How 7 businesses are putting Google Cloud’s AI innovations to work

The AI boom of the past year and a half could not be more dramatic. It’s hard to remember a time when so many organizations were all-in on a new technology. Across industries, businesses understand just how powerful AI technologies can be in boosting productivity, creativity, collaboration and efficiency.

At our annual Google Cloud Next event this week, more than 300 enterprises are joining us in Las Vegas to showcase real-world applications of our AI technologies. Whether building customer service agents and AI assistants for employees, boosting security and code-writing efficiency, or unlocking new levels of creativity, AI is finding a role across industries.

For a better understanding of what this means, here’s a look at how some of the biggest industry leaders are building new tools and experiences with our Gemini models, Vertex AI development platform, Google Workspace and more.

• Bayer is building a radiology platform that will help the multinational bioscience company and others create and deploy AI-first healthcare apps that assist radiologists with data analysis, intelligent search, and to create documents that meet healthcare requirements needed for regulatory approval. Apps built with this platform should improve efficiency and diagnosis turnaround times, ultimately benefiting patients.
• Best Buy is using Google Cloud’s technology, including its Gemini models to create new and more convenient ways to give customers the products and services they need. Starting this summer, U.S. customers will be able to connect with a generative AI-powered virtual assistant that can troubleshoot product issues, reschedule order deliveries, manage Geek Squad subscriptions or memberships and more. Best Buy will also launch new gen AI-enabled capabilities designed to help customer service workers and frontline employees better serve customers nationwide.
• Cintas, one of the leading providers of uniforms and facilities services, is using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search to develop its own gen AI-powered search engines that can quickly navigate large sets of Cintas contracts, documents, and its product library. This enables employee-partners to better find critical information, improving customer service productivity, speed, and accuracy and delivering personalized value to its customers.
• Discover Financial is using Vertex AI to empower its nearly 10,000 contact center agents with gen AI-driven tools featuring capabilities such as intelligent document summarization to analyze and summarize complex policies and procedures. The new capabilities began rolling out in early 2024. Early results show that agents can reduce call handle time and improve policy and procedure search time by as much as 70 percent, allowing agents to spend less time searching and more time helping customers.
• IHG Hotels and Resorts is building a generative AI-powered chatbot to help guests easily plan their next vacation directly in the IHG One Rewards mobile app. The new chat experience is designed to proactively ask questions, providing recommendations that are more tailored and personalized.
• Mercedes-Benz will infuse e-commerce capabilities into its online storefront with a gen AI-powered smart sales assistant as well as new Google-quality search and recommendations capabilities to help customers better discover Mercedes’ vehicles and offerings Mercedes also plans to expand its use of Google Cloud AI to make its call center experience more seamless and helpful, and the carmaker is using AI tools, including Vertex AI and Gemini, to make its marketing campaigns more personalized and relevant to customers.
• WPP, the creative transformation company, will integrate Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities into its intelligent marketing operating system, called WPP Open, which empowers its people and clients to deliver new levels of personalization, creativity and efficiency. This includes the use of Gemini 1.5 Pro models to supercharge both the accuracy and speed of content performance predictions. The company will also take video description solutions to the next level by exploring real-time streaming capabilities with Gemini Pro 1.5 for both description and narration, including voice generation using ElevenLabs.