Leveraging Smart Analytics and AI to Meet Customers Where They Are

Google’s Smart Analytics

A comprehensive set of services is available in Google’s Data Analytics platform:

• Collect (Data Transfer and Migration Services) .
• Process (Dataflow and Data Fusion)
• Store (Data Lakes and Databases)
• Analyse (BigQuery and Dataproc)
• Activate (Looker and Connected Sheets)

The company’s vision is to build an enterprise-class analytics platform on which its customers can rely for their mission-critical workloads. Ultimately, Google wants its platform to be open, intelligent and flexible:

Open

A platform that gives customers portability so they can easily move to and from the cloud and have the support they need with hybrid and multicloud.

As mentioned in our first blog, 80% of cloud users work with more than one cloud service provider, so flexibility is key. Kin + Carta believe in a multi cloud future that gives users exactly that; the multi cloud platform is a hybrid-cloud intelligence solution that runs on Google, AWS and Azure, providing huge potential.

Moreover, with BigQuery Omni, Google Cloud is breaking data silos—no matter the location of the data (Google, AWS or Azure), customers will be able to query the same familiar BigQuery UI standard SQL, which is certainly a step in the right direction.

Intelligent

Google has some of the most advanced AI/ML technologies in the world and has seamlessly integrated them into its systems, tools and processes, so there is no learning curve for users.

Google Cloud is also using these models to build solutions that solve real-world business problems, such as recommendation systems, customer segmentation, anomaly detection and forecasting.

The biggest benefit is that users can reap the rewards of these technologies almost instantly and without much need for onboarding.

Flexible

With a diverse customer base spanning a variety of industries, organisations have different use cases and business models for Google.

Customers want flexibility in Google products and/or pricing models and, of course, Google doesn’t want to make customers work hard to find them; it wants to be ‘where they are’ to make analytics as accessible as possible.

Becoming Data-Centric for a Unified View of Consumers

In his ‘What’s New and What’s Next in Smart Analytics’ talk, Vittorio Cretella, CIO of Procter & Gamble Co., explained how Google Cloud helped transform P&G’s business. P&G shifted to become a data-centric business because of its key objective: to understand consumers and serve them better than anybody else in the market.

Cloud provided the agility to make this shift at scale through its capacity to store a large amount of data on demand, its functionality for tools and ML libraries to work with that data and the means to ensure reliability and the protection of data privacy.

The aim of P&G’s partnership with Google Cloud was to better store and analyse its brand and marketing information, and its journey has led P&G to relocate all of its customer information into a multicloud, data-lake environment that is larger than 4 petabytes.

Becoming data-centric provides one unified view of consumers and allows P&G to efficiently manage omnichannel consumer journeys, which means it can serve the right content to the right audience at the right time.

Google, AI and Economic Recovery

 

During the lockdown, Google saw a 60% increase in internet usage and a 200% increase in searches for ‘online shopping’. Tech solutions are helping companies adapt to these behavioural changes to benefit their customers.

Landbot, for instance, reduced the pressure on emergency systems with chatbots that processed 280 million messages during the pandemic, whilst Ocado Technology supported its retail partners to deliver 40% more groceries.

Google’s commitment to investing in skills and sustainability, and helping governments use the right AI tools is accelerating change as we collectively focus on recovery.

Rajen Sheth, VP of product management at Google Cloud, believes that every organisation can be transformed with AI as part of this effort. He outlined in ‘Generating Value with AI’ that this will happen in two ways:

• By leveraging AI to solve common problems faced by businesses, such as the quality of customer service in contact centres (whether it’s industry-specific or a more general approach to all industries)

•  By leveraging AI to solve unique problems faced by specific types of business

Embracing AI delivers a competitive advantage for organisations, and, crucially, the window of opportunity is closing for those who want to exploit AI to establish and maintain their position as a market leader. According to McKinsey, ‘Companies that fully absorb AI in their value-producing workflows by 2025 will dominate the 2030 world economy with 120% cash flow growth’.

Google offers several AI solutions that help solve common and unique business problems and can help improve operational efficiency and turn it into a competitive advantage: 

• Contact Centre AI (CCAI): An organisation can easily plug this into its existing providers to take advantage of its current investments. CCAI assists live agents, helps expedite customer requests through virtual agents and offers a layer of valuable insights, as it did in Verizon's case.

•  Document AI: Extracting structured data from unstructured documents means that customers can make better decisions for their business, such as processing invoices faster and more efficiently or, in the case of Mr. Cooper, speeding up mortgage processes to benefit customers.

Google also offers some industry-specific solutions, such as the following:   

•  Retail: Where customers are struggling to optimise the merchandising supply chain and product discovery phase to generate conversions, Google Cloud can help with demand forecasting, product searching and Recommendations AI, which leverages ML to match products to customers’ preferences.

•  Financial Services: Google Cloud streamlines complex document management processes such as lending. One solution is Lending DocAI, which optimises mortgage processing for financial institutions by automating certain routine reviews. Another is Procure2Pay DocAI, which helps enterprises automate their highest-volume and highest-value business processes.

Every industry has its unique challenges with customer experience and service, but with the benefits of AI solutions from Google Cloud, organisations can not only overcome them but achieve and maintain competitive advantages in their respective markets.