 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 19, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here with live coverage here in San Francisco in Moscone. We're on the show floor at Google Cloud Next, hashtag Google Next 19. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We're here with Amy Lowkey, G Suite Vice President of UX for Google. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. So we've been here for this day two or three days of coverage. A lot of action here, great profile of attendees. You got the developers, you got a lot of corporate enterprise focus, kind of cloud coming mainstream. It's been the part of the theme. But I loved your keynote. You were showing all the cool features of G Suite, some of the new innovations was kind of going away what's coming around the corner. What was the main exercise of the keynote? What was the main theme? What was the key message? Yeah. Well, I think in general, we are really excited about how G Suite is adapting to the changing landscape of work. And so what you heard me talk about was really how we're seeing how G Suite's playing a key role in connecting mobile remote workforces. So those frontline workers with the back office. And that's a scenario that we're seeing happening today with our customers and many different industries. Some unexpected, some expected. So, you know, we heard about Air Asia and the aviation industry. And then we also talked about a scenario in the retail industry. And so what we're seeing is that these frontline workers are using products like Hangouts Chat to communicate very quickly and send data and information back to the back office. And so G Suite's really helping make this immediate sharing of information available so that strategic decisions can be made based on the data and the information that this remote workforce has available to them. And so helping connect those groups is a key piece of I think where we see work going in the future. What are some of the innovations? Because one of the things that we're power users of G Suite Disclosure, we use G Suite for happy customers. The productivity has always been a big one. You stand up very easily, you don't need IT. You got search, all these great features. But as people keep using it, you guys are innovating more. What are the key design and user experience innovations to help people more and more productive? Because, you know, mail's not going away. You got good filtering. What are some of the new things? Right, right. Well, you know, I think AI, certainly a hot word, right? But that is something where we see, you know, it plays a key role in the enterprise because what we found through a lot of the user research that my team has done and also just largely in the industry is that people categorize their work into two things. One is kind of repetitive mundane work. The things that they have to do, but they don't really enjoy. And the other would be their core work that they see as their intellectual contribution that builds their profile, builds their reputation, makes them marketable and employable and so on. And so if you look at that category of that repetitive work, AI can play a really amazing role in helping alleviate that mundane repetitive work. And so, you know, great example of that is Smart Compose, which hopefully you've used. Yep. And so what we look at is things like, say, a salutation in an email, where you have to think about who are you addressing, how do you want to address them, how do you spell their name. We can alleviate that and make your composition much faster. So the exciting announcement that we had today was that we are leveraging the Google Assistant, so the assistant that you're used to using at home via your home devices or on your phone, and we're connecting that to your Google Calendar. And so you'll be able to ask your assistant what you have on your schedule, you know, know what's ahead of you during your day and be able to do that on the go. So, you know, I think in general, one of the unique opportunities that we have with G Suite is not only AI, but taking these products that consumers know and love and bringing them into the enterprise. And so we see that that helps people adopt and understand the products, but also just brings that consumer grade simplicity and elegance in the design into the enterprise, which brings joy to the workplace. Let me talk about this kind of new vision of how you're going to work. And I first started, was introduced with G Suite because of the collaboration features. I mean, to this day, if somebody wants me to edit a document, if it's not in Google Docs, I'm going to look at it. Not going to touch it, yeah. Because I'm not going to do an eye, it's just a waste of time. So I want to work faster, smarter. I want to be more productive. I want to be secure. And a great thing is these features just show up. Yeah. Oh, you called it smart compose. I call it finish my thought. Yeah. So, so paint a vision of what that future of work looks like. Yeah. Well, I mean, certainly we see that work is getting more distributed. Work is getting more mobile. You know, we see more and more that workforces are in many different locations, not just all together in one office. So what excites me about these tools is I really see them as ways that we kind of build relationships amongst colleagues that may not get to spend face to face time together. So whether that's through video conferencing, whether that's through chat, all of these tools play a critical role in really building connectivity and culture of a team so that they can do their best work together. And so I really think of them not just as like productivity tools, but as relationship building tools. And so I think the more that the tools can almost just help facilitate humans connecting and communicating, that's when we're really going to elevate the way that people can work together. I think cloud is so disruptive. We've been talking all today and yesterday around how the disruptive business models are changing with SaaS and cloud and databases, all from databases to the front end. And one of the things that we've seen over the years of trends is, oh, cloud first, mobile first. Well, first mobile first and cloud first, data first. But one of the things we're seeing is that no one's really cracked the code yet on virtual first, where companies now can be virtual. You don't really need, maybe you even need an office. Forget IT for a minute. Yes, yeah. When you say virtual first, that means having an HR app that's designed for remote and distributed work teams. This is becoming a trend now. We're starting to see some visibility around this new virtual first structure. Yeah. Can you guys look at it that way? Do you guys have any conversations around, can you share any reaction to that concept of virtual first companies, where the processes were tailored for those remote workforces that might gather from meetings, physical face to face, but then have to go back and be digital. Any thoughts on that? Well, again, I mean, I think it goes back to this distributed idea, right? People are working in different places, but I think also different time plays an element as well too. So I'll speak for Google in particular, we have a global team, right? Which means my team is working on different time zones at different places as well. So you have to find kind of like you said, that virtual way to connect. It's definitely something that we're seeing. I don't know that I have anything specific to comment on at this time, but it's definitely a trend that we're aware of. What about UI design and user experience? What are some of the cutting edge techniques that are emerging that you're seeing, that's working that you're doubling down on? Can you share some insight into what UX customers and users like? Sure, well, I think one of the big thing is voice input, right? And so you hear a lot about conversational UI is certainly very much an emerging discipline within the field. So when I started this career path, it was all about pixels on a screen and how you might move and manipulate those pixels and interact with them. But now with all the voice to text capability, it's really about how can you communicate in an interactive way with the digital experience, but you don't necessarily have to use your hands, right? You don't necessarily have to have an input device like a mouse or a keyboard, which is a really exciting space, right? Because it also opens up a world of ways that we can bring a more diverse workforce together through assistive technology and accessibility features, right? So one of the things that I was excited to demonstrate today is the transcription capability within a meeting. So using Hangouts Meet, you'll be able to transcribe the meeting and have that show up on text on the screen, which helps people with varying ways that they might want to engage, be able to engage with the conversation, right? Versus taking notes. Versus taking, right? Versus taking notes. Or listening to the whole recorded video after the fact. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It's way too time consuming. Absolutely, you could look at a transcription. So I do think that interaction is going to be less necessarily about using a device that helps you interact and more about using a natural interface like a conversation. Can we get a highlight reel for the meetings that we missed? Yeah. I know. It would be more efficient, right? Yeah, totally. That's the machine learning could come in. I was asking you about Inbox before. What did you learn from that initiative? What are you carrying over? What can users expect? Yeah, well, Inbox certainly was a great way for us to experiment and try out different features. There was a lot that we learned from that product and a lot of it we have brought over. Ways that we kind of can prioritize your messages, help kind of remind you what to get back to and categorize them. Those are all things that we've learned from Inbox and will continue to carry forward into Gmail. One of the things we hear all the time and we've been covering in Google Cloud really since the beginning, security has always been a big part of it. One of the things that you guys do that I like is identifying malicious emails, right? So talk about how you guys interface that because also you all got a little warning. You got to warn users, so maybe a visual thing as well, but also there's tech involved, right? Security is a huge concern for phishing, spear phishing, malware, talk about that. What's fantastic about what we can do at Gmail is like I mentioned this morning, this is a product that I think over 1.5 billion people use, right? Which means that our machine learning on that data is incredibly powerful and that's how we're able to detect malicious emails and protect you from them and also warn you. And it's where design plays a role too because you may have seen it, I know for myself I rarely see them but when I do, there's a big red banner at the top of the email that warns you that this is an email you should probably be cautious around, right? So it's where design plays a role in security but also our technology really is kind of far above what others can do because it's scale. But you do notice it, it's like, are you sure you want to hit send? Just make sure. Yes. Great, thank you. The other thing too, the productivity is also a double edged sword. You guys have been so good with filtering. I can't use the excuse, oh, it must be my spam folder. You guys do a great job of filtering out spam and it's kind of maybe killing the newsletter business but there's a lot of stuff that you guys categorize. This is kind of, again, back to the collective intelligence across the billions of signals or users. How do you guys look at that? What's the, can you share some insight on how that works? Is there secret sauce? Is there, you know, because you got spam, you got, you know, not urgent. I mean, you got a way to kind of bring all that out together. Yeah, you know, I'm probably not the best comment on how that all works. So, you know, I'm coming from more of a design perspective. You just don't want to reveal the secrets. Yeah, you know, I'm so secret. Just say machine learning. I'm sure that's an element. But you know, essentially what we want to do is make sure that your most important messages are in the foreground and then you can respond to the other messages when you have the right time and you want to address those things. So, you know, I find for me, it's actually useful to go through when I'm in that mindset, like maybe it's a Sunday morning while I'm having my latte, go through the newsletters and see the things that I want to catch in terms of promotions or offers, things like that. And I like being able to compartmentalize my time that way. Yeah, one of the nice things that I noticed that you guys, collective intelligence is always a good thing. That's where data comes in. Is that you have these now reminded, sometimes I see some stuff on my email where it says, hey, you might want to pay attention to this email. Yeah, a little nudge. That kind of pops up, the nudge. Is that new? When did that come out? Is that something that's been around? That is something that's been out for a bit. I don't remember specifically when we launched it, but it was probably in the last few months kind of timeframe. But yeah, that's another way that we want to make sure that you're not missing important messages. I find it incredibly useful at work because there are those messages that I read and I think I'm going to respond right away, but something diverts me to something else and then it pushes down the list. So I find that the accuracy on those is amazing as well too. How about search and discovery? Obviously just one of the benefits of G Suite is across the board, search and cross correlation. Any innovations there, any new kind of techniques that you're seeing around search and layout, folders, is it going, you guys have anything new there? What's your thinking around that? I spoke a bit this morning about Cloud Search, which is a product that we launched about two years ago and that really, that enables businesses to bring the power of Google search into their business. And it's also a standalone product so if businesses aren't totally ready to make the move to G Suite, they can kind of dip a toe in the water by trying search within their business. And then what was exciting that we announced today is we now allow third party connectivity. So Cloud Search will not just search for your purpose of G Suite data or Google data, it will search all types of data at your company, so including things like Salesforce or SAP data. And so that means that now for the end user benefit, they can search all of the digital assets at their company and all of the people and get those results in one place. Okay, because I mean, I personally, I'm creating data faster than I can manage it, so having a powerful search like that. So that sounds like, I was going to ask you, that sounds like you'll help, how you'll help users solve that problem, right? Yes, yeah, absolutely. So that's a product that I can purchase as a standalone product, pointed at whatever data I want to purchase. All the data within your business, yeah. And you know, based on our research, we find that people spend an inordinate amount of time at work searching for information, right? So if we can help cut down that time and help them find the thing that they need that saves people a ton of time at work. How do you price it? Is it per user? Is it per terabyte or? I'll have to get back to you on that. You don't know, okay. You don't know off the top of my head. I'm ready to buy. You're absolutely trying. You're supposed to be objective, come on. Amy, question for you on, as you look at the enterprise, who's a big enterprise focus, what have you learned in dealing with the enterprise because it's great, born in the cloud, standing up G Suite like we've done 10 years ago, and then certainly when we got the corporate account, been great for our business. But as enterprise that had legacy stuff, whether it's Microsoft Outlook or whatever, they have existing stuff that they're used to. What have you learned in dealing with the enterprise, either integration, experience, can you share any insights to some of those learnings? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that's tantamount in the enterprise is interoperability. And so we've been really focused on ensuring that G Suite works well with other products in the enterprise. And I think that is a continuing trend. We see more and more when we speak with our customers, they're not looking for a one size fits all solution for all of their software needs. They understand now that really employees have a lot more control and influence on the tools that they want to use. And that's where you're really looking at, an employee will try to seek out the tool that they think is the best user experience, and that's what they want to use in the workplace. And so that means the employer, the enterprise, has to be much more nimble about how they might put a complementary group of tools together. So we've been very, very focused on ensuring that our products work well with other products, including Microsoft, but including other video conferencing solutions, hardware solutions, and so on. And all the security stuff they need. Amy, thanks so much for sharing the inside update on G Suite. Final question for you, I'm curious, because you're in a unique position, Vice President of UX, share what your job is. What do you do on a day-to-day basis? Take us through the day in the life or year in the life. What do you work on? What are some of the projects? What are your key objectives? What do you do for your job specifically? What are the key things? Yeah, well, I mean the best part of my job is I get to be really close with our customers and users. And I see my job as kind of like chief empathizer. And so really understanding the human need behind our users and what they need to accomplish. And I spoke today about one of the most rewarding aspects is helping people accomplish their most important goals. And that could be in their personal life, it could be for education, and it can be in the workplace as well too. And so for us, my team does a lot of user research and design to understand what are those big goals that people have, what is the friction that they have in accomplishing those goals, and then how can our tools solve those problems for them and make a frictionless experience that brings delight and helps them accomplish great things. So you're like a life coach and a psychologist, same time. All of those things. You hear my problems, I need help to solve them. Amy, thank you so much for sharing the insight, great insight here on theCUBE, we're on the UX behind G Suite. Really successful platform, obviously the innovation on Webmail, taking it to a whole other level now and into the enterprise. It's Cube's coverage here on the show floor of Google Cloud Next. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.