Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, revealed details about how its technology is helping companies in various domains, from public sector organizations to retailers, to strengthen their infrastructure and play a pioneering role in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak.
The CEO of Google Cloud also announced details of the firm’s cloud-based collaboration and artificial intelligence (AI) tools supporting government agencies, retailers, and health care organizations around the world in their response to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.
Kurian provides comprehensive details of various projects that the Google Cloud team is currently engaged with, as its technologies are used to support the responses to the coronavirus pandemic across the world. One such project is the creation of AI-based chat technology that can be used by government agencies to respond to citizens’ questions more quickly.
The company also introduces free online content delivery tools and load-balancing services to shore up government websites as a large number of people search for the latest information on coronavirus updates.
“In the US, we are working with the White House and supporting institutions to develop new text and data mining techniques to examine the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (Cord-19), the most extensive machine-readable coronavirus literature collection to date,” said Kurian.
Google Cloud is also working with the local government of Madrid and the national government of Spain by offering tools to track the spread of the virus.
“In Spain, we’ve set up an app for the regional government in Madrid to help citizens perform self-assessments of coronavirus symptoms and offer guidance, easing the demands on the healthcare system,” said Kurian.
Healthcare industry
From a health care perspective, Google’s G-Suite, a cloud-based business productivity set of tools, is used by 70,000 health care workers in the Veneto region of Italy to collect critical, real-time information on hospital responses to COVID-19, such as hospital occupancy levels, and accident & emergency capacity.
At the Oklahoma State Department of Health in the US, Google Cloud technologies have played a significant role in creating applications that enable healthcare staff to engage remotely with people at risk of contracting viruses, or who are experiencing symptoms and need assistance locating their nearest community testing site.
“We worked with our partner MTX Group to create the app and are now deploying it with governments in Florida, New York, and many other states so they can use our tools for insights into how the virus’s spread is affecting citizens and state healthcare systems,” said Kurian.
The Australian Government Department of Health also hosted an application on Google Cloud to provide real-time information to citizens about the spread of the coronavirus pandemic throughout the country.
“Healthcare is the most impacted industry during the pandemic, and technology can be a critical tool to help,” said Kurian. “We’re providing solutions for the health research community to identify new therapies and treatments, and assist hospital systems with tracking the pandemic and providing telehealth and remote-patient monitoring solutions.”
Last week, the company partnered with many health services and other technology domains as part of the COVID-19 Health Care Coalition initiative, including its public competitors in the Microsoft and Amazon clouds. The aim is to create a data exchange that allows participants to exchange and analyze data safely to accelerate medical breakthroughs related to the coronavirus epidemic.
Google has announced that it has activated the “Black Friday / Cyber Monday protocol” for retailers and other companies that are currently experiencing an exponential increase in traffic. This means bringing together professional services, technical support staff, and customer reliability engineering resources to support, plan, and respond to consumer demand during these difficult times of coronavirus outbreak.
“We’re prepared – we’ve activated remote customer service agents and our enhanced support protocol for peak periods, we’ve detailed plans to manage our capacity and supply chain, and we’ve rigorously tested the resilience of our infrastructure and processes. All of these preparations have been put in place to ensure we can best support our customers during a time like this,” he said.
“We’ll continue to work tirelessly on these and other initiatives to support our users, customers, and communities in this time of need. I’m so grateful to the many extraordinary Cloud Googlers that have worked so hard to provide so many capabilities for our customers.”
