4 Announcements From Google I/O 2024 That Midmarket IT Leaders Should Know

Yes, much of the keynote was focused on AI -- but with some cool features

Google I/O 2024 kicked off Tuesday with a keynote session headed by CEO Sundar Pichai and a lineup of Google executives and engineers.

While much of the keynote focused on developments with Google's artificial intelligence technology – Gemini 1.5 Pro -- and centered on more consumer-oriented new features in Google's ecosystem (enhancing photos, videos, creating music and a somewhat odd presentation about checking in on your kid's swimming lessons), there were some business-focused advancements announced.

Google Workspace

Google Workspace has several new enhancements backed by Google's Gemini AI technology. It can now summarize related emails and analyze attachments.

Google Meet can now provide highlights from meetings.

A new Gemini side panel in Workspaces offers support for 68 languages and real-time caption options.

Compute Power

Google's 6th generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), named Trillium, offers 4.7 times the compute performance over the previous generation, according to Google. This technology will be available to Google's cloud customers in late 2024.

"Industry demand for ML compute has grown by a factor of 1 million in the last six years. And every year, it increases tenfold," Pichai said during his keynote.

Pichai also reminded the audience about Google's announcement last month of its new Axion processors – custom ARM-based CPUs. Also, he said Google is one of the first cloud providers to offer Nvidia's Blackwell processors available to customers in early 2025.

AI Hypercomputer Advancements

"Our AI Hypercomputer advancements are made possible in part because of our approach to liquid cooling in our data centers," Pichai said.

"We've been doing this for nearly a decade, long before it became state- of-the-art for the industry. And today our total deployed fleet capacity for liquid cooling systems is nearly 1 gigawatt and growing — that's close to 70 times the capacity of any other fleet.

Underlying this is the sheer scale of our network, which connects our infrastructure globally. Our network spans more than 2 million miles of terrestrial and subsea fiber: over 10 times the reach of the next leading cloud provider," he said.

AI Teammate

Teammate is another feature of business interest – the AI assistant can monitor resources, track projects, analyze data and perform other tasks it's assigned.