Google Cloud CEO’s 5 Bold Remarks On New Chip, AI Agents And ‘The New Way To Cloud’

'Together, we’re creating a new era of generative AI agents built on a new, truly open platform for AI. And we’re reinventing infrastructure to support it,' said Google Cloud Thomas Kurian during his keynote today at Google Cloud Next.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian is bullish about Google’s new AI launches today around its new Arm-based chip Google Axion, new generative AI products and much more.

“[AI Agents] will transform how each of you interact with computing devices and the web itself,” said Kurian in front of thousands of attendees during his keynote at Google Cloud Next 2024 in Las Vegas today.

“Together, we’re creating a new era of generative AI agents built on a new, truly open platform for AI. And we’re reinventing infrastructure to support it,” said Kurian. “Together we’re building the new way to cloud.”

Google Cloud Next 2024

There are approximately 30,000 attendees at Google Cloud Next 2024 at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas, including thousands of partners, developers and customers.

The $37 billion Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud and AI giant unveiled a slew of new AI offerings at the conference today, including Google’s first-ever custom ARM-based CPU chip for the data center, Google’s new TPU v5p, and new AI features in Google Workspace for meeting and messaging.

“It's been less than eight months since Google Next 2023, but we made a world of progress with all of you. We've introduced over 1,000 product advances across Google Cloud and Google Workspace, expanding our infrastructure footprint to 14 regions, and announced six new subsea cable investments,” said Kurian. “We’ve also announced partnerships with hundreds of leading companies like AI21 Labs, Contextual AI, Essential AI, and Mistral AI who are using our Google Cloud infrastructure.”

Here are the five boldest statements made by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian during his keynote.

AI Agents ‘Will Transform How Each Of You Interact With Computing Devices And The Web Itself’

Our biggest announcements today are focused on generative AI. Customers have quickly gone from experimenting with generative AI, helping it to answer questions to make AI predictions, and now building generative AI agents.

Agents are intelligent entities that take action to help you achieve specific goals. For example, how a shopper finds the perfect dress, helping an employee pick the right health benefits, or having nursing staff being helped to expedite patient handoffs when their shifts change.

Agents process multimodal information simultaneously: conversing, reasoning, learning, and making decisions. Agents can connect with other agents and with units. And they will transform how each of you interact with computing devices and the web itself.

You know, our customers are building early versions of AI agents using our AI infrastructure, our Gemini models, Vertex AI, Workspace and Google Cloud. AI is transforming many industries.

‘Create Customer Agents That Are Amazingly Powerful In Just Three Steps’

To help each of you build customer agents faster, we're introducing Vertex AI Agent Builder. You can now create customer agents that are amazingly powerful in just three key steps.

First, you can use Gemini Pro to create free flowing human live conversations with text, voice, images and video as inputs and personalize them with custom voice prompts.

Second, you can use natural language instructions to control the conversation flow, and guidance on specific topics you don't want it to discuss - such as current effects - in the same way that you train your human agents. You can also control when it hands over to a human agent with transcription and summarization of its conversation history to make these transitions extremely easy.

Third, you can improve response quality with vector-based and keyboard-based search to connect your internal information and the entire web. You can also use extensions to complete tasks for customers like updating contact information, booking a flight, ordering food and many more. And you can integrate enterprise data from operational databases like AlloyDB, predictive analytics with BigQuery and SaaS applications like ServiceNow.

Kurian Introduces Google Axion; ‘Deploying At Scale Google Services On Arm-Based Instances’

I am delighted to announce the Google Axiom processor. It's the first custom ARM based CPU designed for the data center. And they'll be available in preview later this year.

Google Axion combines Google's expertise with Arm’s latest compute core designs, to better deliver up to 50 percent better performance, and up to 60 percent better energy efficiency than comparable to current generation of x86 based VMs.

That's why we've already started deploying at scale Google services on Arm-based instances, including Spanner, BigQuery, GKE [Google Kubernetes Engine], Google Earth Engine and YouTube ads platform.

AI Is ‘The New Way To Cloud’

Google is helping leading companies transform their operations, and become digital and AI leaders, which is the new way to cloud. We have many important advances, starting with our infrastructure.

We’re the first leading hyper scalar to market with Intel’s fifth generation Xeon processors , continuing to lead in price performance. Google distributed cloud and edge brings compute data, AI, and ISVs to highly confidential and edge workloads.

Our cross-cloud networking allows you to connect any service including our AI service to any application on any cloud securely, with lower cost and latency, including all of our AI services.

BigQuery is evolving to a unified end to end platform for data and analytics, with a unified user interface, unified security, and governance.

Workspace is introducing enhanced security, extension models, a new chat with Meet offering, along with the best voice quality in the industry, with Google Meet. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. … Together we're building the new way to cloud.

‘We’re Creating A New Era Of Generative AI Agents’

Together, we're creating a new era of generative AI agents built on a new, truly open platform for AI. And we're reinventing infrastructure to support it.

We are the most open cloud platform that give you choice, including your choice of models, your choice of development environments, databases—including vector databases— and your choice of business applications.

We're building with a broad ecosystem of partners, including independent software vendors and technology partners. And our services partners have been aggressively ramping their capabilities. Our global system integrator partners alone, committing to train over 200,000 professionals on our GenAI products.

We're at a pivotal moment in our industry.

The world is changing, but at Google, our north star is the same: to make AI helpful for everyone, to improve the lives of as many people as possible.