 Good morning everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's day three coverage of Google Cloud Next 23 from beautiful San Francisco, Lisa Merton and John Furrier. Can't tell you how great the weather has been the last few days at this conference. We've been having some amazing conversations with Googlers and it's ecosystem. We're about to do that next as well. We have a Shisharma, the AVP, engineering at Persistent. And Dimitri Coates joins us. VP, Strategic Analytics Insight at Notified. Guys, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having us and glad to be here. Ashish, give us kind of the current lay of the land at Persistent. What's going on since we last talked to you? Yeah, so I mean, as you know, that Persistent is a global consulting digital engineering firm. We are, you know, one of the premier partners for a Google Cloud and one thing I wanted to, you know, call out that being a partner with the Google Cloud, I think Google's partner team is probably, you know, one of the best in the ecosystem. They help us in, you know, getting the early access to all the cool stuff that they are building and, you know, jointly, you know, they work with us to make our, you know, customers happy and, you know, are successful. So they go far enough to, you know, enable us and, you know, kind of give us all that arms and muscle so that we can deliver those services. So more recently, means everything that is happening on Next with the Generative AI, buzz around the Generative AI, the Palm II upgrades and all that. That has been already open to us, you know, for a while now and our teams are, you know, diligently working enough to, you know, put some solutions. Those would help, you know, a few verticals but more like on the horizontal side of it. But, you know, happy to talk more about that later. The AI has really been a gift for the industry really from the development standpoint and also solutions and Google's got great developer chops here with the AI, they're going for that. But they got a lot of solutions Demetri, you're here, you're a customer. Share the story of Persistent, your role with working with them, what's the project? Obviously you guys got a partnership going there. Talk about what you're working on. Yep, so we've been working together for the past several years. Notified is in the public relations and the investor relations space as well as digital events and experiences. So we have brands tell their stories and one of our product offerings is a media contact database where we help PR professionals identify journalists who they might want to pitch their stories to, their press releases to, et cetera. And we've been using AI before I guess AI was cool to discover new journalists, discover new outlets, discover influencers to enhance our media contact database and enhance our offering for PR professionals. So you must be scraping our Twitter fees looking at the linguistics of what we're saying, getting a little sentiment analysis. All the natural language processing stuff. But of course with Generative AI this has taken us to the next level. So we actually launched a patent recently for smart press releases where we're going to, we already have in production an AI-assisted press release generator but we're gonna be doing a lot more to help the PR professionals with managing the content, analyzing the content, predicting the likelihood of success, recommending journalists, kind of grading. Like if you submit the press release is it gonna be awesome or does it need some work to reach your goals, et cetera. And we're doing something similar in investor relations as well where we're essentially building a earnings call coach. So we host earnings calls and do webcasts and we host websites for investor relations for different public companies. And with that there's a lot of capabilities to use AI and also traditional machine learning to improve our product. Demetri, talk a little bit about why persistent, knowing your target audiences, your solutions for IR and PR. What was it about persistent, its relationship with Google that made it the right decision for notifying? So we've been working with persistent through an acquisition. They are really good at acquiring consultancy shops. There was a company called Media Agility that we've worked with for several years before. And they have a team of brilliant data scientists, machine learning engineers who are kind of become part of your team number one. And even if somebody is not working specifically on your project, they have the centers of excellence and they help each other out and we can always go to them for help. Even if we're not necessarily engaged in a particular thing, we'll bounce ideas off of each other. So that's been really fruitful and their partnership with Google and now persistence partnership with Google and the expertise in the space are exceptionally helpful. A lot of the stuff is new. So we have partnered up on exploring all these new opportunities. Actually, talk about the machine learning and AI background you guys have and your skills and your team on the generative AI side. Take a minute to explain what you guys are offering, how this comes together because I mean, this is just going to explode. I mean, what you're talking about with the user value there is incredible. Probably gets a lot of manual labor kind of pushed out of the way. Help people be prepared for their work and their earnings balls. I mean, that's just the game changer. So this is more of this is coming. What's it look like inside? What capabilities do you have? Take a minute to explain. Yeah, absolutely. And again, all the work that we have been doing in the past that is actually leading a path forward for us to bring the more efficiencies, more automation to our customers. Just like Dimitri said that one of the cool use cases that we worked in enriching the journalist database where you scrap the web content, you kind of run it through the NLP and you do the categorization of that content to make the campaigns more successful, in turn, customer more successful so that they see a partner in us. With the generative AI, the floodgates are actually open and I do believe that we are in the early stages of kind of exploring that we have to go what is the path forward. But some of the primary use cases, those are coming to a foreplay, means may all of a sudden our chat bots are very, very intelligent now. What's the coolest thing that Google's got right now in the JNAI? What models? What's jumping off the page for you? Yeah, so, and I'll take it back to the announcement at the next. I think there are two or three things that I still have to absorb myself into, but the things that I really, really liked was duet AI integration with the workspace. I'll be more smarter when I'm writing my emails, writing my documentation, more on the enhancements that they are bringing to the Vortex AI platform. Not only hosting their own models, but hosting some of the open source models and reaching their model garden is going to open up the opportunities for us. And as I said that conversational intelligence is on the rise, but at the same time, some of the digital transformation that JNAI can help, right? That code migrations from a particular style to a second style from a particular database to the alternate database. Those are extremely, extremely, I would say, boring per se, means from a technology point of view, but JNAI TVA is definitely going to help us in improving those areas. Dimitri, to the leastest question early about the relationship, what's on your side is a lot to deal with, to get up and running fast. So one of the things I see in the cloud game over the past eight years, managed service has been really popular. Now you need managed services and managed integrations, managed builds. Partnering is really key to people because your alternative is what? You got to staff up. Even if you had a couple people, you still got to get more. So this is, take us through your mindset when you were going down this endeavor. Obviously you're looking at immediate opportunities of speed to capture is probably top of mind for you, right, like move fast. We have a core group of internal folks who are architecting solutions, managing because we still own a lot of stuff, own the delivery, but acceleration of speed of development because we're in a game right now where it's a race, especially in a PR and IR space. It's an interesting industry because it hasn't really been disrupted for a while. It's kind of been pretty stable. We're doing the disruption. I think we are one of the leaders in driving the disruption and we're going to want to go faster and harder and we need to partner up with folks to accelerate our deployment. And speaking of partnering up to accelerate deployments, what are some of the risks associated with AI ML that persistent is helping you guys to address and eliminate? Well, it takes, I mean, there's a lot of fear out there in the market of how this is going to be used. There's security considerations. We've got companies and countries banning certain applications outright right now. So what we're trying to do internally is to work with our customers to navigate those waters in a reasonable pace, but also deliver extra value for them as well. So, you know, with persistent, we just value their thoughts around DevSecOps as well because one thing is to build something cool as a data scientist. The other thing is actually deployed into production. So that's one of the key areas that we'll all partner with them on. What's the coolest thing you're seeing at the show here, Dimitri? What do you like? What DataRobot has done with Vertex AI? I mean, I've been following DataRobot for a while, but now the integrations, they've have medical, large language models that predict country as a patient. I was kind of blown away by that. It's been really cool to see. I mean, there are a lot of really great presentations as well. It's interesting, you know, we talk about this all the time when we were having the previous conversations in the cloud game. Cloud's great. Next-gen, you get scale. Now with AI, the actions being taken. So automating a way stuff's been around in tech. We love automating things, right? Automate repetitive tasks. AI is generating new things. So generative AI is generating new things. It's not just applying machine learning to something. That's going to be changing the outcomes of real-time applications. So it's a whole mindset shift on architecture, okay? Admin, we were speculating that the cloud admin would be automated away. AI will be running the cloud. It's the architecture, because you're architecting, you got to architect it and then go after the opportunities in the business. That's where I think I see the pattern emerging here in real-time, just thinking out loud, speeds the game. If you go too internally and, you know, rearrange the deck chairs, as they say, you might miss it. Talk about that phenomenon, about how you see that, how you guys see that, because this is something people try to realize, what's the try bug? Yeah, so cloud was anyways pushing the limits for the managed services. So many of the services nowadays, when you architect the cloud solution, they are the managed services. So hardly require any admin and more humans working on keeping it up and running. But what we saw in the keynotes other day, that vertex AI integration with the Google cloud and helping them in debugging, looking at the arrow logs and kind of automating some of the actions where they can fix the things on the fly, that's amazing. That is where the kind of a real value of the automation and perhaps means that that will free up people to do more cool stuff, more creative and be more productive. So essentially instead of fear of, many of us had a fear that people will lose the jobs, but I think we are going to put more productive hours than before and this is only going to help in accelerating. And team formation is a big thing too, right? Who's on the team? Yeah. I just want to say that AI is not, while we're doing automation, we're not, it's not going to get rid of people and positions. It might change a few things, but people are also fearful about that. We have an internal citizen developer program where we're trying to educate folks how to help themselves automate some of their routine tasks. But it's a, you know, people use assistant, co-pilot, whatever. That's what the AI is doing. I always get a lot of crap when I say Cloud Admin is going to be automated with bots. Because it is a kind of a probe. It is kind of a haymaker. I put it out there. But it brings the question of the co-piloting, augmentation of human creativity. You know, we've been saying on theCUBE that we're going to enter a tech era never seen before where there's a creative culture that will emerge in tech. Not that there wasn't, but it wasn't everyone, right? This potentially impacts everyone's creativity, capturing opportunities, doing their job. So I think human element is totally legit. The question is, what's the role? It's the shift. I mean, I remember the bank tellers, Lisa, you know, and when big data came out with the Hadoop wave, oh yeah, you know, bank tellers are going to be extinct. It's going to be all ATMs, and there's more bank tellers now than there was back then. Is there all wrong? Yeah, that's the abundance mindset. I go back and want to reflect on Sundar Pachai's statement that the generative AI or AI is more profound than fire or steam for that matter. Just like in 18th century, we got steam. In 19th century, we got electricity. 20th, we got information technology. Now we are in AI, and humans are going to, they'll always have a role, right? And whether it is writing about the problems that AI is going to solve, somebody has to fill in that role. It might be the wheel actually. Yeah, yeah, so, and AI brings in that efficiency and that consistency in the results. You imagine that, you know, 10 years from now, there is automatic plane landing, right? You don't require pilots to, you know, make even a fraction of a mistake. You know, Lisa, I know Lisa wants to get a question, but I want to make one point on that. There's a famous Steve Jobs video way back when he was launching the Mac, and he kind of quoted it early. The bicycle for the mind, he was talking about the Mac. If you think about that quote, that's kind of an AI kind of vibe right now. Kind of get your mind, scaling intellect is an interesting discussion. How do you scale ideas? How do you scale creative? So I think this is a really important point that Sundar was making. We totally believe that humans plus AI is better than AI itself, and I think you just have to see more use cases where things come out of that. It's net new. Yep. I'm curious, you mentioned the fear, and we hear that so much in the mainstream media, talking about working with media. What is persistence role or focus on, from an education perspective, advancing education of all the positives that are already coming out from AI? Do you have a role in that? Yeah, it means, again, whatever we want to do, we want to do responsibly, and you know, you call it as a responsible AI or whichever way, so that's a one aspect of it. It means we address that, you know, security and the information is well-secured when it comes to this. But again, getting this genetic AI, this is new to all of us, right? Getting this genetic AI in the hands of the people, let them feel about it, let them play with it, that is important aspect of the whole, you know, revolution from here onwards, right? The more people, you know, the more exposure we give them, I think they'll come up with the cool ideas, they'll come up with, you know, more use cases where it is eventually going to benefit the humanity. So that is the part where, you know, giving a more exposure and the executives on the top, they can decide about the prioritization of those, you know, ideas when they come from, you know, down up. But having this technology in the hands of more and more people right at the, you know, college or institution levels before they, you know, come into even the job market, I think that is going to change a lot that how we do things. I think the point about the smart applications that you do as you're building is interesting and how it renders itself. The demo on the day one, the Duet demo where they go into Gmail and they look at the incidents and then they summarize before they take action, that was a game changer because if you look at that, that's essentially multiple applications with first party data. And then AI's going cross applications, that's awesome. I mean, that's a signal of the future and you mentioned DataRobot, but their demo, we're going to start to see these new ways that were stumbling blocks in the past first party data, data relationships. I think the whole data world is going to be turned upside down, I've been saying it for years and you've been preaching that. But now you're starting to see the signs in keynotes. And on the show floor. Yep, absolutely. So what do you guys see AI going? That's just, are we drinking too much Kool-Aid here in the Kube or, I mean, obviously we are in agreement that it's profound for sure, but where's it going next? What has to happen? As you see cloud scale come up at the top, we see GPUs and TPUs behind us. Yeah, I would say AI is everywhere. Means we are only realizing it and you're not talking about it now, but we have been in this journey for a while. Means we're working in the docs and getting the hints of your next word. Be it any sort of an automation around us talking to the Google Home and getting things done, playing music, talking to your gadgets. So all that is AI that we are already into it. It is just an amplification and now the generative part of it where we can, these machines can generate the content that is either of your liking or it gives you a variety, it gives you a consistency. It is more of a creative work going forward than anything else. I am sure that a lot of data scientists around the world they are working on improving the LLM models, whether, and also other signal is that, you know, it may be that we are heading towards the world where it's not a one large model, but it is those specific vertical focused models. Like they announce in the next that there is a Sec Palm II, there is a Med Palm II. That gives us an indication that we are heading in a direction where those specialized models will help us in specific solving, specific use cases. We'll keep our eyes on that. Dimitri, last question for you. What's next for Notify, Gen AI? Where do you think your applications are going to go for the company and your target audience? I think the buzz of AI will subside a little bit. It'll just be stuff that we do and use as part of applications. Specifically for Notify, I mentioned we have a couple of patterns. We've built some solutions. We need to go and build those out. It's about execution at this point. I've attended a couple of these conferences and has participated in a couple of customer calls and kind of panels. And it's interesting that a lot of people are still kind of just thinking about it, exploring very cautiously. We're actually doing it. We're doing it with partners. And I think that's what kind of, I think makes Notify stand out a little bit in the market. For us specifically, right, we're gonna, you know, earning school coaches is a really cool thing that I'm really interested to show a lot more about soon. But it's a, you know, it's a... What does it do? Take a minute to explain. Yeah, so if you think about it as a pre-game, post-game, during-game coaching for an investor relations officer or CFO, you did awesome on your webcast and now your stock price is doing great, or you didn't do so awesome, and there are a few points you might have improved. So... Can we get that for the CUBE interviews? By the way, that's an interesting thought, yeah. That is an interesting thought. We'll be confident in the first call. Absolutely. Ashish Dimitri, thank you so much for joining John and me on the program, talking about the partnership, what you're doing, your thoughts and applications of Gen AI and some of those predictions for the future. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Our pleasure for having you. Yeah. For our guest and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's day three coverage of Google Cloud Next 23, which continues in just a minute. So don't go anywhere.