Google is doubled building AI businesses in the UK on Monday mornings. Google’s Deepmis Cloud Hassabis and Google CEO Thomas Kurian appeared alongside customers BT and WPP to spell out some of their plans.
The company said it would expand its UK data residency and expand its agent space so that it can host AI agents for businesses built on Google infrastructure locally.
In addition to this, Google is introducing more financial incentives for AI startups to work with Google to join the new UK accelerator and award up to £280,000 on Google Cloud Credits. Furthermore, we have expanded our AI skill training.
Additionally, Google has announced that the event will be used at its DeepMind office, Chirp 3, the company’s audio generation model developed there, will be added to the Vertex AI developer platform. For more information, please click here.
“Agent” has become a codeword for how companies actually start adopting AI. This is the pitch and interface with customers that you can build AI agents to help people work faster.
Agent Space is Google’s platform for building these assistants for work. One of the most notable features in IT is the company’s NoteBookLM. It is a service that allows you to ingest and summarise large amounts of information and is now available for use in large business environments. Other features of the Agent Space include multimodal searching and, of course, building AI agents using generated AI.
Google launched Agent Space in beta in December 2024, but Google announced its UK data residency in October 2024.
The idea here is to lay the foundation for attracting more companies to work with Google (on behalf of their competitors) to build future AI services, but to try to fill some of the trust issues that have arisen between organizations about how unique data is handled in building AI and other services in the cloud. Data is a “new oil” and therefore remains a valuable product.
“We know from our research that a significant proportion of organizations across Europe are extremely nervous about using AI in the public cloud,” said IDC analyst Mick Heys. “They want to deploy AI and are happy to experiment in the cloud, but when it comes to real-life deployments at scale, they want to do it in a dedicated infrastructure or some sort of colocation environment. That’s because they’re just nervous about issues of data security, privacy and sovereignty. So they’re still very alive.”
“They will have full control to hold the data that needs it,” Krian said at today’s event.
The companies that participated in Hassabis and Kurian on stage today are longtime partners in AI services. Both BT and WPP are inkling development and data partnerships with Google Cloud, and are early adopters of pilot programs, including new releases of Imagen, Veo and Gemini.
“We’re quietly reinventing all our businesses,” BT CEO Allison Kirby said of how we use AI. “Operationally, there is a great potential for us.” Some of these have a very immediate customer face, such as helping to detect phone fraud and trying to improve customer service agents. Back in 2023, he said he would get up to 55,000 jobs in a third to replace AI.
Google is currently shedding tears of development in the AI business. Last week, a host of new Gemini developments, particularly Gemini 2.0, was launched. Gemini 2.0 in particular began to circumvent multimodal generation and real-time understanding, and advanced with imagery, new robot models and lightweight Gemma models using word prompts.
Apart from that, the UK government has a great drive to promote more AI development within its ranks and wider as an industry. At the same time, European companies are lowering their reliance on major technologies in favor of their own companies and services.
The UK government has made plans and is pushing individual departments to show how more generative AI services can be adopted aimed at promoting paperwork and building services between data previously silent by functions and departments.
Government dog hooding is part of a bigger strategy. The hope is that AI proves to be a really big economic wave and that the UK can capture it. To demonstrate that the UK is “open for business” of AI, it is committed to AI regional zones that include data centre capacity and regulatory changes to make it easier for more data to work with.
“These models are global and used everywhere, so international standards need to be set for this,” Hassavis spoke about the move to mitigate how IPs are handled in AI environments, in response to the issue of how AI companies use rules to change rules regarding how AI companies train models.
Interestingly, the two major companies that the government has mentioned so far are Openai and Humanity, two rivals in Google’s field of AI services. Google’s announcement is late to the party, but it can pave the way for more government collaborations in the future.
Source link
