Welcome to Google Cloud Next ‘24

This edition is from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and originally published on the Google Cloud Blog. If you're not attending Google Cloud Next today in person, register for a digital pass to access keynotes, breakout sessions, and more on demand.

Welcome to Google Cloud Next. We last came together just eight months ago at Next 2023, but since then, we have made well over a year’s progress innovating and transforming with our customers and partners. We have introduced over a thousand product advances across Google Cloud and Workspace. We have expanded our planet-scale infrastructure to 40 regions and announced new subsea cable investments to connect the world to our Cloud with predictable low latency. We have introduced new, state-of-the-art models — including our Gemini models — and brought them to developers and enterprises. And the industry is taking notice — we have been recognized as a Leader in 20 of the top industry analyst evaluations.

Last year, the world was just beginning to imagine how generative AI technology could transform businesses — and today, that transformation is well underway. More than 60% of funded gen AI startups and nearly 90% of gen AI unicorns are Google Cloud customers, including companies like Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Contextual AI, Essential AI, and Mistral AI who are using our infrastructure. Leading enterprises like Deutsche Bank, Estée Lauder, Mayo Clinic, McDonald’s, and WPP are building new gen AI applications on Google Cloud. And today, we are announcing new or expanded partnerships with Bayer, Cintas, Discover Financial, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Mercedes Benz, Palo Alto Networks, Verizon, WPP, and many more. In fact, this week at Next, more than 300 customers and partners will share their gen AI successes working with Google Cloud. ?

Central to the opportunities of gen AI are the connected AI agents that bring them to life. Agents help users achieve specific goals — like helping a shopper find the perfect dress for a wedding or helping nursing staff expedite patient hand-offs when shifts change. They can understand multi-modal information — processing video, audio, and text together, connecting and rationalizing different inputs. They can learn over time and facilitate transactions and business processes. Today, our customers, including Best Buy, Etsy, The Home Depot, ING Bank and many more are seeing the benefits of powerful, accurate and innovative agents that make gen AI so revolutionary. This path to agents is built on our AI-optimized infrastructure, models and platform, or by utilizing our own agents in Gemini for Google Cloud and Gemini for Google Workspace.

Today, at Next ‘24, we are making significant announcements to drive customer success and momentum, including: custom silicon advancements, like the general availability of TPU v5p and Google Axion, our first custom Arm?-based CPU designed for the datacenter; Gemini 1.5 Pro, which includes a breakthrough in long context understanding, going into public preview; new grounding capabilities in Vertex AI; Gemini Code Assist for developers; expanded cybersecurity capabilities with Gemini in Threat Intelligence; new enhancements for Gemini in Google Workspace, and much more. These innovations transcend every aspect of Google Cloud, including:

• Our AI Hypercomputer, a supercomputing architecture that employs an integrated system of performance-optimized hardware, open software, leading ML frameworks, and flexible consumption models;
• Our foundation models, including Gemini models, which process multi-modal information, and have advanced reasoning skills;?
• Our Vertex AI platform, which helps organizations and partners to access, tune, augment, and deploy custom models and connect them with enterprise data, systems and processes to roll out generative AI agents;
• Gemini for Google Cloud, which provides AI assistance to help users work and code more efficiently, manage their applications, gain deeper data insights, identify and resolve security threats, and more;
• Gemini for Workspace, which is the agent built right into Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more, with enterprise-grade security and privacy; and
• A number of announcements across analytics, databases, cybersecurity, compute, networking, Google Workspace, our growing AI ecosystem, and more.

Continue reading on the Google Cloud blog.