hiscox, a leading Lloyd’s of London insurer, to process complex underwriting faster than ever before—reducing response times from days to minutes. This real-time data synergy helps insurers make faster, more accurate decisions, improving customer experiences.
• Cybersecurity: By using Google Threat Intelligence and Security Operations, companies like BBVA and Deloitte are detecting and responding to threats more efficiently, with Mandiant-powered threat detection seeing adoption increase fourfold in 18 months. This enables enterprises to stay proactive in an evolving threat landscape.
• Retail: Vertex AI powers innovative customer experiences, as seen with Snap’s My AI feature, which uses Gemini’s multimodal capabilities to increase engagement by 2.5x in the U.S. This is the future of personalized, immersive customer interaction.

?Google’s AI Infrastructure for Vertex AI’s Growth

The accelerated growth of Vertex AI is driven by Google’s advancements in AI infrastructure. This includes Google’s custom-built TPUs, which now stand at the sixth-generation level with Trillium. These innovations have helped Google lower machine costs per query by over 90% and have doubled the scale of Gemini models. Google also offers various accelerator options, including NVIDIA GPUs, that serve a diverse range of enterprise requirements.

?Research-Driven Progress and the Power of DeepMind

Vertex AI’s impressive growth wouldn’t be possible without the advancements from Google DeepMind, which leads the way in developing Google’s Gemini models. DeepMind's work, acknowledged globally with Nobel Prize wins for researchers like Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, fuels Vertex AI’s long-context, multimodal, and agentive capabilities. Project Astra, for example, hints at future experiences where AI will have an even deeper understanding of the world, elevating AI’s role across sectors and industries.

Banking Industry Benefits:

Banking stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Vertex AI’s powerful capabilities, leveraging it to streamline operations, enhance customer experience, and improve decision-making in real-time. As financial institutions look to stay competitive and drive efficiency, Vertex AI offers transformative benefits across several core areas:

1. Personalized Customer Engagement: Vertex AI can analyze vast amounts of customer data to generate real-time insights, allowing banks to provide hyper-personalized services. By integrating AI models with customer data in BigQuery, banks can develop tailored recommendations for products like loans, credit cards, and wealth management solutions. This creates a seamless experience for customers and drives increased engagement.

2. Enhanced Risk Management: For banks, timely risk assessment is crucial. Vertex AI enables rapid processing of large data sets, making it easier to evaluate credit risk, detect fraud, and comply with regulatory standards. Using Vertex AI’s multimodal capabilities, financial institutions can track diverse data sources — from transactional data to behavioral analytics — to improve risk scoring and reduce the probability of defaults.

3. Accelerated Decision-Making: In complex, data-intensive environments like banking, speed and accuracy are critical. Banks can leverage Vertex AI to reduce processing time from days to seconds, as seen in the case of Hiscox in the insurance industry. This improvement empowers bankers to make faster, more informed decisions on loan approvals, investment strategies, and more.

4. Automated Operations: Vertex AI’s capabilities streamline routine tasks, including customer inquiries, loan applications, and KYC (Know Your Customer) procedures. With AI models trained to handle repetitive tasks, banks can reduce operational costs, increase efficiency, and free up resources to focus on high-value services.

?The Road Ahead for Vertex AI and Enterprise AI

Google’s reorganization to streamline its AI development efforts shows a commitment to scaling and improving Vertex AI. By moving the Gemini app team to DeepMind, Google aims to shorten deployment times and boost development efficiency. This strategic move is expected to accelerate innovations in Vertex AI, helping it address the rapidly growing enterprise demand for customized AI solutions.

Looking forward, Vertex AI will continue to be a key component in Google’s AI strategy, bringing transformative capabilities to businesses worldwide. With its potent mix of foundational models, robust infrastructure, and seamless integration, Vertex AI is not only supporting today’s business needs but also setting the standard for future AI applications across industries.?

?Conclusion

The momentum behind Vertex AI reflects Google’s comprehensive and ambitious approach to AI. The platform’s rapid adoption and diverse applications across industries are a testament to its strength and adaptability, highlighting Google’s leadership in enterprise AI. As businesses continue to harness AI to gain a competitive edge, Vertex AI is poised to remain at the forefront, embodying Google’s vision to make advanced AI accessible, adaptable, and transformative for enterprises around the globe.

Here is a link to the Sundar pichai's blog

https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q3-2024/#google-cloud