London Summit: UK businesses turn to Google Cloud AI

The AI era is here, and the UK is at the forefront. 

Over the past year, search interest for “AI” has surged by 50% in the country, while inquiries about “how to use AI” have jumped 70%. By 2030, AI could generate more than £400 billion ($524 billion) in value for the UK economy and save more than 700,000 administrative hours annually across sectors like healthcare, education, and finance. Central to this transformation is Gemini, Google Cloud’s next-generation AI foundation model, which is empowering UK businesses across all sectors to unlock new possibilities in a rapidly evolving landscape.

This week, the energy is palpable, as we welcome customers and partners to the Google Cloud Summit London at Tobacco Dock to experience how Gemini is helping shape the future of business and unlocking business value. The summit also showcases innovations from across Google Cloud’s extensive portfolio of products and services, as well as from our ecosystem of customers and partners — illustrating how AI is transforming different industries and equipping UK businesses to stay ahead in a competitive landscape.

And what a way to kick off the summit than with yesterday’s announcement of Google’s deepening partnership with Vodafone. This expands beyond our longstanding work together in the cloud, with a 10-year, billion-plus-dollar deal that includes cybersecurity, devices, and cloud services across Europe and Africa. As Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, noted: “I’m excited to see how Vodafone’s consumers, small businesses, and governments will use generative AI and Google Cloud to transform the way they work and access information.”

I’m also excited to further support our customers’ growth with Google Cloud’s $1 billion investment in a new UK data center in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire. Unveiled in January, this major project reinforces our commitment to AI innovation and delivering reliable digital services across Europe and the world. We’re also fueling this digital growth with key updates and announcements made today from both Google Cloud and our customers. 

Empowering customers with data and AI solutions

The momentum behind AI is undeniable — nearly two-thirds of UK organizations have earmarked at least half of their AI budget for generative AI. These tools have the potential to generate £4.8 billion in productivity savings, according to research from Public First.

Today, we are proud to highlight leading UK companies who are already harnessing Gemini and Google Cloud AI capabilities to drive real-world impact: 

• BUPA UK is using Google Cloud to build a cloud-first digital customer platform providing direct access to care when needed, as well as the tools to enable proactive health outcomes for customers. This new digital platform will allow BUPA to develop innovative ways to improve members’ wellbeing, reducing the cost of care all while delivering a highly personalized healthcare experience.

• Dunelm has partnered with Google Cloud to enhance its online shopping experience with a new gen AI-driven product discovery solution. This has shown significant improvements in a number of key areas, including reduced search friction, helping customers find the products they are looking for.

• Incubeta is using Gemini for Google Workspace, primarily with their development teams, to streamline architecture documentation and code refinements, and to reduce time spent on these tasks. They also use it for client teams to assist with mundane tasks and for creative conception.

• Vodafone — in addition to its 10-year expanded partnership with Google — also recently completed the migration of its SAP ERP resource planning database to Google Cloud. One of the largest shifts of its kind, it was completed with zero business interruptions. At the summit, the team will be sharing more about this work, which boosted performance while shrinking costs and Vodafone’s carbon footprint.

Data residency for machine learning available in the UK

We understand the importance of data sovereignty for certain industries. That’s why Google Cloud is expanding our data residency commitment, enabling UK organizations to run machine learning processing for Gemini 1.5 Flash within the UK. 

This effort helps address key data sovereignty and compliance concerns that enable UK organizations, including the public sector, to leverage gen AI while maintaining strict control over their data. 

Fueling the next generation of UK and EMEA startups

We are also excited to share that since 2023, more than 60% of UK-based gen-AI startups are Google Cloud customers. Yesterday, at our global Startup Summit, we announced several important updates that are relevant for UK AI startups. These include our Startup School for AI skill-building and the ISV Startup Springboard offering extensive go-to-market and co-selling opportunities with Google Cloud and our partners. We’ve also launched a partnership with the startup accelerator 500 Global to provide streamlined access to Google Cloud’s AI platform

As part of today’s summit, we’re launching the Google Cloud Startup Hub in London — a dedicated community space designed to provide in-person education and engagement for startups and developers. Open five days a week with business hours from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. or until 9 p.m. to accommodate evening events, the hub offers hands-on learning for Google Cloud and partner solutions and access to experts. 

At the hub, we will host exclusive sessions with industry leaders and facilitate invaluable networking opportunities with investors and peers. The Google Cloud Startup Hub also serves as a vital community resource where key partners can also host events. 

Some examples of how UK startups are driving breakthroughs with Google Cloud are: 

• BioCorteX, in collaboration with Google Cloud, announces a breakthrough in ADC research for cancer treatment using its “Unified Biology” approach. The research has uncovered a crucial link between the tumor microenvironment and ADC efficacy, potentially transforming personalized cancer therapy. 

• Motorway uses Google Cloud AI to streamline the process of buying and selling used cars online. With Google Cloud’s AI, Motorway has been able to build and deploy AI models faster, automate document processing, and provide industry-leading vehicle valuations.

• OnBuy, a fast-growing ecommerce marketplace, partners with Google Cloud for international expansion and enhanced customer experience. Google Cloud’s infrastructure, data storage, and AI tools enable OnBuy to scale, improve efficiency, and innovate.

We’re also announcing the opening of the new AI Playground, located within the same space as the Google Cloud Startup Hub. An experiential AI demo space, the AI Playground is aimed at inspiring and empowering developers and organizations to build incredible new applications and solve business challenges with AI and ML.

Google Cloud’s commitment to making data and AI more accessible and powerful for all users

To help enhance our overall data platform, we’re also sharing a number of important product updates and announcements. These will deliver better insights and efficiencies for our customers and boost the performance of their AI offerings and projects. Data is the foundation of any AI work, so without having a handle on the former, it’s hard to succeed in the latter.

BigQuery, our unified enterprise gen AI-ready data platform, has now been integrated with our Gemini models. Gemini in BigQuery makes data prep easier, offering an intuitive natural-language interface that can help data teams generate insights from metadata and other large datasets, and it’s especially useful for new batches of data. 

We also have new synthetic data capabilities, with BigQuery Dataframes, which make it easier to run and train models when inputs are more limited. Gemini in Looker has added conversational analytics, which lets you use a search experience similar to those found across Google; this allows for data exploration using natural language that surfaces actionable insights more easily.

For enhanced security, BigQuery now supports cross-region disaster recovery with multi-factor authentication, ensuring business continuity and data protection. 

New managed BigQuery workflows assist data engineers in building data pipelines. For data ingestion, customers can use new managed services for Flink and Kafka to better configure, tune, scale, monitor, and upgrade real-time workloads. A unified data catalog in BigQuery helps organize and manage all your data and metadata, making it easier to discover and use, while BigQuery catalog semantic search, available in preview, expands the ability to find data using natural language. These search features make BigQuery more intuitive and accessible to everyone.

Google is also launching a new enterprise tier of Code Assist, our AI-powered coding partner, which can help teams with work throughout the software development lifecycle. This enterprise tier will offer enhanced security, improved context for better accuracy and reliability, and wider integration with Google Cloud services.

With these investments and the customer momentum showcased today, Google Cloud is reinforcing the UK’s role in shaping the future of AI and strengthening the future we can build together on the cloud. 

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