🚀 Inside Google I/O: Redefining how we work, search & shop
In this edition, we explore the most important updates from Google I/O, and what they mean for your business, customers, and teams.
Last week, Google announced major updates at its Google I/O event, and it feels like we’ve had more AI goodness over the past couple of weeks than in the whole past year! A number of these updates open up exciting production-ready AI capabilities, workflows and experiences.
The full list of announcements is available in their “100 things we announced at I/O” write-up, but as usual, we like to break things down for you.
Let’s start with the most viral part first, video…
🎥 Veo 3: Production-Quality AI Video for Everyone
Veo 3 is live, and this is massive - it immediately brings production quality video to the masses. Veo 3 takes a massive leap over Veo 2 (and most other video models for that matter) by introducing voice, currently in experimental mode, but still incredible.
In the unlikely event you’ve not seen one of the hundreds of creations using Veo 3 doing the rounds, below is one of our favourites (yes, it’s all 100% created from text prompts);
Google also announced Flow, their Veo 3 powered AI filmmaking tool, which will clearly set a new standard in video production workflows.
Flow Pricing Snapshot:
Pro Plan (~$30 AUD/month): ~10 videos (8 seconds each)
Ultra Plan (~$385 AUD/month): ~125 videos per month
Creating with Veo 3 isn’t cheap, but it brings high-end video to the masses.
🔍 AI Mode: A New Era in Search
AI Mode is now live (US only for now, or try via Google Labs). AI Mode is the next iteration on AI Overviews, allowing consumers to search based on intent, rather than keywords.
Think of a traditional keyword search like “Brisbane, Holiday, Things to do” which results in a list of pages, being replaced by asking for “Things to do in Brisbane this weekend with friends”, resulting in a comprehensive answer, resulting in a comprehensive response, which includes detailed explanations.
These new search super powers are fast being adopted by consumers as a preferred way to search, over traditional methods, potentially ushering the end of traditional search as we know it, and the beginning of natural language-based search.
For any brand relying on SEO / SEM to attract visitors, AI mode is fast opening up (forcing) new ways to rank in LLM conversations, while heavily disrupting traditional approaches
Progressive brands are exploring ways of getting ranked in LLM’s, which is still a bit of a dark art (only a few companies, like Perplexity, have opened up for registration). Even the term for LLM optimisation hasn’t been established yet, with acronyms like LEO, GEO, AIO, AEO all being used interchangeably.
🚚 Agentic Commerce: The Rise of AI Shopping Agents
eCommerce is set to change too, with Agentic Commerce giving you an AI agent to browse and purchase goods and services (using Google Pay), all without visiting the retailers website.
The experience below shows what it’s like to use AI to search, browse, set a price alert on and buy a product, without visiting any eCommerce sites;
This has massive ramifications for retailers. AI shopping agents will (and already are) disrupting ownership of the customer experience. There are many options and steps retailers can take, at all stages of the shopping experience from exposing products to LLMs, to building conversational product search experiences and enabling agentic transactions (with companies like Visa launching agentic capabilities too).
📸 Vision: AI That Sees and Understands
AI can now see you and the world around you, with Gemini Live. Similar to ChatGPT’s video capability you can now launch Gemini, turn on your camera to show it what you see, and ask for help. The below video shows connecting Gemini Live with a product manual for visual and audio guidance. This opens up a world of AI assisted customer self-service experiences;
👓 Wearables: The Future Is Here
Next gen AI wearable glasses were also teased with Gemini enabled Android XR glasses. It’s rumoured that OpenAI’s partnership with Jony Ive is focussing on launching similar AI enabled devices.
Having spent a week using Meta's AI glasses, we can confirm that integrating AI seamlessly into daily life feels both natural and empowering.
🌐 Real-Time Translation: No More Language Barriers
Real time video / voice translations is coming to Google Meets, removing all language barriers from virtual calls. The translation happens near real-time, maintaining the quality, tone, and expressiveness of the subject’s voice. Microsoft recently announced these features coming to Teams too.
🚀 AI Developer Tools: Smarter, Faster, Better
Despite all predictions, AI doesn’t seem to be replacing developers anytime soon, with Google announcing over 20 developer AI updates and tools – and apparently over 7 million developers are building with Gemini, five times more than this time last year.
If you haven’t given Google’s AI Studio a try yet, you should - it’s where you can get access to and play with their latest AI tools and models.
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A handful of Gen AI news
Given the vast amount of things announced at Google I/O, here are 5 other things worth a mention.
Google Beam is Google’s AI-first 3D video communication platform, partnering with some major players like HP and Zoom.
Project Astra which will allow you to use AI for “multimodal understanding in the real world” (similar to ChatGPT Vision, on steroids!).
Project Mariner uses natural language to assign AI agents to handle time-consuming tasks, like research, planning, and data entry.
Google Try On allows you to virtually try on fashion products using photos of yourself.
Google AI Studio has an upgraded UI and includes new capabilities like the new text-to-audio model, allowing for two voice natural conversation building (watch this space for some Time Under Tension experiments!).
Google I/O truly accelerated the shift into an AI-first world. The changes are sweeping, the tools are powerful, and the opportunities are vast. The question is no longer "Should we use AI?" but "How fast can we adapt?".
Thanks for reading!