Google Cloud Partner Wursta On ‘Exciting’ New AI In GCP, Workspace
‘The Duet AI technology, particularly for collaboration, is one of the most exciting changes that the Workspace platform has seen in years,’ says Wursta CEO Matt Wursta.
After nearly 10 years of being a Google partner, Matt Wursta believes Google Cloud is in a better market position than ever thanks to the generative AI innovation engine inside Workspace and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
“The Duet AI technology, particularly for collaboration, is one of the most exciting changes that the Workspace platform has seen in years,” said Wursta, CEO and founder of Austin, Texas-based Wursta Corp. “It’s a really interesting opportunity to rethink the work environment and the way people work now: hybrid, remote work, in-person, etc.,” he said.
“Enterprise customers like that and say, ‘Look, this technology facilitates a more productive, better workforce,’” said Wursta. “It’s a super huge opportunity for us. I think that’s going to be one of the big cornerstone things at the end of the year and early 2024.”
Over the past three years, Wursta’s revenue has grown 488 percent.
[Related: 5 ‘Huge’ Google Generative AI Use Cases For Cloud Partners: Philip Moyer]
Wursta is a longtime Google partner, first joining the Google Partner Ecosystem in 2014. The cloud solution provider achieved Google Premier Partner status in 2018, providing a slew of GCP and Google Workspace services on top of security and managed services.
Why Google AI Will Drive Workspace Sales
Last month at Google Cloud Next 2023, the cloud giant unveiled that its Duet AI collaboration technology was now generally available for Google Workspace, which includes Gmail, Meet, Docs, Drive and more.
Duet AI enables a powerful new way of working by embedding generative AI across Google’s communication and collaboration applications, which have more than 3 billion users and over 10 million paying customers. Google Cloud plans to consistently add new generative AI features and tools to Workspace, which Wursta expects to drive customer sales.
“A lot of the Large Language Model things look very focused and oriented on content generation, but those same types of technologies are driving things like the ability to discern video information or contextual text information,” said Wursta.
Duet AI in Workspace will also help customers solve “blank page problems” in marketing. “It will give customers a lot of really interesting feedback to get started in generating content in a particular domain,” he added.
New Google Meet AI Features
One particular Workspace product that was injected with new generative AI features is Google Meet. Thanks to new Duet AI innovation, Meet will also be able to take notes in real time during a meeting, as well as capture a summary and action items—all without a person needing to attend.
“You can now say, ‘Here are my questions. Go to the meeting for me,” said Wursta. “And Google is an expert in keeping your data secure and keeping your data private.”
These new Google Meet AI features—along with new dynamic tiles, face detection and improved lighting—are something that both enterprise leaders and end users are seeking.
Vertex AI And Duet AI In GCP
Duet AI for Google Cloud Platform is now in preview but will become generally available later in 2023. Duet AI can now provide AI assistance across a wide range of GCP products and services—from code generation and chat assistance to designing APIs and migrating applications.
Duet AI on GCP as well as Google Vertex AI, which is the company’s AI platform of cloud services for creating AI models, bodes well for Google Cloud partners.
Wursta said he’s seeing a lot of interest around Google’s new AI technology in GCP when it comes to video data.
“There’s tons and tons of video data, especially in North America. So you’ve got the ability now to take real-time streams and more easily pick things out or identify things,” he said. “So imagine you can say, ‘Incident response for emergency services.’ It’s a very real and cost-effective way now to say, ‘I can see a crash where it happens in dispatch way before a person calls and I answer.’ Those types of solutions were farther away, or harder to do, or very niche. Whereas now a lot of the stuff that’s coming through the Vertex AI models Google is putting out really allows for you to go very rapidly to market with things like that. So it’s super exciting on the cloud side. … The fun stuff is coming from the way that you can start to infer things out of different types of data.”
Although some customers are somewhat hesitant, even scared of AI, the technology will win because it solves two key issues that are top of mind for nearly every organization.
“It accelerates your time to delivery and it decreases your overall risk,” said Wursta. “We can help keep your risk down on your deployment dollars and the way that you’re implementing things, and we can make it go faster. … That’s a winning combination.”