Transforming Organizations with Google Cloud AI

An energetic welcome to Google Cloud AI includes the question Why Not? Why not transform organizations with AI?

Thomas Kurian shares a vision for how AI can transform organizations.

Today, that vision is not just a possibility – it’s the vibrant reality we are collectively building. 

Thomas kurian

Google delivered more than 3,000 product advancements across Google Cloud and Workspace in 2024. There are now over 4 million developers building with the power of Gemini, the most advanced AI model family.

All of this is powered by global infrastructure, which has grown to 42 regions.

Known as Cloud Wide Area Network (or Cloud WAN). It makes Google’s global private network available to all Google Cloud customers. Cloud WAN is a fully managed, reliable, and secure enterprise backbone to transform enterprise wide area network (WAN) architectures.

The Accelerating Momentum of Google AI

The true measure of Google success lies in the impact on customers.

Customers are choosing Google Cloud for three fundamental reasons: 

  1. AI-Optimized Platform: Only Google Cloud offers an AI-optimized platform with leading price, performance and precision.
  2. Open and Multi-Cloud Capabilities: Google Cloud allows customers to adopt AI agents while connecting them with their existing IT landscapes.
  3. Interoperability: Google Cloud offers an enterprise-ready AI platform, built for interoperability. This enables customers to adopt AI, while addressing evolving sovereignty, security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.

Google is proud to announce innovations, including: seventh-generation TPU: Ironwood, that delivers levels of efficiency. Advancements in Google Distributed Cloud enable customers to bring Gemini models on-premise. They also support a full suite of generative media models and Gemini 2.5. Innovations in Vertex, like Agent Development Kit and Agent2Agent Protocol enable a multi-agent ecosystem.

AI Hypercomputer: Unleashing Unprecedented Computational Power

AI Hypercomputer is a revolutionary supercomputing system meticulously designed to simplify AI deployment, dramatically improve performance, and optimize costs. It includes hardware, software, and consumption models. These are all optimized to deliver more intelligence at a consistently low price. This is essential for training, tuning, and serving AI workloads.

Google introduces:

  • Ironwood TPUs: The seventh-generation TPU, Ironwood represents Google’s largest and most powerful TPU to date with 10x improvement from the most recent high-performance TPU.
  • Cluster Director: Cluster Director helps companies deploy a large number of accelerators. These are managed as a single, unified unit of compute.

This builds on the Google commitment to delivering AI hardware optionality to customers, including NVIDIA GPU-based offerings:

  • A4 and A4X VMs: Google has significantly enhanced the GPU portfolio. A4 and A4X VMs are now available. They are powered by NVIDIA’s groundbreaking B200 and GB200 Blackwell GPUs.
  • NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs: Google Cloud will be among the first to offer NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin GPUs.

We’re introducing groundbreaking storage innovations:

  • Hyperdisk Exapools: Offering the highest aggregate performance and capacity block storage of any hyperscaler.
  • Anywhere Cache: Intelligently keeps data close to accelerators, reducing storage latency by up to 70% and significantly accelerating training times.
  • Rapid Storage: Our first zonal object storage solution. It offers an impressive 5x lower latency for random reads and writes.

Software is the key to orchestrating and simplifying access to this powerful hardware. Today, we’re introducing three significant enhancements for AI inference:

  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Inferencing: New inference capabilities in GKE include gen AI-aware scaling and load-balancing features.
  • Pathways Availability: Google’s own distributed ML runtime, Pathways, is now available for the first time to Cloud customers. Developed by Google DeepMind, Pathways enables state-of-the-art, multi-host inferencing for dynamic scaling with exceptional performance at optimal cost.
  • vLLM Availability: We’re bringing vLLM to TPUs. Customers who have optimized PyTorch with vLLM for GPUs can easily and cost-effectively run their workloads on TPUs.
  • All of these AI Hypercomputer hardware and software enhancements work together. They enable Google to deliver intelligence and useful AI output.

Not everyone has been able to benefit from these advancements. Historically, organizations with strict regulatory, sovereignty, latency, and data volume issues have been able to access the latest AI technology. They must keep their data on-premises. We have partnered with NVIDIA to bring Gemini to NVIDIA Blackwell systems. Dell is a key partner. This allows for local use in air-gapped and connected environments. This complements our GDC air-gapped product, which is now authorized for U.S. Government Secret and Top Secret levels. Gemini is available on it. It provides the highest levels of security and compliance.

Google’s Leading Models: Bringing the Best of Google DeepMind to Cloud Customers

We build upon the groundbreaking research of Google DeepMind. We’re delivering rapid innovation across a diverse spectrum of first-party models. Each model is designed to meet the unique needs of various customers.

Gemini, the most capable family of AI models, has been at the forefront of this innovation. Gemini 2.5 models are thinking models. Google brought Gemini 2.5 Pro to Vertex AI in public preview. Pro is optimized for precision.

Coming to Vertex AI is Gemini 2.5 Flash – our workhorse model optimized specifically for low latency and cost efficiency. Real-time summaries or quick access to documents are needed in these situations. Gemini 2.5 Flash adjusts the depth of reasoning based on the complexity of prompts. You can also control performance based on customers’ budgets. These new features make AI easier to use. These features enable our customers to build AI that solves complex problems.

Beyond Gemini, we have an incredible suite of generative media models. These models are driving new levels of efficiency. They enhance creativity and boost customer engagement.

Google is the only company to offer models across all modalities. These include images, voice, music, and video.

Thomas kurian

All of these are available today on Vertex AI. These creative tools are delivering real-world impact for customers like Agoda. Agoda is a leading digital travel platform. It creates unique and captivating visuals and videos of travel destinations using Imagen and Veo on Vertex AI. This enhances customer engagement and drives bookings.

Google is announcing groundbreaking advancements:

  • Imagen 3: Our highest quality text-to-image model now has improved image generation. It also has enhanced inpainting capabilities for reconstructing missing or damaged portions of an image. This update significantly elevates the quality of object removal, delivering a more natural and seamless editing experience. 
  • Chirp 3: Our groundbreaking audio generation model now offers a new method. You can create custom voices with just 10 seconds of audio input. This enables enterprises to personalize call centers. They can also develop accessible content and establish unique brand voices. These transcription features separate and identify individual speakers in multi-speaker recordings. This significantly improves the clarity of transcriptions, enhancing usability for applications like meeting summaries, podcast analysis, and multi-party call recordings.
  • Lyria: The industry’s first enterprise-ready, text-to-music model can transform simple text prompts into 30-second music clips. This produces high-fidelity audio, capturing subtle nuances and delivering rich, detailed compositions across a range of musical genres. With Lyria, organizations can create soundtracks for marketing campaigns and product launches. They can also design immersive in-store experiences, podcasts, and other digital content.
  • Veo 2: Veo 2 is the Google industry-leading video generation model. This transforms Veo on Vertex AI from a generation tool to a comprehensive video creation and editing platform. Advancements include: inpainting to remove unwanted background images, logos or distractions. This allows professional edits without manual retouching. Outpainting is used to extend the frame of existing video footage. This extension helps customers optimize video for different screen sizes and platforms. Sophisticated cinematic techniques are employed to provide shot composition, camera angles, and pacing. Interpolation lets companies define the beginning and end of a video sequence. Veo seamlessly generates the connecting frames.

At Google, we bring the best of Google DeepMind and Google Research together with new infrastructure and AI capabilities in Google Cloud, including:

  • AlphaFold 3 was developed by Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. It can predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy. The new AlphaFold 3 High-Throughput Solution is available for non-commercial use and deployable via Google Cloud Cluster Toolkit. This solution enables batch processing of up to tens of thousands of protein sequences. It minimizes cost with autoscaling infrastructure. 
  • WeatherNext AI models, from Google DeepMind and Google Research, enable fast, accurate weather forecasting. They are now available in Vertex AI Model Garden.

Vertex AI: The Comprehensive Platform for AI Innovation

These are the models available on Vertex AI.

Vertex AI is empowering companies to gain significant efficiencies by automating and accelerating routine, mission-critical processes.

We are also announcing new advancements in Vertex AI to improve your ability to manage your AI initiatives:

  • Vertex AI Dashboards: These help you monitor usage, throughput, latency, and troubleshoot errors, providing you with greater visibility and control.
  • Training and Tuning capabilities: You can manage custom training and tuning with your own data. This is done on top of foundational models. You can do this securely across all first-party model families. These include Gemini, Imagen, Veo, embedding and translation models. There are also open models like Gemma, Llama, and Mistral.
  • Vertex AI Model Optimizer: This capability uses Google’s unique understanding of Gemini. It automatically directs your query to the most performant model and tools. This is based on your quality, speed, and cost preferences. 
  • Live API: To enable truly conversational interactions, Live API offers streaming audio and video directly into Gemini. Now your agents can process and respond to rich media in real time, opening new possibilities for immersive, multimodal applications.

Expanding Vertex to Enable a Multi-Agent Ecosystem

We believe Vertex is the most open developer AI platform in the cloud. It is the only one delivering multi-agent solutions. These solutions empower multiple AI agents to work together. Agents are intelligent systems that exhibit reasoning, planning and memory capabilities. This is all to accomplish tasks on your behalf and under your supervision. Agents are set to become increasingly important in the workforce. They will collaborate with employees to drive efficiencies. They will also enhance decision-making and accelerate innovation.

  • Agent Development Kit (ADK): Our new AI Agent Development Kit (ADK) is an open-source framework. It simplifies the process of building sophisticated multi-agent systems. It maintains precise control over agent behavior. With ADK, you can build an AI agent in under 100 lines of intuitive code. ADK supports Model Control Protocol (MCP) to allow developers plugin available tools. ADK also connects seamlessly with APIs managed by Apigee to leverage your own business APIs
  • Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol: We’re proud to be the first hyperscaler to create an open Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol. This protocol helps enterprises support multi-agent ecosystems.
  • Agent Garden: Agent Garden is a collection of ready-to-use samples and tools, directly accessible  in ADK. It enables you to connect your agents to over 100 pre-built connectors. You can also use your custom APIs, integration workflows, or data stored within your cloud systems, like BigQuery and AlloyDB.
  • Interoperability:  With Vertex AI, you can seamlessly manage agents built on multiple agent frameworks, including LangGraph and Crew AI. We are also announcing that you can build AI agents directly on your existing NetApp data, no data duplication required. You can choose any method to build agents. We can assist you in connecting them to leading application and enterprise data companies.

Google Agentspace: Empowering Every Employee with AI

We’re empowering enterprises to put AI agents in the hands of every employee with Google Agentspace.

Agentspace combines Google-quality enterprise search with conversational AI. It includes Gemini and third-party agents to empower employees. They can find and synthesize information from within their organizations. They can also converse with AI agents and take action with their enterprise applications. It delivers a broad set of tools. These tools include pre-built connectors to search and transact with documents, databases, and SaaS applications. Additionally, there is advanced security and compliance to protect your data and IP. 

Today, employees can use Agentspace to access expert Google-built AI agents. These include NotebookLM, which is already used by more than 100,000 businesses. It allows you to upload multiple source materials. These materials include PDFs, Google Docs, websites, and YouTube videos. You can then summarize the content, ask questions about the materials, and format responses in a specific way.

Google is announcing enhancements to Agentspace:

  • Chrome Enterprise: Agentspace is now integrated with Chrome Enterprise. This allows employees to search and access all their enterprise resources directly from the search box in Chrome. This integration streamlines workflows and boosts productivity.
  • Agent Gallery: This provides employees a single view of available agents across the enterprise. This includes agents from Google, internal teams, and partners.
  • Agent Designer: A no-code interface for creating custom agents automates everyday work tasks. Agent Designer helps employees adapt agents to their individual workflows and needs, no matter their technical experience. 
  • Idea Generation agent: This agent uses a tournament-style framework. It effectively ranks ideas based on employee-defined criteria. The agent can help employees refine or generate new ideas.
  • Deep Research agent: This agent explores complex topics on employees’ behalf. It provides them with findings in a comprehensive, easy-to-read report. 

Google Workspace: AI-Powered Productivity

Gemini is not only powering best-in-class AI capabilities as a model. It is also supercharging our own products, like Google Workspace. This includes popular apps like Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Meet. Workspace’s AI features have been enhancing employee collaboration for more than a decade. Google is announcing a number of Workspace innovations to further empower users with AI, including:

  • Help Me Analyze: This powerful feature turns Google Sheets into your personal business analyst. It intelligently identifies insights from your data without the need for explicit prompting.
  • Docs Audio Overview: With audio overviews in Docs, you can create high-quality audio. These can be human-like or podcast-style summaries of your documents.
  • Google Workspace Flows: Workspace Flows helps you automate daily work and repetitive tasks. This includes managing approvals, researching customers, organizing your email, and summarizing your daily agenda.

High-Impact Agents: Delivering Tangible Business Results

Across our AI portfolio, we’re witnessing a surge in the creation of highly-advanced AI agents. Organizations are pushing the boundaries. They are developing agents that not only excel in coding, data, and security. These agents also revolutionize customer service and the creative process. Here are five categories of agents where we are already seeing business impact:

Customer Agents empower your customers to quickly find answers and the right products. They can synthesize and reason across all types of multi-modal information, including text, audio, images, and video. They communicate and engage naturally with human-like speech and dialog. They connect across enterprise applications on behalf of the user and can be used anywhere.

We have already introduced Vertex AI Search for Healthcare and Retail. It allows doctors, nurses, and providers to rapidly search and analyze diverse patient data. Retailers can also add product discovery to their websites powered by Google Search.

Google Cloud’s own pre-built Customer Engagement Suite is transforming customer service. Grounded in a company’s data, it provides out-of-the-box functionality to build agents. These agents can be deployed across web, mobile, call center, in-store, and with third-party telephony and CRM systems. These unique capabilities have led to rapid growth in conversational AI agent usage.

Today, we’re announcing the next-generation of our Customer Engagement Suite. It will include human-like, high-definition voices. The suite will have the ability to understand emotions so agents can adapt better during conversations. It will offer streaming video support so virtual agents can interpret and respond in real-time through customer devices. Additionally, there will be AI assistance to build custom agents in a no-code interface.  

We are enhancing conversational customer experiences beyond the call center. We offer purpose-built vertical agents that address specific industry use cases. These include Food Ordering, Automotive, and Retail. Examples of these agents in-action include:

  • Wendy’s AI drive-through ordering system handles 60,000 orders daily.
  • MercedesBenz provides conversational search and navigation in its new CLA car series.
  • The Home Depot built Magic Apron, an agent that offers expert home improvement guidance 24/7.

Creative Agents are being used to supercharge creative teams, including those in media production, marketing, advertising, design. In some cases, agents are augmenting creative teams to enable content production at massive scale. In others, they are helping reimagine how stories can be told for a new generation of audiences. Google is using this technology. Marketing teams are directing its application to build the Fall Pixel phone ad campaign. A few other examples include:

  • WPP, which built Open for its 120,000 employees to concept, produce and measure campaigns.
  • Monks. Flow is using Google AI to help localize creative for campaigns.
  • The Brandtech Group built Pencil, a gen AI platform for brands to create ads, predict performance, and optimize active campaigns.
  • Mondelez is aiming for a 25% return on investment. They are using gen AI for content and creative development. This includes their brands like Oreo and Cadbury.

Google is thrilled to partner with Adobe. Adobe is the leader in creativity. The partnership brings advanced Imagen 3 and Veo 2 models to applications like Adobe Express.

Data Agents enable data teams to effectively manage data and business teams to activate it. Our data platform BigQuery has 5x more customers than the two leading independent data cloud companies. With BigQuery, you can activate all your data for AI. You can combine structured and unstructured data. Additionally, you can work with open formats like Apache Iceberg directly integrated into BigQuery. You can also use BigQuery to access data in any storage system, any SaaS application or on any cloud.

Google is announcing specialized agents for every member of the data team:

  • For data engineering teams, we are delivering support to build data pipelines. We help perform data preparation like transformation and enrichment. We also maintain data quality with anomaly detection. Additionally, we automate metadata generation. 
  • For data science teams, our AI agent acts as a comprehensive coding partner in your data science notebook. It automates feature engineering. It provides intelligent model selection. It enables scalable training and faster iteration.
  • For data analysts and business users, our Conversational Analytics Agent performs powerful, trustworthy analyses – entirely in natural language. You can embed this agent inline in your own web mobile application. 

Customers are seeing benefits with Google Data Agents. Mattel, for example, can analyze sentiment and consumer preferences in real time. Using BigQuery, Spotify harnesses enormous amounts of data. It delivers personalized experiences to over 675 million users worldwide. Additionally, Unilever reaches millions of retailers in emerging markets. It processes 75,000 orders daily. Bayer built an agent that combines Google search trends and internal data to forecast flu trends, improving public health outcomes. And public sector organizations like the State of Nevada are using agents to speed up benefit claims.

Coding Agents: At Google, AI is powering tools across our software development life cycle, including tools that help developers code. Today, more than 25% of new code at Google is generated by AI.

Gemini’s fast performance, large context window, and advanced reasoning capabilities make it exceptionally well-suited for coding assistance. Google offers Gemini Code Assist in Google Cloud, Android Studio, Firebase Studio, and your favorite IDE. Our enterprise version understands your code base, standards, and conventions. We’re announcing new Code Assist agents to help with everything from modernizing code to assisting with the full software development lifecycle:

  • Kanban board: Developers can interact with our agents on a Kanban board. 
  • Partner Integration: Code Assist also has integrations from partners such as Atlassian, Sentry, Snyk, with many more coming soon. Outside of Google, Gemini is also available for your development needs in Aider, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Replit, Tabnine, and Windsurf.

Security Agents can dramatically increase the speed and effectiveness of security analysts. AI integration in our security products is a key factor. This is why organizations worldwide are making Google part of their security team.

We offer critical cyber defense capabilities for today’s challenging threat environment, and today, we’re introducing a number of new innovations:

  • Google Unified Security: This solution brings together our visibility, threat detection, and AI powered security operations. It includes continuous virtual red-teaming and the most trusted enterprise browser. It incorporates Mandiant expertise. All these are in one converged security solution running on a planet-scale data fabric.
  • Alert triage agent: This agent performs dynamic investigations on behalf of users. It analyzes the context of each alert, gathers relevant information and renders a verdict on the alert. It also provides a history of the agent’s evidence and decision making. 
  • Malware analysis agent: This agent investigates whether code is safe or harmful. It builds on Code Insight to analyze potentially malicious code.

Commitment to Openness and Partnership

Realizing the full potential of gen AI requires an enterprise AI platform. This platform offers a broad, practical set of capabilities. It should be optimized for both cost and performance. This platform must also be open, seamlessly integrated with existing systems, and be supported by a strong partner ecosystem. 

At Google Cloud, the commitment to interoperability enables you to:

  • Leverage your existing IT environment by connecting with other clouds and applications. You can secure cross-cloud networking using your existing security platforms with Cross Cloud Interconnect. You can support federated identity with Microsoft EntraID. Use Google Cloud’s BigQuery, Spanner, and AlloyDB without moving from Amazon or Azure.
  • Access hundreds of the world’s leading ISVs. They integrate with Google AI. You can easily deploy them from the Google Cloud Marketplace.
  • Utilize our extensive network of services partners. These include Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, HCLTech, KPMG, TCS, Wipro, and others.
  • Implement sovereign clouds, which Google enabled with local partners to meet international regulations. They offer Google Cloud Sovereign AI services in the public cloud. They are also available in sovereign cloud and distributed clouds. Additionally, they provide these services with Google Workspace. 

This is an unprecedented time to be working with these transformative technologies. Google delivers world-class infrastructure, models, platforms and agents.

The opportunity presented by AI is unlike anything we’ve ever witnessed. It holds the power to improve lives, enhance productivity and reimagine processes on a scale previously unimaginable.

Thomas kurian

Google has been incorporating machine learning into our products for more than 20 years. Our investment in AI is deeply rooted in our core mission. This mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Now, if you can’t come to the cloud. Google cloud will bring Google AI to you.

Jensen Huang, CEO, NVIDIA

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Amin Vahdat, VP, GM, ML. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Gabe Weiss, Developer Advocacy Manager. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Lisa O’Malley, Sr. Director, Product Management, Applied AI. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Pali Bhat, Product Officer. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Brad Calder, VP & GM, Google Cloud. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Sandra Joyce, Google Threat Intelligence. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Payal Chakravarty, Director Product Management,Google Security. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Nav Jagpal, Principal Engineer, Google Security. (2025, April).

Google Cloud AI. Google Cloud Next 25 Opening Keynote: The new way to cloud’ Jensen Huang, CEO, NVIDIA. (2025, April).

An Intro. to Coding Java with Skillstorm

Java 

  1. Portability
  2. Easy to use
  3. Documentation
  4. Powerful APIs
  5. High Performance
  6. Development Simplicity

Java has been around since 1995. Object-oriented programming.

Becoming a Stormer means acquiring the following abilities so that, by the end of the course, you are able to:

  1. Explain basic object-oriented programming fundamentals such as encapsulation, inheritance, abstraction, and polymorphism
  2. Construct basic Java application logic and code, such as variables, conditional and iterative execution, methods, loops, etc.
  3. Identify how common data structures are implemented and be able to appropriately leverage the Java Collection API.
  4. See Apply algorithmic logic for sorting, searching, and other foundational problems.
  5. Store, manipulate, and query data in a relational database using SQL.
  6. Explain technical concepts in an interview format.
  7. Integrate code and add new features into a larger application.

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another’s code; too little and expressiveness is endangered. — (Guido.van.Rossum)

Java fundamentals
  1. Oops Object-Oriented Programming
  1. Encapsulation
  2. Inheritance
  3. Abstraction
  4. Polymorphism

It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing — Steve Jobs

Classes in Java

Classes are blueprints used to define objects.

Real-world objects

Application components

Class members include:
  1. Variables (state)
  2. Methods (behavior)
  3. Constructors (initialization)

An Intro. to Coding Java with Skillstorm. “An Intro. to Coding Java with Skillstorm” course, Instructor, Patrick Walsh, Skillstorm. (2025, March).

January Art Show

Artwork is available for sale at The Boxcar Bakery & Ice Cream during the month of January. This artwork can be ordered on my website at https://www.valmarketing.net/paintings-for-sale.

Blackburn, Valerie. (2026, January 31). January Art Exhibition. Val Marketing.

Orgininally Published

Blackburn, Valerie. (2025, February 25). February and March Art Display. Boxcar Bakery & Ice Cream. 

Snowflake conference

This conference series manifests what an AI powered marketing agency of the future looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtPrpqh5Kxc

Snowflake conference,Snowflake’s Free AI Training Investment, Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of Engineering, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference,presenter, Erin Foxworthy, Industry Principal Marketing Advertising, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, presenter, Ben Dutter, Chief Strategy Officer, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, presenter, John Saunders, VP of Product, Power Digital. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, presenter, Ryan Green, host, Data Cloud Now. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, presenter, Baris Gultekin, Head of AI, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, Christian Carter, presenter, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, Anoosh Saboori, Head of product security, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, Brad Jones, presenter, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, Amanda Kelly, Director of product experiences, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, Danielle Moore, presenter, Adweek. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, David Fisher, Industry Principal Media & Entertainment UK & EMEA, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Snowflake conference, Bill Stratton, presenter, Snowflake. (2025, February).

Wp State of the word

State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, celebrating the progress of the open source project and offering a glimpse into its future.

This year, State of the Word was broadcast live from Tokyo Node Hall, in Tokyo, Japan. This event will be live-streamed to WordPress enthusiasts and newcomers around the globe via the WordPress YouTube channel.

WordPress publishing is not just about publishing books and websites, but building community. — Matt Mullenweg

Japan was the first language to localize WordPress 21 years ago.

WordPress powers 43.6% of the worlds websites and has 62.3% market share. That’s the power of open source.

WordPress. ’State of the Word 2024.’, Matt Mullenweg, Co founder , WordPress. (2024, December).

Google Public Sector Summit

An event focusing on the “art of the possible” in AI, cybersecurity, and data analysis for government customers.

This year, Google is seeing incredible momentum among customers who are digitally transforming with AI to support their missions. The uses range from using Gen AI for language translation, to building an AI-powered microscope to identify cancer, to helping identify underground water leaks.

Google is thrilled to showcase innovations that will help public sector organizations on their AI journeys, as well as help expand offerings to agencies. In addition, they have expanded partnerships that will enable organizations to prototype, create, and deploy AI-powered solutions faster, as well as upskill their workforces. This is how they are transforming missions.

Google public sector is excited to announce Gemini in Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) is available for Secret and Top Secret workloads in early 2025. Gemini in GDC empowers public sector agencies to build next-generation AI agents to improve efficiency and effectiveness across departments. These workloads could include agents built to help government employees streamline workflows and code development, gain deeper insights from data to drive better decision-making, and enhance the agency’s cybersecurity posture to navigate evolving threats.

Gemini in GDC is air-gapped, empowering agencies to adhere to the highest standards of security, compliance, and privacy, with enterprise-grade security built in to protect sensitive government data. With a focus on data privacy and high availability, Gemini in GDC ensures reliable access to critical AI capabilities that can improve public services, increase productivity, and ultimately better serve citizens.

Google Achieves IL4|5 ATO for Air Force Cloud One

Google public sector announced it achieved Impact Level (IL) 4 and IL5 Authorization to Operate (ATO) Air Force Cloud One, a contract vehicle that provides innovative cloud technologies to the Department of the Air Force. This milestone underscores our commitment to providing the DoD with secure and reliable cloud solutions for sensitive workloads.

Google’s use of a Zero Trust security architecture is the assumption that no part of the network is inherently secure, and constant verification of access is required. The U.S. Air Force has access to Google Cloud’s scalable, flexible cloud services to support government applications.

Google is a pioneer in Zero Trust security. This achievement builds on the existing FedRAMP authorizations and further solidifies a position as a trusted partner for the DoD’s digital transformation journey.

A Playbook for Minting the New Chief AI Officer

According to the White House Executive Order on AI, each federal agency needs to fill the role of Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) this year.

That’s why Google public sector commissioned leading analyst firm IDC to produce The Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) Playbook: A Practical Guide for Advancing AI Innovation in Government, offering guidance for U.S. federal agencies navigating the evolving CAIO role¹. The playbook explores challenges and opportunities, drawing comparisons to similar roles, and emphasizes the importance of clear role definition, stakeholder engagement, and early project success.

Google Accelerates Government Upskilling with $15M AI Grants

According to Apolitical’s research, only 15% of public servants have received training in AI. That’s why they announced $15 million in Google.org funding to two leading public sector organizations — the Partnership for Public Service and InnovateUS — to further upskill the U.S. government workforce. The grants will be used to establish a Center for Federal AI, a hub dedicated to cultivating AI leadership and talent within the federal government, and to offer no-cost, at-your-own-pace AI training courses, workshops, and coaching programs.

Google Launches National Institute of Health STRIDES Marketplace

At the Summit, Google Cloud is launching a curated Google Cloud NIH STRIDES Marketplace to provide a one stop shop for researchers in the National Institute of Health (NIH) Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) initiative. The Marketplace will allow scientists to find, purchase, and deploy cloud-based tools and services from Google Cloud partners to accelerate biomedical research.

Google Cloud is the preferred platform for researchers around the world because of its scalability, ease of use, and openness. The new Google NIH STRIDES Marketplace will offer easy access to a wide range of tools and services that benefit researchers and scientists.

The Google Cloud partners include Redis, Box for Life Sciences, Augmedix (a Commure company), Sorcero, Egnyte, MongoDB, WEKA, Form Bio, Red Hat, Rhino Health, and Aiforia.

Our Partners, Our Key to Success

At a pivotal time for innovation in the public sector, Google Public Sector continues to focus on accelerating growth, fostering deeper collaboration, and maximizing profitability for our valued partners.

Google announced two expansions to existing partnerships:

  • Accenture Federal Services and the Google Public Sector’s Rapid Innovation Team have launched a new “AI Federal Solution Factory” to speed the prototyping and piloting of AI-powered solutions purpose built for federal agencies.
  • Slalom Solution Factory announced an expanded partnership with Google Public Sector, which focuses on the development of cutting edge AI solutions, leveraging Google Public Sector’s Rapid Innovation Team and professional Google Career certifications to help drive customer success via U.S. state and local government and education (SLED) initiatives.

Google public sector continues to be a source of pride as they work with industry partners to explore the “art of the possible” with customers.

¹IDC Signature White Paper, The Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) Playbook: A Practical Guide for Advancing AI Innovation in Government, sponsored by Google Public Sector, Doc# US52616824, October 2024

Google Cloud Summit, CEO Keynote CEO Keynote, Karen Dahut, CEO, Google Public Sector. (2024, December).

Google Cloud Summit, CEO Keynote Fireside Chat with Thomas Kurian, Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. (2024, December).

Google Cloud Summit. ’Beyond LLMs: Reimagining Higher Education in the Age of Gen AI‘, Ron Bushar, Field CTO Research and Education. Google Cloud. (2024, December).

Google Cloud Summit. ‘Luminary Talks by Public Sector Leaders’, Katharyn White, Director of Marketing. Google Public Sector. (2024, December).

Google Cloud Summit. ‘Data, Infrastructure, Partnership: Unlocking AI’s Potential in the Public Sector’, Sachin Gupta, Vice President and GM, Infrastructure and Solutions Group, Google Cloud. (2024, December).

Google Cloud Summit. ’Beyond LLMs: Reimagining Higher Education in the Age of Gen AI‘, Charles Elliot, Field CTO Research and Education. Google Cloud. (2024, December).

Google Cloud Summit. ‘ Powering the Next Wave of Transformation and Mission Impact‘, MK Palamor, Director, Office of the CISO, Google Cloud. (2024, December).

Google Cloud Summit. ‘ Powering the Next Wave of Transformation and Mission Impact‘, Elizabeth Moon, Managing Director, Customer Engineering. Google Public Sector. (2024, December).

Google Cloud Summit. ‘New Way To Cloud: Allen Institute for Research Intelligence’, Ali Farhadi, CEO, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. (2024, December).

datacommons.org

g.co/research/greenlight

 innovate-us.org

Generative AI

Prototyping with Generative AI: Essential Patterns for Building Innovative Applications

Embark on a journey into the world of generative AI prototyping and discover the most impactful development patterns for building innovative applications using Google Cloud’s powerful tools. This session provides a practical guide to rapidly transforming your ideas into functional prototypes, empowering you to explore the potential of generative AI. In this session, here are the lessons.

  • Rapid Prototyping with Gemini and Vertex AI: Quickly get started with generative AI development using the Gemini API and Vertex AI platform.
  • The Art of Prompt Engineering: Learn prompt design and tuning techniques to elicit accurate and creative outputs from Gemini.
  • Unlocking Multimodal Magic: Integrate various data types, including images and text, into your prototypes using Gemini’s multimodal capabilities.
  • Building with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Leverage your existing data to enhance the knowledge and context of your prototypes with RAG.

Products Covered: 

Vertex AI Studio, Gemini 1.5 Pro/Flash, Model Garden, Model Builder, Workspace

Project IDX in beta

Complete developer workspace in the browser. 

Building a server in 24 hrs.

Rag Retrieval augmented generation.

Scaling Generative AI: Advanced Patterns & Production Techniques

  • Advanced Gemini Capabilities: Unlock the power of Gemini 1.5 Pro/Flash, exploring features like enhanced reasoning, function calling and AI agents to build more sophisticated and interactive applications.
  • Integrating Visuals with Imagen 3: Learn how to integrate Imagen 3 for advanced image generation and understanding, creating visually compelling and interactive user experiences within your applications.
  • Building with Function Calling and AI Agents: Dive deeper into function calling and AI agents, exploring how to connect your application to external APIs and data sources, enabling dynamic interactions and automation.
  • Optimizing for Production with Context Caching and Deployment Strategies: Discover techniques like context caching to enhance performance and efficiency, and explore best practices for deploying and scaling your generative AI applications on Google Cloud for production readiness.

Products Covered: 

Vertex AI, Gemini 1.5 Pro/Flash, Imagen 3, LangChain, LangGraph, Agent Builder, Cloud Run

  1. Data
  2. Model
  3. Application 
  4. Infrastructure

The new genre of computing equals a more random model
of computing. It is good to have a random output.
That way it isn’t too robotic. 

GENERATIVE AI

With objective deterministic outputs and subjective probabilistic outputs, what problems can be uniquely solved by GenAI?

The IVO test

If you can immediately validate the output it is a good application. 

Generative ai

Legacy code generator creates static code analysis to perform static architecture. 

Decoding AI’s potential with Anthropic. A guide for technical business leaders.

Anthropic

Experts in engineering helped transform us to AI to function autonomously.

How to work with Claude

The upgrade to Claude 3.5 sonnet simulates a real work environment. With real world use cases we can look at a large scale code base.

The future impact of generative AI is yet to be seen. With proponents on both sides, do you think AI is necessary in order to advance technology?

Getting Started with Generative AI. ’Getting Started with Generative AI’, Zack Akil Sr. Full Stack Machine Learning Engineer & Developer Advocate. Google. (2024, November).

Welcome: Startup School. ’Welcome: Startup School’, Tymon Kokoszka, Go-To-Market Manager, Google for Startups. Google. (2024, November).

Deep dive: Vertex AI for ML practitioners. ’Deep dive: Vertex AI for ML practitioners’, Mona Mona, AI/ML Customer Engineer, Google Cloud. (2024, November).

Resources

Google Startup school https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/startup-school

Vertex AI Studio https://cloud.google.com/generative-ai-studio

Vertex AI Platform https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai

Generative AI Feedback goo.gle/GenAI-FeedbackW1

Gemini Google gemini.google.com

Email authorization changes

Gmail and Yahoo announced key changes in email authentication earlier this year.

What is changing?

  1. Using your own custom domain.

2. Authenticating emails correctly.

3. Keeping spam complaints below 0.3%.

4. Ensuring an easy one click unsubscribe process.

Who is impacted? Those that send 5,000 emails per day. Even if you send fewer, the advice is to use the rules to prepare for change.

Using your own custom domain

Using free domains is a negative practice. e.g. mynameis@gmail.com. It increases the chances your emails get rejected, or put in the spam folder.

Authenticating emails correctly

Authenticate your emails with SPF, DKM and DMARK. These tools help to keep your emails trustworthy and safe.

Keeping spam complaints low

Keep spam complaints below 0.3%. Pay attention to spam complaints. Why would anyone opt out of your email marketing list? Perhaps, they receive too many emails. Or, the content is irrelevant now.

Ensuring an easy one click unsubscribe process

Make it easy for users to unsubscribe. Tools to help with this are DKIM and DMARC. Using advanced DNS, add a new record, then copy and paste the DKIM string. Save the changes, then voila, you have an easy unsubscribe process.

Gmail and Yahoo! 2024 Email Authentication. ’Gmail and Yahoo! 2024 Email Authentication‘, Pedro Simao, Product Marketing Expert. GetResponse. (2024, November).

AI, For Better or Worse?

In a recent conversation with a gentleman at an after hours chamber event, the topic was all about AI.

Does it make technology better? The large tech companies would say so. AI speeds up productivity in allowing computer generated content.

A blog post becomes easier and faster to write. Stumped on how to vary the words in a sentence? Ask AI for suggestions. Magically, the words appear and can be inserted with just a click.

My response to him was, “What about rhetoric?” If we all rely on AI to fill in our sentences, then does all the content become the same? With human generated content the rhetoric is present.  With AI, “Does the computer generated content have the same ingenuity as what a human writes?”

E.g. Human generated content | “The energetic fox became friends with the lazy hound.”

E.g. AI generated content | “The fox and the hound are friends.”

Anyway, is E.T. still around to ask?

Adobe Max Conference

The Adobe Max Conference is filled with useful information about software updates and small business advice.

Need to increase your content’s views, likes, and conversions? Struggling to meet the high content demand of your quickly growing audience? I listened to the session with WellSaid, SVP, Head of Marketing, Patricia Rollins. She shares the latest trends and techniques for utilizing AI voiceover to wow audiences and scale your creative assets without sacrificing professional quality.

AI Voices

Design is a crowded field. Motion helps you stand out. Motion tells a story. Motion is information. — Victoria Nece, Motion Designer

Michelle Higa Fox has a session on After Effects, Michael Fugoso has a session on Adobe Live and Terry White has a session on Lightroom for motion designers.

One of the most content filled sessions was the Creativity Super Session Motion Design for Graphic Designers. Other sessions included Moving your brand into Video and Personal Brand, From Unseen to Unforgettable.

Personal Brand, From Unseen to Unforgettable is presented with Kristy Campbell.

Creativity unites us all. Build a personal brand with power. Create |Carve |Connect |Conquer — Kristy Campbell, Designer

Build your core framework & anchor your personal brand by embracing where you come from.

Your personal brand is about projecting you. Be authentic.

Build Chart with a business and a personal row containing the 4 facets of branding for each one.

4 Facets of personal branding

What you know | What you show | What you feel | What you hide

For instance, my personal brand has a very modern, iconic letter “V” and “M” that are connected in a bold red color.

The logo is animated when you visit my website, https://www.valmedia.net. I have successfully attracted business clients and career opportunities with this brand identity. — Valmedia | Sole Proprieter

Adobe Express was presented with Vratislav Pecka. He demonstrates a unique font and visual design in the program.

Adobe Max Conference. ‘From Unseen to Unforgettable: The Power of Personal Branding’, Kristy Campbell, Brand & Graphic Designer, Pink Pony Creative. (2024, October).

Adobe Max Conference. ’Creativity Super Session: Motion Design for Graphic Designers – SS2‘ , Victoria Nece, Principal Product Manager, Motion Graphics, Adobe. (2024, October).

Adobe Max Conference. ’Creativity Super Session: Motion Design for Graphic Designers – SS2‘ , Michelle Higa Fox, Group Creative Director (Experience) BUCK. (2024, October).

Adobe Max Conference. ’Quickly Scale Your Marketing Campaigns with AI Voice – OS705‘ , Patricia Rollins, SVP|Head of Marketing, WellSaid. (2024, October).

Adobe Max Conference. ‘Meet the Speaker: Michael Fugoso – AL690‘ Michael Fugoso, Sr. Design Evangelist for Next Gen Creative Pros, Adobe. (2024, October).

Adobe Max Conference. ’Opening Keynote‘, Terry White, Principal Director, Creative Cloud Evangelist and Community Advocate, Adobe. (2024, October).

Adobe Max Conference. ‘Using Adobe Express in Creative Workflows‘, Vratislav Pecka, Graphic Designer, PosterLad. (2024, October).