Since generative AI first captured the world’s attention a year and a half ago, there’s been a vigorous discussion about what, exactly, the new technology is best used for. While we all enjoyed those early funny chats and witty limericks, we’ve quickly discovered that many of the biggest AI opportunities are clearly in the enterprise.
Our customers and partners at Google Cloud have found real potential for creating new processes, efficiencies, and innovations with generative AI. For proof, look no further than the 300-plus organizations who are featured at this week’s Next event in Las Vegas.
In a matter of months, organizations like these have gone from AI helping answer questions, to AI making predictions, to generative AI agents. What makes AI agents unique is that they can take actions to achieve specific goals, whether that’s guiding a shopper to the perfect pair of shoes, helping an employee looking for the right health benefits, or supporting nursing staff with smoother patient hand-offs during shifts changes.
In our work with customers, we keep hearing that their teams are increasingly focused on improving productivity, automating processes and modernizing the customer experience. These aims are now being achieved through the AI agents they’re developing in six key areas: customer service; employee empowerment; creative ideation and production; data analysis; code creation; and cybersecurity.
These special capabilities are made possible in large part by the new multimodal capacity of generative AI and AI foundation models, which allow agents to handle tasks across a range of communications modes, including text, voice, video, audio, code, and more. With human support, agents can converse, reason, learn, and make decisions.