Google Cloud plans to deliver its new generative-AI model Gemini to enterprises, working with one of the industry’s biggest professional services companies.
Alphabet Inc.’s
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Google said Wednesday it has partnered with Accenture
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to create a joint business unit to help Fortune 500 customers adopt generative AI to improve operations, create new lines of business and build cutting-edge customer experiences. The unit has the capability to bring artificial-intelligence services to more than 1,000 large businesses almost overnight.
The new business unit, the AI Center of Excellence, will provide businesses with technical knowledge and product resources to build and scale applications using Google Cloud’s generative-AI portfolio. The global unit will be staffed by thousands of engineers, industry experts and solutions architects so enterprise customers can get their generative-AI projects up and running quickly.
“We established the CoE because these models are getting better at an insanely fast rate,” Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian said in an interview. “Once you’re on the train, you can’t jump off of AI.”
The CoE — the latest in a series of partnerships between Google and Accenture that go back a decade — is designed to help enterprises create large language models, and is capable of delivering Google’s latest model, Gemini. “This is a natural evolution of our relationship with Accenture,” he said.
Gemini, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, is a new, powerful AI model from Google that can understand not just text but also images, videos and audio.
The Gemini Pro API is available as of Wednesday. Gemini Ultra, which is a private preview, will be generally available in early 2024.
“What our clients want is to move fast and execute responsibly,” said Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, who spends most of her time talking to CEOs about their business needs. “We want to close the gap between the rhetoric of what AI can do and using it responsibly.”
