Google Sharing Its AI with You

According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 16.5 percent in 2016 to total $204 billion (up from $175 billion in 2015). Gartner also revealed that Amazon’s cloud is 10x bigger than its next 14 competitors, combined. The technology research company’s final revelation is that there’s a two-horse race between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure to capture the IaaS cloud computing market.

The Google cloud platform has been sitting in third place and rapidly losing ground, but maybe that’s about to change. Recently, we have seen the AlphaGo program defeat world Go champion Lee Sedol, and Google has revealed its cunning plan to catch up in the cloud.

Google’s secret sauce consists of adding machine-learning software to the cloud that will create an incredibly powerful AI program. As Google continues to capture and analyze a seemingly unlimited supply of data, deep learning technology will allow machines to learn tasks and enable applications to learn on their own without any input from a developer.

The most interesting aspect is how it can work on any data of any size. Considering that the Google Translate cloud speech API can already translate more than 80 languages, it seems that this latest announcement could be the game changer that Google has been looking for during its cloud assault strategy. 

The alpha release of the company’s open source Cloud Machine Learning is undoubtedly a massive step in this bold new direction. Enterprise customers who prefer to build machine learning models from their own data will be delighted with the announcement, but the pretrained model will be equally as exciting for some developers.

In a world where Coca-Cola and Walt Disney Animation Studios use both AWS customer and Google, it’s clear that the pressure is on both companies to offer better value, while also being innovative and having a unique selling point. Interestingly, it appears that open source trends are playing an important part in driving progress forward.

A survey by Cloud World Forum revealed that 85 percent of those asked believed that data analytics is the biggest game changer for marketing campaigns in the last five years. But more importantly, an overwhelming 82 percent firmly believe that data will define the way they interact with their customers.

Closing the gap on Microsoft and AWS is Google’s number one priority at the moment and for an excellent reason. Urs H?lzle, Google senior VP technical infrastructure, has said: "I've been quoted publicly as saying this could be larger than ads, and I very seriously believe it.”

Despite languishing in third place, growth figures from Synergy Research tell a slightly different story. Google had a respectable 108 percent year-over-year growth, compared with Microsoft’s 124 percent, and Amazon’s 63 percent. Google claims to offer 50 percent better price/performance than its competitors, along with a killer combination of open source and its own technology to set itself apart from the competition.

A wealth of application programming interfaces (APIs) that are capable of identifying images, recognizing speech, and translating over 80 languages is highlighting the incredible power of technology and understanding from a colossal amount of data. 

Over the last five years, we have seen companies change their attitudes toward their often neglected customers. There has been a shift in power from businesses toward their customers who now have a united voice that is amplified by social media.

More and more companies run the risk of looking a little too needy upon the realization that their forum threads, tweets or sponsored Facebook posts suffer zero engagement if they don’t understand their audience. Being chosen by a customer is becoming the difference between success and failure for businesses. By contrast, it seems that the future success of Microsoft, AWS and Google will be determined by the best machine learning solutions that understand customer needs or behavior.

Maybe Google is finally realizing the threat on the horizon to its advertising revenue and adjusting strategy accordingly. Businesses are searching for a simplified way to take advantage of this new level of machine learning as it has become the latest buzzword. Google is now attempting to provide new tools that are capable of predictive analytics with its new Cloud Machine Learning service.

And let’s not forget about IBM with Watson, its powerful cognitive computing platform. Cognitive computing is different than data analytics, as I have written in previous blogs, and as you can see, rapid innovation in AI is the name of the game. 

There is still a very long way to go before we can mention Google Cloud’s capabilities in the same breath as Microsoft, Amazon and IBM, but if Google continues with this momentum, the possibilities could be endless.

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DANIEL BURRUS is considered one of the World's Leading Futurists on Global Trends and Innovation, and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients understand how technological, social and business forces are converging to create enormous untapped opportunities. He is the author of six books including New York Times & Wall Street Journal best seller Flash Foresight.   

Daniel Burrus is also the creator of  The Anticipatory Organization? Learning System, a training process for executives and their teams to develop the skills to accurately foresee and take critical actions before disruption strikes.

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