Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said companies are starting to reimagine their businesses for artificial intelligence one process at a time. The big question is what industries hit scale first.
Speaking on DisrupTV, Kurian said "in virtually every field, we're seeing people take the persona that they had, and then creating a digital version of that persona using AI and this is happening incredibly quickly."
"The common theme is taking the skills of the model that represents what human beings can do, but now creating a digital persona and assisting a function," he said.
Kurian cited use cases across industries including healthcare, insurance, cosmetics and media to name a few. Many of these industries started out with AI use cases that revolved around classification and categorization. The next phase for AI was prediction using models based on different parameters. Generation is the new phase.
"Generation is the next skill as you train a model with a set of inputs and it can generate output," said Kurian. "You can now put together and automate a complete workflow for the whole company. And this is happening in many places. We see it happening at scale at many around the world."
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Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang asked Kurian whether incumbent companies or startups had advantages in generative AI. Kurian said:
"We're very early in the market. To do AI well, we need high quality data sets to fine tune the state-of-the-art models. For high quality datasets, you need state of the art models, and you obviously need the infrastructure to serve the models. But then just as importantly, you need to integrate these into the application surface.
The companies that succeed will have capabilities for state-of-the-art models that are driven by high quality datasets that they own, and the ability to activate these models. within account within the context of an application surface.
There will obviously be disruptors and they will take a function of process that was done in one way and fundamentally change it. You will see disruptions in different industries, where the fundamental business model itself may change.
"The winners are always those that solve a fundamental problem materially."
Going forward, generative AI will be democratized and simplified. AI will be an enabler for new technologies and access. In other words, we'll all become programmers to some degree. Kurian said:
"The code generation model will generate the skeleton code and create the environment. You can say 'hey, I want to support a million and a half users with less than 10 seconds latency of 10 milliseconds latency and I need to guarantee four nines of availability' and the system will do it for you. There's no reason that that cannot be done with where models are. And by doing that, we again change how widely accessible these things are. We are also very encouraged by the fact that we can make these models work not just for people in affluent countries, but also people in emerging markets."
Kurian also touched on other topics.
Security. Kurian said AI is already detecting threats, but also prioritizing them. "We built a model that can look at the threats that are emerging in your infrastructure, which one needs priority and how does that threat affect you," he said. "Models don't have that emotional bias. So, they can look at many more patterns to detect what's going on what is the attack the attack surface. It can remediate it and automate the creation of the rulebook to resolve the problem. We're applying AI to the whole spectrum."
AI-driven cybersecurity attacks. "We also see AI being used by bad actors to create new types of threats and we're also building our platform to thwart new types of threats," he said.
Running Google Cloud. Kurian said Google had great products but needed to build out enterprise capabilities as an independent unit.
"We're the fifth largest software company in the world, which is a long, you know, huge credit to the team. But when we looked at it, we felt we needed to do four things really well. You need to take great technology but convert it into solutions that people can use. Just having technology that's not accessible is a challenge.
Second, we need to build a great go to market function. What kind of structure do you have? How do you focus? We started with a set number of industries and countries.
It's an ecosystem game. It's not your company against another company. It's your ecosystem. So, we made decisions very early to partners. We started with 100 partners today there are 100,000 partners. And part of that is we wanted to bring that ecosystem so that people realize it's a bigger pie that they are creating, not slicing off the same pie. That's the third one.
And then you have to do something really well. It's just like sports. In order to play really well, you have to do the grunt work of training. We have to do a lot of the things below the surface of the water such as the systems, the legal contracting, and the frameworks to be more efficient as an organization. Those were all put in place so that you can go faster. Unless you have a strong core, you can't really play well. We've been super fortunate that we've been blessed with such a great team of people that have done so much of the work to get us where we are today."
