SINGAPORE — Google recently presented its portfolio of tools and products harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), all promising to deliver a "unique" and secure experience for enterprises and general users alike.

At the Google Cloud Gen AI Southeast Asia Media Summit held in Singapore on Oct. 17, representatives of media organizations and other stakeholders were given a preview and hands-on experience of Google's fresh generative AI offerings.

DUET AI

Google showed its Duet AI, its generative AI tool that helps users write, organize, and visualize work-related tasks as it can draft emails, sales proposals, projects, and many others.

• Generative AI comes to Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets via Duet AI

"With Duet AI in Google Workspace, we added AI as a powerful real-time collaboration partner that can act as a coach, source of inspiration, and productivity booster — all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data," Google said in its press release.

Google Workspace Asia Pacific director Darryl McKinnon personally demonstrated at the summit how Duet AI was able to refine the content of his email and adjust its tone, from "poetic" to "feeling lucky."

"I spend 3 to 4 hours a day writing emails. I've been using Duet AI. My emails time [has] gone down to about an hour. But it's still personalized because it understands my tone, so it still sounds like it's coming from Darryl McKinnon and not some robot. We are actually helping people replace mundane tasks," he said.

Sales, marketing, and customer service industries would particularly benefit from Duet AI, according to McKinnon.

"Duet AI can quickly generate high quality sales materials, nurture leads with personalized content... [For marketing], Duet AI can save marketers time and money by drafting text and creating new images... [For customer service], it can help reduce response times by quickly generating answers to questions]," his presentation read.

• Google offers free AI courses, IT certification, scholarships

Mitesh Agarwal, managing director of Google Cloud Asia Pacific's Solutions and Technology unit, said the company prides itself on knowing and possessing what most consumers and businesses want and need.

“We feel that there is a completeness to our portfolio, that we take care of what our consumers and users want, and we take care of what enterprises want," Agarwal said.

"There are organizations that can obviously can do one, or two, but can [they] do all of this? That’s a partner a company wants. That’s [our] differentiator," he also said.

Google said its AI tools will empower users and enterprises without compromising their data.

AI-POWERED CYBERSECURITY

Agarwal said Google is one of the "most attacked" companies in the world, and how they respond to it provides them with data that could be shared with their consumers to prevent potential breaches.

Introduced earlier this year, Sec-PaLM 2 is an industry-specific large language model trained on security use cases, and geared for cybersecurity companies.

"What if you, as a company, pick all those learning from us and predict attacks that could happen? That is our project SEC-PaLm, using all the cyber security information that we've got and converting it using our PaLM 2 model," he said.

In terms of protecting enterprises and consumer data, Google said it has zero data leakage incidents.

"We do not train our models using customer data. Absolutely not. In fact, it’s the reverse. What we do is we provide our model to the customers and say 'Hey, put it inside your cloud environment, train it using your data, and that data is yours.'," Agarwal said.

AI TRANSPARENCY

In its study called "The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier," McKinsey projected that generative AI can add an equivalent of up to $4.4 trillion to the economy annually.

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A United Nations study also recently found that AI is more likely to augment jobs than to destroy them amid growing anxiety over the potential impact of the technology.

• AI likely to augment rather than destroy jobs: UN study

The UN's International Labour Organization (ILO) suggests that most jobs and industries are only partially exposed to automation.

Transparency however remains a concern for generative AI systems. Just how do these AI models produce their outputs and decisions?

Lack of transparency makes it harder for other business to know if they can rely on the technology for their own applications, for academics to do research and for consumers to understand the models' limitations, according to Stanford University researchers behind the "Foundation Model Transparency Index" released earlier this month.

Many AI users have complained of “hallucinations” where generative AI systems like ChatGPT come up with false narratives and made up “facts.”

The Stanford index ranks 10 major AI firms, with Google's PaLM 2 ranking fifth place at 40 percent, according to an Agence France-Presse report.

• AI models lack transparency: research

Rishi Bommasani, a researcher at Stanford's Center for Research on Foundation Models, said companies should strive for a score of between 80 and 100 percent.

The researchers said "less transparency makes it harder" for "policymakers to design meaningful policies to rein in this powerful technology."

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