Shares of Google parent Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) jumped on Tuesday, as the tech giant debuted a slew of new AI offerings for its Google Cloud and Workspace enterprise platforms. The news comes as part of Google’s annual Google Cloud Next event, which is being held in San Francisco.
The show, the first the company has held in person since 2019, includes a series of major announcements meant to highlight Google’s cloud platform and AI capabilities as it continues to do battle with rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) in the cloud space.
That includes pricing for Google’s AI-centric Workspace features, as well as the addition of new AI training models and improved AI-centric infrastructure.
Shares of Google were up as much as 4% as of 12 p.m. ET Tuesday.
In July, Google reported its second consecutive quarter of profitability for its cloud division and said the segment reached an annual revenue run rate of $32 billion. And the company is banking on its latest products to help build on that growth.
The most intriguing news out of the show is that Google is pricing its AI-powered Duet AI in Workspace at $30 per user per month. That’s the same price Microsoft is charging for its Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Both products are meant to serve as AI assistants for workers that frequently send emails, work in spreadsheets and presentation software, draft documents, and spend a lot of time in meetings.
Duet AI in Workspace includes the ability to craft summaries from various sources in a single document. In one example, Google imagines a worker who needs to put together a presentation for financial performance over the last quarter by asking Duet AI to craft a summary of the latest quarterly data with everything from text to charts and images using information culled from your Gmail and Drive.
Duet AI in Google Meet also claims to be able to improve your overall look in a video meeting by adjusting the sound and lighting, and, more importantly, grab notes, action items, and video snippets when you ask it to “take notes for me.”
Google says Duet AI will be able to attend meetings for you and give you a summary of everything that was covered by simply asking it to “attend for me,” though your boss might not exactly appreciate you using the feature in a one-on-one meeting.
Google’s Chat is also getting an AI update with Duet AI in Google Chat. Improvements include a visual facelift, as well as AI capabilities such as the ability to ask Duet AI to summarize long text threads and documents.
In addition to Duet AI in Workspace, Google announced new features for its Duet AI in Google Cloud meant to help improve application development.
On the infrastructure front, Google said it is adding new AI training models to its Vertex AI platform including Meta’s Llama 2 and Code Llama.
Google’s announcements are all a part of its effort to make its Google Cloud Platform more competitive with market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. Microsoft has been aggressively pursuing adding AI capabilities to its various cloud and productivity products ever since it announced its collaboration with ChatGPT developer OpenAI in February.
That’s helped the company steal mindshare from Google, making the search giant appear flatfooted. But Google, which helped develop the transformer technology that powers generative AI models, has fired back, dedicating the bulk of its Google I/O conference in May to its AI developments.
Daniel Howley is the tech editor at Yahoo Finance. He's been covering the tech industry since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @DanielHowley.
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