Google Cloud Next 2024 took place in the US this week, leaving a trail of excitement and anticipation for the future of data and artificial intelligence (AI).
This year’s conference focused on a few key themes but one stood out most: democratising AI, making it more accessible and valuable for organisations.
In this blog, we’ll showcase Google Cloud’s new comprehensive suite of tools and services, such as Gemini for Google Cloud, that are designed to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI capabilities and real-world business applications.
We’ll also highlight how our teams at XPON are accelerating data-driven insights and AI-powered marketing outcomes with Google Cloud and our proprietary Audience, Enrichment and Activation platform – Wondaris.
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Jump to a section:
- Empowering Businesses: Making AI Accessible for Every Need
- AI for Marketing Analytics: Accelerating Insights and Data-Driven Decision-Making
- Capitalise on AI Advancements with XPON and Wondaris
- The Conclusion: 2024 is the Time to Embrace the Power of AI
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Empowering Businesses: Making AI Accessible for Every Need
One of the most significant announcements was the emphasis on Google Cloud’s AI being made more accessible and in-built to most of Google’s platforms, now allowing businesses to:
- Access pre-trained models: Google Cloud offers a vast library of pre-trained models covering various tasks, including image recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and anomaly detection. This eliminates the need for businesses to build models from scratch, significantly accelerating AI adoption.
- Customise existing models: Businesses can leverage the tool Vertex AI to customise pre-trained models to fit their specific needs. This allows them to tailor the model’s output to their unique data and business problems.
- Augment existing workflows: AI doesn’t have to replace human expertise; it can (and should) augment it. Vertex AI allows businesses to integrate AI models into existing workflows, making human workers more productive and efficient.
- Deploy custom models: Finally, businesses can seamlessly deploy their own custom-built AI models on Google Cloud’s infrastructure. This ensures scalability, security, and efficient resource utilisation.
By offering a complete AI platform, Google Cloud makes AI more accessible and scalable for businesses – something that XPON has been doing for years with our Wondaris platform that enables AI-powered marketing use cases with a few clicks (check out more on this below).
AI for Marketing Analytics: Accelerating Insights and Data-Driven Decision-Making
The conference shed light on the future of AI-powered marketing and data analytics, and how Google Cloud is committed to providing tools that empower businesses to unify customer data, scale analysis, and predictive insights with AI.
To achieve these outcomes, businesses need tools that bridge the gap between raw data and actionable insights. This is where data agents and Gemini come in, and Google Cloud Next 2024 showcased significant advancements designed to empower businesses in building these powerful tools.
Let’s delve deeper into the key announcements:
1. Gemini in BigQuery: Unleashing AI Power for Data Teams
Imagine having an AI assistant specifically designed to streamline your data workflows. Gemini in BigQuery delivers just that. This exciting integration equips data teams with a range of functionalities to:
- Simplify Data Preparation: Mundane tasks like data cleaning and transformation can be automated or significantly streamlined with Gemini’s AI capabilities. This frees up valuable time for data analysts to focus on higher-level tasks like interpreting results and drawing actionable conclusions.
- Enhanced Data Discovery: Gemini empowers data teams to discover hidden patterns and trends within their data sets. By analysing data through an AI lens, Gemini can uncover anomalies, identify correlations, and surface insights that might be missed by traditional methods.
- Advanced Data Analysis: Beyond basic analysis, Gemini can assist with more complex tasks like statistical modelling and forecasting. This allows data teams to gain a deeper understanding of their data and extract valuable predictive insights.
- Data Governance Made Easy: Maintaining data quality and accessibility is crucial. Gemini can assist with data governance tasks, ensuring data is accurate, secure, and readily available for authorised users.
2. BigQuery Data Canvas: A New Era for Data Exploration
Traditionally, data exploration has often involved complex queries and code. BigQuery Data Canvas reimagines this process with a user-friendly notebook experience. This new feature allows data analysts to:
- Utilise Natural Language: BigQuery Data Canvas enables users to interact with their data using natural language queries. This eliminates the need to be a coding expert and empowers a wider range of users to explore and analyse data effectively.
- Embedded Visualisations: Moving beyond plain text outputs, BigQuery Data Canvas allows users to seamlessly embed visualisations within their notebooks. This provides a more intuitive understanding of data trends and relationships.
- Streamlined Collaboration: The notebook environment facilitates collaboration among data teams. Team members can easily share their analyses, fostering better communication and knowledge transfer.
3. Gemini in Looker: Integrating Data Agents with Workflows
Looker is a popular business intelligence platform used by many organisations to visualise and explore their data. The new Gemini in Looker integration (currently in preview) empowers users to:
- Streamlined Workflow Integrations: Seamlessly integrate data agents (powered by Gemini) into existing Looker workflows. This eliminates the need to switch between tools and allows users to leverage the power of AI within their familiar environment.
- Conversational Data Exploration: This exciting functionality allows users to “chat” with their data using natural language queries. Imagine asking Looker questions like “Show me trends in customer behaviour over the past year” and receiving insightful visualisations and data points in response.
4. Gemini in Databases: Simplifying Data Migration and Modernisation
Many businesses still rely on legacy data systems. Migrating this data to the cloud can be a daunting task. However, Gemini in Databases streamlines this process by providing secure and efficient data migration capabilities. This allows businesses to:
- Effortlessly Move Data: Gemini assists in securely extracting data from legacy systems and efficiently transferring it to modern cloud databases like Google Cloud’s AlloyDB. This paves the way for leveraging the scalability and security benefits of the cloud.
- Data Transformation on the Fly: During the migration process, Gemini can perform necessary data transformations, ensuring seamless integration with the new database structure and eliminating the need for separate transformation steps.
5. Vector Indexing: Enabling Real-Time AI-Powered Data Queries
Traditional database queries work well with structured data. However, modern data sets often include unstructured elements like images and text. Vector indexing addresses this challenge by enabling AI-powered queries directly within BigQuery and AlloyDB. This allows businesses to:
- Leverage AI for Unstructured Data: Utilise AI models to process unstructured data like images and text during the query process. This unlocks valuable insights hidden within these non-traditional data sources.
- Faster and More Accurate Responses: Vector indexing facilitates real-time data retrieval and generation of accurate responses to complex queries, even when dealing with large and diverse data sets.
Capitalise on AI Advancements with XPON and Wondaris
As a Google Cloud Premier Partner, XPON is at the forefront of leveraging these AI advancements. We help businesses fuel advanced marketing and data AI use cases using Google Cloud’s technology. With the product releases announced at Next ’24, our focus is to support businesses with their strategy and implementation of Cloud & AI solutions to ensure they realise short time-to-value and significant return-on-investment (ROI).
One way we achieve this is through our proprietary platform, Wondaris Audience, Enrichment, and Activation Platform. Wondaris capitalises on Google Cloud’s industry-leading AI, enabling marketers to:
- Centralise 1st Party Data: Quickly centralise their 1st party data in a single platform.
- Enrich, Explore, and Activate Audiences: Easily enrich, explore, and activate their audiences from a single click into multiple channels to deliver better customer experiences and accelerate ROI.
Wondaris empowers businesses to execute various AI-powered marketing use cases with just a few clicks, including:
- Exclusion list creation from online and offline data
- Audience segmentation by transaction and daypart to identify purchase trends and optimise media spends
- Building audiences by calculated and predicted lifetime value segments
- Identifying and targeting audiences based on seasonal transaction trends
- Utilising predicted churn models to identify at-risk customers for one-to-one activation
- View customer sets by RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value), set specific exclusion lists, and re-engage lagging or churned clients
- Retarget customers who abandoned carts for exclusive offers and discounts
- Group customers by product and interest affinity to drive increased engagement and personalisation
- Unify online and offline purchase data to a Single Customer View
- Drive increased engagement and client retention
- Use attributes & behaviours from existing customers to seed lookalike audiences
To further explore Wondaris’ capabilities or to request a demo, visit the Wondaris website here.
The Conclusion: 2024 is the Time to Embrace the Power of AI
The announcements at Google Cloud Next 2024 paint a clear picture: the future of AI is here and now.
XPON is excited to be at the forefront of this revolution, leveraging these advancements to deliver unparalleled value to our clients.
By harnessing the power of Google Cloud’s AI platform and XPON’s expertise, businesses can unlock new levels of efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction in their marketing efforts.