Analyst(s): Steven Dickens, Paul Nashawaty, Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: September 25, 2024
Google Cloud’s latest innovations in generative AI are pushing the boundaries of customer service. The company’s new Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI is poised to transform how enterprises deliver omnichannel experiences, combining its advanced Gemini models with CCaaS functionality. With a focus on multimodality, grounded AI, and the speed of Gemini 1.5, Google is offering businesses enhanced productivity and a seamless customer journey.
What Is Covered in This Article:
- Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite integrates conversational AI and CCaaS features to improve customer experiences.
- The use of multimodal AI models (text, voice, images) ensures seamless communication across different channels.
- Rule-based controls and generative AI combine to enable hybrid virtual agents, enhancing customer service capabilities.
- Google’s partnership with key organizations such as Bell Canada highlights the real-world cost savings and operational efficiencies driven by AI.
- The introduction of features such as automatic summarization, live translation, and generative knowledge assists enhances productivity for customer care representatives.
The News: Google Cloud has announced a significant enhancement to its AI offerings with the launch of the Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI. This new solution merges the power of Google’s latest Gemini 1.5 model with an omnichannel contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution, aimed at helping enterprises deliver consistent and efficient customer service experiences. The platform integrates text, voice, and image inputs for seamless multimodal interactions. Notable partnerships, such as with Bell Canada, underscore the real-world impact, delivering $20 million in savings from AI-driven customer service improvements.
Can Google Cloud’s Generative AI Lead the Way in Customer Engagement?
Analyst Take: Google Cloud’s strategic push into the customer engagement space through its AI-powered Customer Engagement Suite presents a compelling case for the evolving role of AI in business operations. The platform’s ability to integrate advanced generative AI models with established CCaaS capabilities positions it to address the growing demand for intelligent customer service solutions. However, the question remains: Can Google outpace competitors such as Microsoft and AWS in a crowded market with similar AI and cloud offerings?
A Strategic Step for Google Cloud
At its core, Google’s Customer Engagement Suite combines AI models such as Gemini 1.5 with practical customer service functionalities, helping enterprises unify customer experiences across various touchpoints. Moreover, the new suite takes the capabilities of its Contact Center AI technology, its CCaaS platform, and new generative AI functionality and combines them into an end-to-end application.
Like other major SaaS vendors, Google is also highlighting its use of AI agents, which are intelligent bots that are designed for specific tasks or workflows. Google announced three types of AI agents: conversational, assistive, and conversational insights. Conversational agents interact with consumers and enterprises’ customers, whereas assistive agents help employees be more productive and interact with customers. Finally, conversational insights provide data analytics and insights to call center management. These agents enable organizations to increase productivity and efficiency, while also introducing more accuracy, consistency, and compliance with company processes and policies as well as industry regulations.
The use of multimodal AI—processing text, voice, and image inputs—stands out as a critical feature. The example of a virtual agent for a mobile provider, guiding a customer through a phone trade-in with images and voice instructions, is particularly striking. By leveraging the multimodal capabilities of Gemini, Google enhances the customer experience, creating a more interactive and personalized journey.
This move aligns with broader trends in the enterprise space, where omnichannel customer engagement and automation are key priorities. What makes Google’s approach unique is the integration of generative AI with rule-based controls, which enables businesses to deploy hybrid virtual agents that combine deterministic workflows with flexible, context-aware conversations. This balance allows enterprises to handle both structured and unstructured queries efficiently, further improving customer satisfaction while reducing operational costs.
The Competition Heats Up
While Google Cloud’s innovation is noteworthy, the competitive landscape presents a significant challenge. Both Microsoft and AWS have made strides in customer engagement through their respective AI platforms, and their established enterprise customer bases pose an obstacle for Google Cloud’s expansion. However, Google’s focus on grounding its AI in enterprise truth—a feature that improves response accuracy and brand voice control—could provide it with a critical advantage in industries such as finance and healthcare, where compliance and precision are non-negotiable.
The Bell Canada partnership, where Google’s AI suite contributed to $20 million in savings, demonstrates the potential for real-world operational efficiencies. The ability to offer AI-driven customer service at this scale may entice more enterprises to adopt Google Cloud’s solution, particularly as customer service demands continue to grow.
Challenges and Opportunities
Despite the potential of Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite, several challenges loom. The transition to AI-powered customer service requires substantial investment and change management, particularly in training staff and integrating AI solutions with existing systems. Moreover, while Google emphasizes privacy and security, enterprises may still be wary of potential risks associated with sensitive customer data being processed by AI.
On the other hand, Google’s open ecosystem approach, which integrates third-party tools such as CRM systems and workforce management applications, could enhance its appeal. The inclusion of BigQuery connectors for real-time data analytics positions Google as a strong competitor in industries that rely on data-driven decision-making.
What to Watch:
The success of Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite will depend on how effectively it can differentiate itself in a crowded market. While the platform’s multimodal AI and integration capabilities offer distinct advantages, competition from Microsoft and AWS remains fierce. Other pure-play contact center vendors, including Genesys and Avaya, to name a few, are also incorporating similar AI features, while also continuing to support more traditional on-premises and hybrid deployments, without requiring a full migration to the cloud. Additionally, enterprises will need to see clear cost savings and operational improvements to justify investment in these advanced AI systems.
Potential risks include the complexity of migrating existing customer service operations to the cloud and ensuring data privacy and regulatory compliance, particularly in sectors such as healthcare and finance. However, if Google can prove the scalability and security of its AI models, it may gain significant traction in these highly regulated industries.
For more information, you can view the full announcement from Google Cloud’s Gemini at Work event here.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Leap into Enterprise AI Adoption
New Workspace Enhancements Focus on AI, Efficiency, & Usability
Why AI Innovations from Google I/O 2024 Matter
Author Information
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
At The Futurum Group, Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
