Google Cloud will incorporate AI principles in all new products; India unit developing payment gateway

Amit Zavery, VP and head of Platform, Google Cloud

Google Cloud will architecturally ensure that anything new it builds will have some artificial intelligence (AI) principle associated with it, a senior executive at Google Cloud said, as the race to gain market share for AI capabilities in enterprise offerings from rivals such as Microsoft and OpenAI intensifies.

Earlier this month, Google Cloud introduced a slew of additional AI features and tools for customers of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It also launched a generative AI app builder along with padding up the AI capabilities of its existing machine learning (ML) platform Vertex AI, which is used to train and deploy ML models and AI applications.

Speaking to Moneycontrol, Amit Zavery, Vice President and Head of Platform, Google Cloud, said GCP is using AI to make existing products better, for instance, using generative AI and the foundation models to improve capabilities such as training huge volumes of data across video, audio, text, chat and images with different size parameters. Additionally, it will be focused on the security aspects of business-sensitive data not getting leaked through AI usage.

“So customers are getting the value of AI directly through to these products, not having to learn about each other between themselves,” Zavery said referring to enterprise customers and app developers using GCP.

He added, “A big thing for us architecturally is to make sure that in anything we build there are some AI principles associated with it…So we provide those principles as part of the things we publish. But the goal is to really make sure that we can cater to those specific use cases through our products as well.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft too has announced AI integrations for all of its Office 365 apps and services through a new assistant called Copilot that will be available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and Business Chat.

On the generative AI side, Google has also started public release of its AI chatbot and ChatGPT competitor, Bard. The technology giant is currently gathering feedback on Bard to improve the product. Zavery didn't divulge much details on it wanting to stick to the enterprise-level AI offerings.

Strengthening and pushing Vertex AI

Google Cloud also added new AI features to Vertex AI while strengthening back-end security, Zavery said.

“While we also provide a product like Vertex AI, which provides API access as well as tools to do modelling, data training and the whole life cycle around ML Ops, with AI you can bring in different models to kind of cater to your specific business needs,” he said.

According to him, with Vertex AI, Google aims to provide simple tools and an interface that makes it easy for anybody to take these models and train the data to control and apply it as they need it.

“If you look at the demo, and the capabilities we do with Vertex AI, the whole lifecycle of doing AI, generative AI-related work is now much, much simpler, manageable, easy to use, and very predictable. And you don't need an army of data or AI scientists to do your work. Anybody who's in the business or trying to build applications can benefit from these AI capabilities,” he said.

Innovating in India

Zavery spoke to Moneycontrol during his recent visit to India where he met the engineering teams that were developing Google’s Payment Gateway. This gateway is a new B2B API-based payment product that allows companies to process payments at scale. It also offers an ‘issuer switch’ which helps execute payment or account information-related transactions on bank accounts of users through a per-transaction billing model.

This offering was built completely from scratch by GCP using its own various services and was led by the India engineering team.

Zavery said, “We are working with many large banks to provide them with the gateway capability. So they can run that as a service for themselves and process all the payments through that gateway as well. We can give them the scale, the volume support, the security associated with that, integrate to their systems, and offer fully managed cloud service as a payment gateway for those capabilities.”

“With this product, instead of banks needing to build a UPI (unified payments interface) translator and a UPI switch, we provide that as a product to them. So they can also do away with a lot of standards and requirements changing, as we take care of them as well,” he added.

This payments gateway product will be offered to cater to the emerging needs of other geographies like Brazil and countries in the Asia Pacific region too, Zavery said.