As we mentioned in our other blog, the central thread of Next 2023 was Duet AI, Google’s generative AI engine aimed at the professional market. Think of it as an AI assistant with a growing set of basic functionalities, that is pretty much built into all Google Cloud and Workspace solutions. In this blog, we’ll go over some of these functions and discuss how they can help organisations and employees with their daily tasks.
How Duet AI Will Help the Workforce
Duet AI will enable organisations to significantly increase their productivity and improve the quality of their output. And we’re not just talking about Workspace users: this new AI assistant promises to be just as big of a help for developers, operators, data specialists and other IT-related roles.
At Cloud Next, Google launched a new set of environments and features to help with application development, database management, data analysis and visualisation, operations, and security. Let’s go over these announcements one by one, and discuss how they will change the way we work.
Application Development
Duet AI will be able to assist with application development throughout the entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Google announced functionalities related to understanding and generating code within Google and external IDEs, testing, designing and publishing APIs, migrating and modernising applications, and much more.
For more information, we recommend giving this blog a read, which takes a closer look at code refactoring, context aware code generation, API management, and application integration. Make sure to also check out this impressive demo, where Duet AI responds to a natural language prompt through a chat interface, converts a function in Go, and updates the back-end database to Cloud SQL.
Streamlining Your IT Operations
Many organisations spend a lot of time building and securing deployments. Trying to figure out what exactly is causing application issues during a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) also takes a lot of effort. In these cases, Duet AI can help by automating deployments, ensuring that applications are configured correctly, quickly detecting and analysing problems, and creating more secure and reliable applications.
To make things a bit more tangible, take a look at this demo where Duet AI quickly troubleshoots a service issue and recommends solutions.
Unlocking Your Data’s Potential
Data and business analysts can harness the power of Duet AI to streamline their data analysis processes. Within BigQuery, Duet AI can offer contextual assistance for writing SQL and Python queries, making it easier to access your data.
In addition, it’s now possible to use a single SQL statement to seamlessly link your BigQuery tables with Vertex AI’s base models, fine-tune pointers within BigQuery Studio, conduct text analysis, or generate new features to enhance your BigQuery data model.
If you’re curious about these functionalities, this demo shows how Duet AI excels at generating SQL or Python code for tasks like customer segmentation within the user-friendly BigQuery Studio interface.
Empowering Data Visualisation
To help visualise those new insights, Google is also bringing Duet AI to Looker so decisionmakers can get the right insight, at the right time, in the right format. This includes call data analysis, automated presentation creation, generating intelligent text summaries rooted in the user’s reports, using natural language to craft calculations and visualisations, and quickly generating LookML models.
Later this year, Looker will also introduce collaborative data analysis capabilities in a notebook environment. For now, we can watch this demo where Duet AI quickly analyses and visualises data, and exports those visualisations to slides.
Simplifying Database Management
In Cloud Spanner, you can now use Duet AI to generate code in natural language for structuring, modifying, or querying your data. Soon, this capability will extend to AlloyDB and Cloud SQL, making database management more intuitive and efficient.
Duet AI can also be used in Google’s Database Migration Service (DMS) to automate the conversion of database code that traditional translation technologies struggle with. This includes tasks like handling stored procedures, functions, triggers, packages, and custom PL/SQL code. This innovative approach simplifies the complex process of code conversion. For example, this demo shows how Duet AI helps automate code conversion for the last mile of Oracle migrations.
Increasing IT Security
Duet AI will be a valuable asset for security professionals. It can help prevent threats, reduce the effort of creating workflows in the security environment, and take security expertise to the next level. You can already experience a preview of Duet AI in action within products such as Chronicle Security Operations, Mandiant Threat Intelligence, and Security Command Center.
What’s Next?
In summary, these announcements mark a significant milestone. The impact on our operations, job roles, and our clients’ progress cannot be overstated. If you ask us, we’re on the brink of an unparalleled revolution, characterised by unprecedented speed: a true intellectual labour revolution.
While the potential of Generative AI is immense, concerns about deployment risks persist. It’s essential to note that Google ensures the protection of your intellectual property with Duet AI, guaranteeing that your data won’t be used to train Google’s models. We think that the challenge lies mainly in continuing to improve the model and minimising the risk of unintended side effects.
Many are still unaware of the vast possibilities offered by Google technology, and what we’ve discussed here is just the beginning. If you need some advice or a guiding hand, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’ll explore how we can unlock these possibilities for your organisation by connecting the dots together.
