Next, the baton was passed on to Becky Levanger, Partner Marketing Manager, Google Cloud. Becky provided a powerful and inspiring talk, highlighting Google Cloud’s extraordinary growth and emphasizing how it has barely scratched the surface. Becky also walked the audience through her professional journey, what lead to her current role at Google Cloud and the importance of not setting limits on yourself.

Following Becky was Manju Devadas, CEO of Pluto7, an analytics company focused on business transformation and Google’s preferred partner. Manju provided an overview of the implications, abilities, and potential business impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, specifically through Google Cloud Platform (GCP). He began by providing a general overview of Pluto 7 and GCP services,  then went “under the hood” on some of the basic Google ML services.  Manju discussed various industry case studies and showed how demand forecasting and digital marketing can be improved through ML. He mentioned that the vision is leveraging ML to transform how your business handles forecasting, demand planning / supply and inventory management. It’s about going from a 60%-80% accuracy in forecasting – and leaping up to 95% accuracy. And doing that in a fraction of the computation cost per day while freeing up teams to be hubs of innovation. As an example, Pluto 7 worked with a large brewing company to improve productivity, save on costs, and improve the taste of the beer using ML TensorFlow.

Our closing presenter was Aishwarya Ganapathy, speaking about how ML and AI will be everywhere including hardware and chips and her professional journey in BigData. Aishwarya is a national award winner for innovation. She is exploring using AI ML for chip designs for very fast processing of high complexity ML Algorithms.  Aishwarya graduated from USC just this May. As a part of Pluto7’s team, Aishwarya collaborated and developed solutions for forecasting problems using Bigquery and ML models.