Google bets big on artificial intelligence to make a cloud push for enterprises – Economic Times

SAN FRANCISCO : Google is betting big on its dominance in machine learning and artificial intelligence to break into the cloud market, a message that was the underlying theme on the first day of the technology giant's cloud conference that began here on Wednesday.

It also made a slew of announcements further strengthening its place as the leader in machine learning and artificial intelligence platforms.

We put $30 billion in the Google Cloud Platform, said Eric Schmidt, chairman of Googles parent company Alphabet. He added that big data, or large data sets that are analysed to reveal patterns through machine learning and artificial intelligence, is so powerful that nation states will fight over it.

Google announced big names, such as HSBC, Colgate-Palmolive, the Home Depot, SAP, Disney, Verizon and Ebay as customers, most of who have large data sets to the tune of billions of records.

Google currently lags in the cloud market, with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure taking the lead with big customers, but the technology giant aims to change that through the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) which allows customers to leverage its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

Google Cloud's vice president Diane Greene led the agenda on the opening day, along with CEO Sundar Pichai, Fei Fei Li, the chief scientist, cloud AI and ML, Eric Schmidt.

The GCP lets enterprises host applications and websites, store data, and analyze data on Google's scalable infrastructure. Added on top of that is Googles machine learning capability which is widely acknowledged as being the best in the industry.

Machine learning is a phenomenal tool for enterprises to get insights like never before, said Greene at a post keynote press conference.

Artificial Intelligence, or building applications that mimic human-like behaviour, making them more intuitive and useful to the end consumer, is fast becoming the battleground for all major cloud providers, as they take a step further from providing just storage capability to their clients.

Research firm IDC said last year that widespread adoption of cognitive systems and AI across a broad range of industries will drive their worldwide revenues from nearly $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020. Last year, banking, retail, healthcare and discrete manufacturing were the largest spenders in AI. In the future, education and process manufacturing are expected to drive more revenues.

ET reported last week that the India arm of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to add AI services such as speech recognition, text-to-voice services, visual search and image analysis, to its base infrastructure on which startups, enterprises and developers can build their products.

Google, with its deep learning capability through its Brain project as well as the work done by Li, has an edge over its competitors in understanding and crunching large data sets, as well as understanding artificial intelligence.

Li, whose work in visual search is well recognised, built on the theme of "democratizing AI", and said Google wants to take it to developers, people and enterprises.

Describing video as the dark matter of digital, Li launched the Google video API for Google Cloud, which accurately identifies things and places in videos. For instance, in a medical procedure video, if a user wants to search for specific body parts, they will be able to do it just by searching for the name of the part instead of having to go through the entire video.

Google also announced the acquisition of Kaggle, a San Francisco-based data science startup that runs programming contests and competitions for machine learning projects. Google did not disclose the value of the acquisition, but said Kaggle would continue to operate as an independent brand for a while.

Some of the Google announced on Wednesday also use AWS and Microsoft clouds, in what they described as having a multi-cloud strategy. We want all players in the cloud market to compete against each other, said Paul Gaffney, senior vice president at The Home Depot, summing up what the cloud market is already looking like.

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Google bets big on artificial intelligence to make a cloud push for enterprises - Economic Times