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Beyond the Hype: Discover AI Apps the World Isn’t Talking About…Yet
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Tue, 22 Oct 2024 16:00:00 +0000
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There is no shortage of AI applications that are on the market. These apps are enabling users to make smarter decisions, automate mundane tasks, and providing personalized experiences that were once the stuff of science fiction.
Below, we explore groundbreaking AI-driven apps that are transforming daily lives—whether enhancing how we consume things to revolutionizing our work environments. These technologies are setting new standards for efficiency and convenience. Let’s dive in!
Translation: SayHi
SayHi is a free translation app that covers more than 100 languages and dialects for both iPhone and Android. It uses voice recognition to figure out what’s being said, gets the translation, and sends it all back in moments. This app is optimized for on-the-go use, making it ideal for travelers who need quick, accurate translations through their smartphones or tablets.
Photo Professional: Picsart and Remini AI
with Picsart’s free AI Image Generator has the power to generate images instantly, simply by writing out the prompt, select the style, and create images instantly by text-to-image AI. Or, if you are looking to refresh your headshot, Remini AI specializes in enhancing photos, including turning casual images into high-quality, professional-looking headshots. It has the ability to change out the background and retouch (that blemish doesn’t need to be there!).
Music Generator: Suno AI
Suno AI, or simply Suno, is a genAI music creation program designed to generate realistic songs that combine vocals and instrumentation, or are purely instrumental. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, AI technology through this app helps to generate original tracks based on mood, genre and style.
Pocket proofreader: Grammarly
Grammarly is a cloud-based typing assistant that reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement and delivery mistakes. It detects plagiarism and suggests replacements for identified errors. Byimproving writing with built-in AI assistant and supporting vocabulary enrichment, this tool is customized to your preferred language setting.
BYO Art Director: StarryAI
StarryAI is a free AI art generator app that allows you create images by simply describing what you want. It blends the power of neural style transfers with innovative machine learning to craft contemporary AI-driven art. By supplying diverse art styles, users find it easy to use and saves time, money and resources.
Unsuspicious Schoolwork Support: Socratic
Socratic is an impression and free educational tool created by Google that uses AI to help high school and college students complete their schoolwork. The application allows students to use their voice or camera to ask questions, and Socratic will show videos, step-by-step explanations and study guides created by experts to provide answers.
Wellness warrior: Youper
Youper, an interactive CBT therapy app was developed by therapists and designed to alleviate anxiety, enhance mood, and foster better relationships. Its’ AI Mental Health Assistant employs Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques, supported by scientific research, to offer practical exercises for clear thinking, stress management, and emotional control. While there is no replacement for professional mental healthcare, it is an accessible tool to open the doors to getting help.
Fitness Made Easy: FitnessAI
FitnessAI uses artificial intelligence to generate personalized workouts according to a given user’s experience and goals. With nearly 6 million preset workouts, the AI optimizes sets, reps, and weight for each exercise every time a user works out. Users can also track their progress over time on the app.
These apps are incredible, and the best part: There are so many other great ones out there. Which one of these are you most interested in trying?
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When Routine Turns to Ruins: How the CrowdStrike Incident Highlights Our Vulnerabilities
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Thu, 22 Aug 2024 22:33:49 +0000
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The global IT community experienced a seismic shift in how we perceive security when CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity firm, was involved in a global outage that sent shockwaves across businesses worldwide. This incident isn’t just a cautionary tale; it’s a wake-up call to reevaluate how we protect ourselves and our clients.
What Happened: How a routine update led to widespread chaos and calamity.
On July 19, 2024, a single automated software update brought much of the global economy to a sudden halt. The incident caused a significant global IT outage, disrupting services and highlighting vulnerabilities in cybersecurity, particularly for organizations relying heavily on outsourced cloud-based services. According to CNN, the CrowdStrike incident is now the largest IT outage in history and will cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses.
The outage underscores a critical truth: This could have happened to anyone. As businesses lean more heavily on cloud-based services and outsource essential operating functions, the potential points of failure multiply. At 24Notion, the hard work we do for our clients depends on the seamless operation of multiple platforms, tools, and services—many of which are not hosted on-premises. From CRM systems to content management platforms, our reliance on third-party providers introduces additional endpoints that need securing. Each of these endpoints is a potential vulnerability, and the CrowdStrike incident shows that even the most trusted partners can face significant disruptions.
There’s a lot we do to protect our clients and our employees, and fortunately, there are many ways companies can defend their businesses and people from radical errors and insidious breaches.
Simple Ways to Improve Security:
1. Implement a strong VPN strategy
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is no longer optional—it’s essential. By encrypting internet connections and masking IP addresses, VPNs reduce the risk of data interception and protect sensitive information from prying eyes. Ensure everyone, especially those working remotely, uses a VPN when accessing company systems.
2. Conduct regular security audits
Are your passwords strong enough? Are employees following best practices when accessing sensitive data? It’s crucial to regularly review your security protocols and regular audits help identify and address weaknesses before they can be exploited.
3. Enhance endpoint security
The more endpoints you have—whether they’re cloud services, remote workers, or IoT devices—the more vulnerable your business and its’ network becomes. You can implement various of endpoint security measures, including firewalls, antivirus software, and intrusion detection systems that ensure that every device that accesses your network is secure.
4. Develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan
We can’t predict every incident, but we can prepare for them. A disaster recovery plan outlines the steps your team will take in the event of a cyberattack or data breach. This should include roles and responsibilities, data backup protocols, communication strategies, and a clear action plan to minimize downtime and data loss.
5. Educate your team
Your security is only as strong as your least-informed employee. Regular training sessions on cybersecurity best practices are vital. Make sure everyone understands the importance of vigilance, from recognizing phishing attempts to securing their devices.
Next time might not be an accident
The CrowdStrike incident serves as a powerful reminder that in the digital age, security cannot be an afterthought. It underscores the fragility of our digital infrastructure, the interconnectedness of businesses and our reliance on complex software ecosystems.
We all have a responsibility to protect not only our data but also the data of our clients, partners, and employees. By implementing preventative measures and developing robust security strategies, we can mitigate risks and continue to deliver exceptional service—even in the face of unforeseen challenges.
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Collaborate, Innovate and Celebrate at the 2024 Women in Retail Leadership Summit
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Tue, 02 Jul 2024 15:45:35 +0000
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Three days of inspiration, content and meaningful connections brought women in business across retailers and brands together for the Women in Retail Leadership Summit. Hosted by the Women in Retail Leadership Circle (WIRLC), the summit provides a bespoke opportunity to share best practices to improve business processes and support each other, woman-to-woman, on our entrepreneurial and leadership journeys.
This event took place at the Ritz-Carlton at Amelia Island, Florida offering a beautiful backdrop to absorb new, innovative leadership practices, discover the latest retail and technology trends, and take home actionable ways to benefit oneself and one’s business.
There was no shortage of wisdom shared, with women in leadership bringing a bright and fresh perspective within the retail industry, providing a foundation of fundamentals for the next generation of trailblazers.
Confidence > Competency
One of my favorite lessons from the summit came from Sharon Price John. Shared in the style of a TED Talk, Sharon delivered a powerful 15-minute keynote on the value of how confidence can a more important role than competence. Research findings suggest that dominant individuals can ascend group hierarchies and attain influence simply by appearing self-assured and speaking up. For women, this is so crucial because we are asked to compete in a business world where confidence often trumps competence (even if women often come to the table fully equipped with confidence). Sharon invited the audience to consider that we, as women, are naturally driven to be deeply skilled and capable, and to make sure that confidence is a focal area for personal investment when climbing the corporate ladder.
Sharon Price John presenting at WIRLS
Lessons Around Life and Leadership
Another enlightening panel discussion was a held by four incredible women founders and CEOs responsible for transforming today’s retail industry. We received an inside look into the career journeys of Mandy Fields, SVP and CFO of e.l.f. Beauty; Jacqueline Ardery, President, CEO and Board Director for Vera Bradley; Deirdre Quinn, Co-Founder and CEO of Lafayette 148 New York; and Paula Schneider, CEO and President of Susan G. Komen. Amongst the top lessons and actionable advice around how to succeed in both work and life, the audience learned about the valuable balance between driving leadership success, while being flexible with your own plan, finding accountability and being resilient.
Panel discussion with Mandy Fields, SVP and CFO of e.l.f. Beauty; Jacqueline Ardery, President, CEO and Board Director for Vera Bradley; Deirdre Quinn, Co-Founder and CEO of Lafayette 148 New York; and Paula Schneider, CEO and President of Susan G. Komen
Investing in yourself is as easy as taking a stroll
For those who know me, they know how much I value health and wellness. It was personally validating to sit through talk tracks and activations centered around strategies to build a career with health baked in. Hearing from Dr. Amy Shah, a double board-certified doctor and leading expert in women’s hormonal health and nutrition, she shared credible ways for busy professional women to get healthy, which can be as easy as walking! In fact, Dr. Shah said that walking is one the best exercise to increase cortisol levels. Simple health advice can go along way for women who are juggling a lot at home, at work and everywhere in between. I also enjoyed a beautiful walk/run and yoga at the summit, sponsored by Mattel and Shopify one morning during the summit!
Morning walk/run for attendees
24Notion + Adobe sharing an impact
As much as there was to absorb during the three days of content, 24Notion was also there to contribute an incredible activation for the Adobe Digital Experience team through the activation of generative AI (GenAI) headshots for the women. This experiential engagement demonstrated how easy GenAI can be used in retail brand’s marketing strategies. It was such a hit with the attendees.
All in all, it was an absolute honor to be part of such an incredibly inspiring and supportive event focused around women leadership. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves with the content, fun pop-up shops and unique activations offered by the white-glove event. We are certain next year won’t be any different!
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Virtual Vitality: The Next Wave of Digital Health and Wellness Products
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Tue, 28 May 2024 20:55:37 +0000
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We live in a time where rapid technological advancements profoundly improve nearly every aspect of our lives. From entertainment to communication to education and even healthcare, these developments have had a resoundingly positive effect on our collective and individual well-being—elevating our quality of life in ways previously never imagined.
One area in particular that has completely changed since the onslaught of smartphones and devices are tech applications and tools that empower health and wellness. In 2022, the global wellness economy reached $5.6 trillion. And as the world continues morph into its post-pandemic existence, the Global Wellness Institute (GWI) predicts that the wellness economy will see an 8.6% average annual growth, reaching $8.5 trillion in 2027. Those numbers are massive, and with the rise of modern technologies, namely artificial intelligence and machine learning, there remains enormous potential for health technology (health tech) innovations as we continue carrying on through this decade.
Digital Solutions Are Reshaping Health and Wellness
Wellness is a generalized term that encompasses so much. The UMKC School of Medicine defines wellness, “not just about physical activity and good nutrition. It includes positive choices and a sense of fulfillment spiritually, occupationally, psychologically, physically, environmentally and socially.” It creates a multidimensional understanding around the behaviors that promote a healthy and successful life.
Health and wellness takes many shapes and forms. For some, practices like meditation, yoga, and herbal medicine are cornerstones of health maintenance. While others emphasize physical fitness, community engagement, or work-life balance as integral to wellness. There is no universal standard that we must all apply to; but fortunately, for whatever matters most to you, there’s likely a technology or application now available to track towards it.
This is the first post in an ongoing series where we explore some of the trendiest digital technologies that inspires us all to lead healthier and happier lives:
1. For Wearing: Evie Ring
In a world full of wearable tech, Evie is a smart ring set apart by the simple fact that it’s not designed for everyone. Yes, that’s right; because it’s a wearable for women. It does many things its competitors accomplishes such as tracks sleep, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, steps, and more. But Evie is designed with the understanding that men and women are vastly different, and that data is often in flux when a woman wears a smart ring—not because they might be under the weather or recovering from a hard workout the day prior, but because of the natural hormonal fluctuations that happen during a woman’s cycle. Evie takes these variations into consideration, making its’ personalized health findings more accurate and meaningful to this demographic. Not to mention, it’s designed like real jewelry, making it fashionably blend into day-to-day wear.
2. For Home: BMind Mirror
Something we saw at CES earlier this year was a rise in digital technologies centered around a type of health that is extremely hard to see or measure: mental health. One of our favorite finds was BMind from Baracoda, a bathroom mirror designed to improve self-worth and confidence. As users stand in front of the mirror, it uses facial and gesture recognition and voice commands to analyze one’s expression and tone. It’ll then provide recommendations and affirmations and improve one’s mental state based on their current level of well-being. Wouldn’t you want your everyday mirror to hold the ability to improve your overall mood and better manage your stress?
3. For Sleep: DeRucci’s smart mattress and smart pillow
What if you could combine your best mattress with your sleep tracker? The DeRucci T11 Pro contains patented AI technology, which adjusts to the individual’s health for optimal sleep, in addition to alerting an individual about potential health issues arising from their sleep data. Couple this with the company’s Anti-Snore Smart Pillow, which pairs with an app and remote to manually move your head to a comfortable position before you fall asleep. According to an internal clinical study, the company says its pillow can reduce snoring up to 89%.
4. For Beauty: Lipcure Beam
The next wave of beauty tech is filled with advanced devices that are poised to fling our current skincare routines out the window. Korean skincare brand Amorepacific’s Lipcure Beam is a perfect example, using technology to provide immediate lip treatments and leave a custom-tinted hue. It works by using a brush-like applicator to emit visible light and material on the lips to maximize riboflavin and create a makeup effect, strengthening the collagen fibers in the lips and forming a moisturize barrier as a result. With an endless number of serums and lotions on the market, it’s great to see how the beauty industry is starting to create space for technology and we are eager to see what will come next.
5. For Meditation: Headspace XR
To meditate, all you have to do is sit, close your eyes and not think. Easy right? If you are like the many who have taken it upon yourself to master the art of meditation, you’ll know that it’s much more challenging to disconnect from your surroundings and your thoughts. Which is why Headspace have taken their application to the next level: virtual reality. With Headspace XR, meditation turns into a virtual mental health playground where you walk around as a gender-neutral avatar and explore an interactive realm that aligns with your breathwork and movements—alone or with friends. This technology is designed to engage younger generations with the idea of mindfulness and meditation with a new, innovative medium that appeals heavily to that demographic. But it’s really for anyone, of any age. According to a study conducted by Gallup and Meta, a quarter of adults worldwide feel very or fairly lonely. Technologies like this can provide a new way for addressing the aloneness many might experience.
6. For Health: EverlyWell
When it comes to knowing about our health nowadays, more is more. How else can we plan for a healthier future? Yet extensive blood work and doctor appointments to review them doesn’t fit into our busy schedules nowadays. That’s why on-demand health and wellness tests are like EverlyWell are growing in popularity. These routine health tests help support your preventive care and provide early detection for diseases like cancer. Lab Corp also has their own version of the tests, which tout to be the same test your doctor orders, and can be specialized around women’s health, men’s health, food sensitivity, sexual health and nutritional health.
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From Sci-Fi to Reality: Real AI Success in the Modern World
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Fri, 24 May 2024 18:14:10 +0000
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In just a few short years, artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from futuristic fever dream to fervent and active opportunities for businesses and individuals across the world. The quick arrival of actionable generative AI (gen AI) has enchanted the world, throwing open the door to AI capabilities that are rapidly changing industries and consumer expectations.
Generative AI can learn from existing artifacts to generate new, realistic artifacts (at scale) that reflect the characteristics of the training data but don’t repeat it. It can produce a variety of novel content, such as images, video, music, speech, text, software code and product designs. According to Forrester, 60% of workers will regularly use gen AI by the end of this year, and by 2030, gen AI is forecasted to influence more than 11 million U.S. jobs.
AI’s Quick Rise
What makes generative AI so powerful is it’s ability to learn from existing artifacts to generate new and unique assets at scale, in the form of content, images, video, music, software code, product designs and more. It’s constantly evolving and fine-tuning itself, resulting in faster product development, enhanced customer experience and improved employee productivity, according to Gartner, and which continues to create a growing number of use cases that are altering the way we work and live.
Use Cases and Success Stories
Generative AI has found applications across various industries and for consumers, leading to several popular use cases. Here are some of the most notable ones:
Content Generation and Technology: Gen AI is widely known for its convenient use of creating content such as articles, blog posts, product descriptions, and social posts. It can generate text that mimics human writing styles, making it valuable for content marketers and publishers. Tools like Jasper, ChatGPT, Firefly and Surfer SEO are great examples of tools that businesses of all shapes and sizes are utilizing to support their marketing efforts, and produce more quality work with tighter budgets. For larger enterprises, AI is being developed in-house. For example, Apple has publicly begun to explore multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to train its generative A.I. systems on publishers’ news articles. Recently, 24Notion created multiple program activations for Adobe roadshows and helped launch Generative AI personalized photo opportunities for attendees. This experiential engagement demonstrating how GenAI can easily create images, instantly transforming me into a superhero, cyber punk, a member of the Roaring 20’s, and anything else in between. These technologies give way to unlimited opportunities for brand marketers—while keeping to the confines of a realistic budget.
Here’s my before and genAI-powered after! What do you think?
Fashion and Product Design: In industries like fashion and product design, generative AI is used to generate new designs, patterns, and styles. It can assist designers in exploring a wide range of possibilities and coming up with innovative concepts to upgrade the shopping experienced to be ultra-personalized for each individual. One example of a brand using gen AI well is ASOS, a UK-based retailer, that has started utilizing AI for merchandise predictions, focusing on items like T-shirts, dresses, and denim. Their model is trained on recorded deals, returns data, product popularity, and trends. It predicts weekly demand for each item size and warehouse for upcoming seasons. This strategy offers a level of detail and precision previously unattainable. Another example comes from Tommy Hilfiger, which through the creation of FashionVerse, blends gen AI with mobile gaming for fashion enthusiasts and offers a lifelike 3D styling experience.
Healthcare and Drug Discovery: Several use cases for gen AI in healthcare are emerging, and these models are employed for tasks such as generating synthetic medical images, designing drug molecules, and predicting disease outcomes. They help researchers analyze medical data and accelerate the drug discovery process. While AI technology has been used in the healthcare industry for years gen AI represents a whole new arena of play that can help unlock a piece of the current unrealized $1 trillion of improvement potential present in the industry. One real life example comes from Google’s AI-powered Med-Palm 2, Google’s medical large language model ( LLM) which was trained on the MedQA dataset and achieved an 85% accuracy rate while answering relevant medical questions. Even as a work in progress, that is a strong start for generative AI as a diagnostics assistant.
Intelligent Automotive Personal Assistants: Automotive companies are leveraging generative AI in various ways to enhance vehicle design, engineering, manufacturing, and customer experience. At CES 2024, we saw how certain brands were bringing this to life. Take BMW for example, who demonstrated innovative development projects that offer a glimpse into the future. According to BMW, in the near future, consumers can teleoperate a BMW iX and guide it around, and discover as a passenger the potential offered by augmented reality glasses during a journey. They also featured a new generative AI capability of the BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant powered by the Alexa large language model (LLM), enabling quick answers and how-to responses on vehicle features.
The Future is Unlimited
As gen AI continues to advance, we can expect to see even more diverse applications emerge in various domains. It’s an exciting time to get to witness evolving use cases across businesses, and how these will ultimately impact consumers’ mindsets and actions.
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There’s just one thing on Google’s mind. Here’s what we learned at Cloud Next ’24.
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Thu, 25 Apr 2024 21:36:50 +0000
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Another weekend spent in sunny Las Vegas to celebrate the future of technology—this time at Google Cloud Next ‘24. Surrounded by another 30,000 Google enthusiasts at the Mandalay Bay Conference Center, we anticipated leaving the latest insights that we would learn surrounding Google Cloud, and how these would continue to help businesses around the world provide a modern infrastructure that is ready for the next generation of cloud technologies.
Yet as the conference progressed, core cloud infrastructure technologies were rarely the center of the conversation. Cloud Next was—yes, you guessed it—all about generative artificial intelligence (gen AI). Google spend the entire week announcing a slew of AI enhancements that were created to improve productivity across the platform suite as well as help customers take advantage of Google’s novel creations, including their brand-new AI Hypercomputer, Gemini and Vertex (more on those in a minute).
Best said by Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud itself, “We’re at a pivotal moment in our industry. We’re reinventing infrastructure to support a new age of AI.”
In this piece, we will first cover the biggest updates provided by Google; then we will delve into some larger industry trend takeaways that can be applied to the entire industry. Ready to hop in? Let’s begin!
Newest Innovations from Google Cloud
Gemini 1.5 Pro
Originally released in February 2024, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet wrote that this next-generation model, “delivers dramatically enhanced performance, with a breakthrough in long-context understanding across modalities.”
At the event, a great deal of time was spent demonstrating how this model significantly increases the amount of information that Gemini can process, by running up to 1 million tokens consistently. For those who have limited technical fluency, tokens can be described as the building blocks used for processing information. No other competitor even comes close to a million (the closest is 200K from Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, and significantly beats out GPT-4 Turbo with its 128K tokens.) More tokens equals a drastically enhanced performance, with the ability to complete complex tasks more quickly while maintaining quality.
“With these advances, enterprises can do things with AI that just weren’t possible before,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says. Throughout the conference, we learned of how Gemini can be inserted into all aspects of Google Cloud and businesses applications. For example, in Google Workspace, users can easily summarize meeting notes from lengthy transcripts and check to ensure that their proposals comply with compliance proposals. With time we will see just how many opportunities Gemini 1.5 Pro will create for enterprises everywhere.
Vertex AI
Another big focus for Google at the conference was its’ Vertex AI, a fully managed and unified platform meant for building and using gen AI. Vertex AI offers access to Gemini and allows data scientists and machine learning (ML) engineers to prompt and test everything from text, images, video and code for various use cases of data preparation, model training, monitoring and deployment.
In short, Vertex AI is a scalable solution that can help users accelerate and automate ML development and build generative applications more quickly. It touts the ability to reduce complexity, since it’s all on one easy-to-use platform. It might not be a tool that everyone within an organization will put their hands on, but its’ influence will undoubtedly be felt across the world.
In mentioning Vertex AI and Gemini, it’s also important to note is that Google announced the new AI Hypercomputer at the conference. This hypercomputer is the bedrock of its AI platform and they have huge plans to offer end-to-end infrastructure through it, which provides everything from storage to hardware.
Google Vids
While still centered around AI capabilities, another fun announcement from Google was all about Google Vids, a new video creation application within Google Workspace that allows users to create all different kinds of business-appropriate content—from training videos to product pitches—all from the comfort of their browser.
The launch of Google Vids will help businesses of all levels embrace video, potentially even for the first time, and do it in a way that inserts their own personality. Because it’s part of Google Workspace, there’s full integration with Docs, Sheets and more, and boosted collaboration across your teams.
General AI Trends
AI & Security
As a society, we’ve faced our initial fear of AI—worries like how it’ll inexplicably overpower the human race tomorrow. Yet there are still very real threats this emerging series of technologies will have, most critically in regard to cybersecurity. That’s one area Google remained focused on throughout the event.
Cybercriminals aren’t really leveraging generative AI that much…yet. According to Chris Corde, product manager for security operations at Google Cloud, “We haven’t seen that kind of activity yet.” But he anticipates that we will see AI being used to make attackers more productive and effective. Organizations needs to tap into AI to improve cybersecurity efforts in order keep up a fair fight against the bad guys.
Google is simply following (or leading) this industry trend. An Acumen report estimated the global market for AI-based cybersecurity products was about $15 billion in 2021, but will surge to roughly $135 billion by 2030. We saw examples of security capabilities in Gemini via its new Threat Intelligence, to provide in-depth research and flagging threats before they affect your business, allowing for natural language prompts to spot issues. Google also shared how its Security Operations will provide AI-assisted investigations, and Gemini in Security Command Center will help businesses react to attacks or threats before they do too much harm. And of course, Google ensures that everything they do is in line with their AI Principles and robust safety policies, to ensure models undergo extensive ethics and safety tests.
AI Use Cases
It’s one thing to hear about AI’s futuristic capabilities; it’s another to see its’ practicality in today’s world. Something that was really helpful at Cloud Next was the various customers Google highlighted, to share their stories and positive experiences with Google Cloud technologies.
Ola Kallenus, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz, joined the main stage to demonstrate how Google Cloud is supporting a high-end customer experience through AI by creating a more personalized experience. Kallenus hinted how these technologies could (sooner than later) expand to automated driving.
We also heard from Daria Khosrowsahi, CEO of Uber on how Google Cloud is helping the company ensure workers are collaborating more effectively. There are many complex processes that must run smoothly behind the scenes for Uber to keep providing a magical user experience, but by using the AI-enabled Google Cloud, they’ve seen boosted productivity and efficiency, and even employee retention.
Another speaker comes from Accenture, who announced a partnership to help other enterprises harness the value of AI to improve operations, create new lines of businesses, and build unique customer experiences. This initiative will help Accenture customers determine how to utilize, build and scale with Gemini based on their business objectives.
Building a new way to cloud
The flood of information around AI was endless at Cloud Next. But even Google executives conceded it’s still incredibly early for the adoption of these emerging technologies in the enterprise. It’s clear that AI will remain a centeral topic at events for years to come, and that was are just barely scratching the surface of its challenges, threats, opportunities and capabilities. So, while AI was the talk of the town, it will take quite a while before organizations lacking digital sophistication (which is mostly everyone) will take full advantage of all that Google has to offer. But that didn