Keynote Analysis Day 2

[Savannah Peterson]

Good morning, nerd fam, and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We’re here at Google Cloud Next. It is midway through day two of three days of coverage here on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by the brilliant souls that power the Analyst Engine as well as the entire business, John Furrier, Rebecca Knight, Rob Shetchey. Thank you all for being here. We are all buzzing. We’re still smiling midway through. We’ve already done about 20 interviews, which is really impressive. Rob, I’m going to turn to you first since you’re on my right.

First Impressions

What is your first impression, takeaway, theme of the show? Bonus points if you don’t say Gen AI.

[Rob Shetchey]

That’s good because I wasn’t going there. So I think the vibrancy of the community that is here and the fact that so many partners are here. I think ones that we’ve had on the show, ones that are not even on the show, and a lot of what is going on where there’s just a sense of partnership with Google that I’m not sure that I saw back in the fall when we were at Google Next 2023, which again was only eight months ago.

[00:01:09]

But I think the 30,000 people here, it’s basically twice as many that were at the previous show. Lot of energy. Just a lot more energy than we saw in San Francisco.

[Rebecca Knight]

Pace of Innovation

Yeah.

[Savannah Peterson]

It really is buzzing.

[Rebecca Knight]

Rebecca, what about you? I am struck by all of those things, Rob, and also just the dizzying number of product announcements and updates and the pace of innovation. I’m going to say a Gen AI.

[Savannah Peterson]

Yeah, go for it.

[Rebecca Knight]

And really that we are on the cusp of this real AI-driven workplace and that you cannot not know how to work with Gen AI because if it doesn’t replace your job, it will change your job. And so these are really important topics that we’re discussing, really important themes. So I’m abuzz.

[Savannah Peterson]

Hot Take

I love it. John, what about you?

[00:02:00]

Hot take?

[John Furrier]

Well, the keynote going on today is mostly developer. It’s a little bit less exciting in the sense of the announcements aren’t really there, but it’s really, it gets under the hood. A couple of things that are jumping out at me is I’ll say I love the Gen AI enterprise use cases because we’d follow that heavily and really it’s most important that’s under a lot of change that’s going to cause a lot of disruption. So the enterprise under the covers use cases is going to cause all kinds of disruption and there’ll be winners and losers. We talk about that all the time. But the whole AI editing with photos, I think is a big popular item today. You’re going to see AI editing and then the watermarking that came out yesterday, a little nuanced point. That’s going to be like, what’s real, what’s real, what’s synthetic. That’s big. And then you got like the coding piece of it, coding assistant. So you got Google really hitting the user experience with workspace. So that’s, that’s speaks to the chat GPT wave. And then you got the underlying new infrastructure and then everything in between like little tools like editing photos.

[Savannah Peterson]

Google Vids. I think the fact that you can do a whole video with prompt is amazing.

[00:03:02]

[John Furrier]

There’s a cool factor here that I’d like to go, okay, that’s cool. And then like, oh shit moment. What does that mean? Like, so there’s a lot of that going on in this event. And I’m impressed with Google. Like I said, last year they had a good direction this year. They followed it up on the sizzle and they had brought a lot of steak to the table. But the other area is the ecosystem. And if Google continues to get traction with the partners, Rob, this is where I see a little bit of, I won’t say Amazon level partnership ecosystem, but they’re standing tall, but are they confident? All right. So, so they’re having parties, we’re going to the parties. You see in the partners, uh, it really, really step up and they’re standing tall. So I think if that continues for one more year, Google will have a legit ecosystem. And so that’s going to be the big watch for us.

[Savannah Peterson]

Google’s Momentum

Yeah, I think so. I mean, Google’s got some momentum. They shared some stats. 90% of Gen AI unicorns are Google Cloud customers. 60% of Gen AI startups use the Google Cloud platform.

[00:04:01]

So if we’re looking at that, that is quite a bit of saturation in this new emerging market.

Collaboration Across Teams

I think one of the things that struck me all week is the level of collaboration across teams within these large organizations. We’ve talked to PwC, to Deloitte, and to McKinsey, each one of them talking about how they’ve combined their cloud and AI teams now to solve problems for customers at scale, which I think is really interesting. Sometimes new tech stays in its silo or in a different division of the business.

[John Furrier]

You’ve got to be careful in the stats. When they quote those numbers, a lot of those unicorn numbers, they’re not really full cloud customers sometimes. So I’m suspect of those numbers because they might be workspace users. So, I mean, so you’ve got to look at, say, pure IaaS to Amazon. That’s a tough compare. Platform to platform. Isn’t workspace in the cloud though? Well, Azure does the same thing when they’re Office 365, they call that cloud numbers. So there’s always that apples to oranges. I’m not hammering Google too hard, but they do have a good uptake, but full cloud adoption, they’re definitely not as high as…

[00:05:03]

[Rob Shetchey]

But I also look at, and to your exact point, that’s not the interesting number to me. Like the Gen AI startups and being in there and foundation models being built, that’s great and all.

Customer Use Cases

But I think some of the discussions we’ve been having around the use cases that customers are really using. And I think we’re going to have some great exploration of that this afternoon because to your point on what we’re seeing is a lot of them are leaning into that dev first, engineering first use case. And I think, Rebecca, we were talking about this a couple of times yesterday and today. What is the replacement? And what is this going to do to the workforce and to the people? And in fact, there’s been some caution, cautionary tales around that as well.

[Rebecca Knight]

Impact on Entry-Level Jobs

Well, exactly. The New York Times has a great story today all about entry-level jobs on Wall Street pretty much going away because of the fact that Gen AI can do all the data crunching, can make all the PowerPoints, can do all the scut work that these junior bankers were doing, that they used to do for many years.

[00:06:07]

And it was the worst jobs on Wall Street, but it was your golden ticket to the greatest jobs on Wall Street. And I’m really curious because I think that that is getting a little bit lost in this discussion in terms of what will happen to those younger people. They will find other jobs, but how do they get the training? How do they learn the business? And this applies to investment banking, but also other roles, other industries.

[John Furrier]

AI Opportunities

I love the New York Times, but I’ll put a little, I love the New York Times, here’s what comes next. I don’t buy that whole, they’re a narrative on the job things losses. Yes, people will lose their jobs and bankers, well my traders, oh my heart bleeds for them. But if you think about the other side of the coin, what does AI bring opportunities for people that don’t get those jobs? So they’ll go away in the grunt areas, the grunt work entry-level, but it also shifts. So we’ve seen that with big data before.

[00:07:00]

The real thing that I love was the Hitachi interview I did earlier today where the society benefits. So you say, okay, underrepresented minorities, people who can level up with AI and say, hey, I don’t need to go to college, or some pedigree school, or I can move from poverty to more productive, better living. So I think the argument should be more focused on what AI does there, and everyone focuses on the job loss. And we heard that many times before, ATMs are going to kill the branch office for the bank. Well, not really.

Training and On-the-Job Learning

So, you know.

[Rebecca Knight]

It’s not the job loss, I’m talking about the training and the on-the-job learning that you do early in your career. If you’re not getting that foundation, that basis, that’s the question I’m bringing up. Because I think you’re right.

[John Furrier]

Going Back to the Office

You cover future work, I’ll ask you the question. So there’s a big narrative around going back to the office because the junior mentoring dynamic has come in. That’s come up a lot. What’s your angle on that? What’s the report say there? Because I buy that argument, by the way, that having that mentorship, but also, just to come to the office, is there tools, will tools fill that?

[00:08:04]

So that’s a tough, that’s not my wheelhouse, but what’s your view on that one?

[Rebecca Knight]

That is absolutely a concern, and I think that those entry-level workers are missing out on a lot of mentorship, on a lot of networking, on a lot of learning that they can get from older, more seasoned, more veteran employees who don’t want to go into the office because they’ve got kids, or they’re traveling, or they’re doing other things in their lives. And so there really is a lot of research that shows that it is hurting the younger generations. Absolutely.

[Savannah Peterson]

Show Floor Highlights

There’s, we could go down a huge rabbit hole there, and I am going to refrain us from doing that in this moment. Let’s talk a little bit about the show floor. Have you seen anything that’s excited you? I was over playing with the Gemini model that they have that lets you travel to anywhere in the world to learn about the animals, which was very cool. You can learn all about, I was learning about the hawksbill turtle and what it eats, and I don’t know, I think sometimes when we think about tech, we think about software, we think about these literal applications.

[00:09:00]

We’ve talked a lot about what the stack looks like for these companies who are trying to scale, but to our point, we’re still on the precipice of making AI real, actually, in terms of everyday consumer lives.

Education and AI

And I think the education piece is really interesting.

[John Furrier]

That’s a great point about the, looking at that experience about the environment, because I think AI is going to help sustainability in a big way, because a lot of that number-crunching supercomputer power is going to come in, and there’s a lot of underfunded NGOs and nonprofits that are doing all this work. But also, there’s also a cool element of, say, the rainforest. I saw at the NVIDIA conference, they had this exhibit where there’s this virtual wall, it’s going to come out, it’s going to be shown in LA, and you put this collar on and it gives you all the sense of the entire rainforest or whatever environment you’re in, but that immersive experience really hit home there.

AI for Good and Immersive Experiences

So you got the AI for good, and then the AI immersive experience. So I think the photo stuff and the graphics and the videos, we’re going to see a whole nother metaverse-level-like thing come out, I think, augmented reality will probably go to the next level from this.

[00:10:06]

So that’s why I think meta’s all in on their side, because … Because everyone goes to the metaverse, the four users of the metaverse, are you joking? I think they were a little bit early on the whole meta. They should have called it Gen AI instead of Facebook, you know?

[Rob Shetchey]

Targeting Different Personas

But I think what you’re saying and what I think is so exciting about this event is that they’re speaking to different personas here this week. I mean, yesterday was more the CIO and executive level, today’s more the developer and how you get your hands dirty, and I think they’re playing both sides of the fence with who they’re really targeting, Google is.

Getting to Production

I think that what’s really interesting is that people are talking about getting to production. They’re not talking about trying something out with Gen AI now. I think a lot of that is, Gen AI may not be a prompt, it may be behind the scenes, behind the UX, and have that kind of, you know, be part of the data app, but it’s not the prompt.

[00:11:08]

You’re not interacting with it that way.

[John Furrier]

Gemini 1.5

I think the Gemini news here is, I know they got a bad launch wrap, and I hate to see that because I think some people jumped on that and wanted to kill Google on that, but the Gemini 1.5 is good. I played with it last night, and it was really phenomenal, and how they’re integrating it into the apps is good, and the million token window is only going to get better. We heard last night that it could go up to 10 million, and so that was an internal number. It wasn’t out for public usage, but that means we have to- Well, and we just made it public. Well, I mean, that’s what you hear in your hallway. When you got the press land, you got to be careful who you talk to, but if that’s true, and I do believe that that’s the headroom you’ll see, that means everything’s going to be tokenized. Now, remember, Jensen at NVIDIA, the CEO of NVIDIA said, we’re living in a token world, and tokens will be the currency of AI, so I think Google is showing to me that with

[00:12:01]

that kind of horsepower and Gemini performance, it might be ready for prime time to be on

Edge Devices

smaller footprint machines, so what I’m watching is how much back-end horsepower will be needed to power the AI apps, and if Gemini can be more efficient, then you’re going to have more distributed use cases around your phone, your lightweight machine, your laptop, whatever.

[Savannah Peterson]

Your edge devices, baby.

[John Furrier]

Edge devices, you know, IoT, Savannah, your wheelhouse, so I think that’s a promising look, and the Vertex, obviously, they’ve got the 130 models, and the BigQuery, really kind of a storage, data analytics, might seem a little bit boring, but their pitch is strong, Rob.

BigQuery Pitch

One place to do everything, with the vectors there, and everything’s there, and open to multi-cloud, that’s a compelling pitch, I got to say.

[Rob Shetchey]

Distributed Cloud

Yeah, I like that they’ve rebranded Anthos and all of the different things, like on-premise stuff to distributed cloud, and I think another thing that’s been very consistent throughout all of the discussions here has been multi-cloud, not just about having your data live here,

[00:13:05]

in fact, we had that discussion earlier today about how you connect up things into BigQuery, into the semantic layer, inside of Google Cloud, from other clouds, and I think that is something that you really hadn’t heard out of Google, and you certainly will not hear out of Microsoft, or out of Amazon, for that matter, so I think, again, I like the messaging, now it’s, let’s see the delivery of that, and I think that’s the interesting part.

[Savannah Peterson]

Cross-Cloud Networking

Yeah, I agree with that, I’m glad you brought up cross-cloud networking, I also really enjoyed the interview that we did with PwC a minute ago, when he said, no is not an answer, when it comes to implementing AI within your organization, or leveraging these tools, and I’ve kind of

No is Not an Answer

been thinking about that ever since, he literally just said, when it comes to making a decision about AI within your organization, making any decisions about AI, no isn’t an answer, you have to have the right people from across teams, making that decision, but what’s interesting

[00:14:02]

about that is my point, where I’m driving here, is typically, when we see new tech emerge,

Cross-Market Adoption

we see the tech industry adopt it, or we see one vert adopt it, with much greater saturation first, at least in the early adoption phase, right now we’re seeing companies ranging from life sciences, to retail, to the big hyperscalers, and so everyone really is all in, and so I think in a sense, the hype is really intense right now, but I also think that everyone is viewing that in a way that is very cross-market, which is really, it’s interesting, I think that’s been one of the things I noticed here, is how many players are already a few steps down the path, and about to start realizing goals.

[John Furrier]

Preview Products and Rebranding

Well I mean, the thing about these shows, Savannah, is you get excited, it’s booming, and Rob, we’ve talked about this many times at AWS, at some point you become a victim of your success, where you got to hit GA for all these preview products, so if you look at all the announcements, Savannah, it’s like, a lot of previews, so.

[00:15:03]

That’s a great point, John. And then the rebranding, so Google’s going to have to continue to navigate through how do they manage that, naming conventions, how to make it easier for the consumption side, so you know, you still got to follow through, and it’s a competitive world out there.

[Savannah Peterson]

Competitive World

It is a competitive world, I think this has been a really great show though, it’s my first time, I feel like I’m learning, I feel like there’s a lot of exciting stuff, there’s puppies, there’s donuts, I’m not really sure why donuts are such a theme, we’re going to have a great swag segment for you all in a little bit, don’t worry about that, you know it’s going to be good. Rebecca, John, Rob, what a pleasure.

[Rob Shetchey]

Ecosystem Partners

Yeah, well I will say, there’s one other thing, just sorry, not to throw everybody off, but I think one of the interesting thing is also, the ecosystem partners around here, so there’s announcements out of Chronosphere, there’s announcements out of Dynatrace, where Dynatrace is actually now running on Google Cloud, so I think there, to John’s earlier point, there is a lot more coming in to the ecosystem, and I think that’s something to watch around,

[00:16:02]

Sustaining the Ecosystem

this is the ecosystem.

[John Furrier]

And they got to sustain it, because I mean, it looks good now, they’re here, they’re planting their flag, they’re saying we’re here at the booth, we’re having a party, they want to engage, if they can sustain it for one more year, Rob, then this, to me, I think it’s legit.

[Rebecca Knight]

You’ll be a believer.

[John Furrier]

I mean, it’s legit now, because they’re spending money, but at the end of the day, if partners aren’t getting value out of it, doing business, and Google’s not going to do business with the partner, you know, this is a market where Google will do business through the partnerships, and the partners do business on Google, so that’s the ecosystem flywheel here, and it’s a good sign that they’re here, so I said, again, that’s one of those points where that’s the enterprise angle, that’s interesting.

Enterprise Angle

Great.

[Savannah Peterson]

Conclusion

Yeah, well, it’s going to be fun to watch, can’t wait to be sitting here with you all at the next Google Cloud Next, and thank all of you for tuning in to our live coverage here for three days at Google Cloud Next in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name’s Savannah Peterson, you’re watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.