Google is doubling down on building out its AI business in the U.K., and on Monday morning in London, the CEO of Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian appeared alongside customers BT and WPP to spell out some of its plans. The company said it will be expanding UK data residency to include Agentspace so that its AI agent for enterprises can be hosted locally. Alongside this, it is introducing more financial incentives for AI startups to work with Google awarding those joining its new UK accelerator up to £280,000 in Google Cloud credits; plus expanded AI skills training.
Additionally, the company used the event at its DeepMind offices to announce that Chirp 3, the company’s audio generation model that was developed there, would be added to its Vertex AI developer platform. You can read more about that here.
Agentspace. “Agentic” has become the codeword for how enterprises will practically start adopting AI — the pitch is that AI agents can be built both to help people do their work faster, and to interface better with customers. Agentspace is Google’s platform for building these assistants for work. One of the most notable features in it is NotebookLM for enterprises — a service that can ingest large amounts of information and then summarise it, now set up for use in large business environments. Other features of Agnetspace include multimodal search, and of course the building of AI agents using generative AI.
Google launched launched Agentspace as a beta in December 2024, while Google announced data residency for the UK in October 2024, allowing for private and public organizations to store data at-rest, train AI and and run inference on Gemini 1.5 Flash within the U.K. Today’s news brings Agentspace into that the UK data residency region.
The idea here is to lay the groundwork to get more businesses working with Google (instead of its competitors) to build their future AI services. Many have expressed reservations over how their data will be used by Big Tech for their own advantage. Data is the “new oil” and so it remains a precious commodity.
“They will have full control to keep the data where they need it,” Kurian said at the event today.
The two companies that joined Hassabis and Kurian on stage today are longtime partners in AI services. Both BT and WPP have inked development and data partnerships with Google Cloud and are early adopters of running pilots using its newer releases like Imagen, Veo and Gemini.
“We are quietly reinventing all our operations,” said BT CEO Allison Kirby of how it’s using AI. “Operationally there is just a huge potential for us.” Some of these have a very immediate customer face, for example in trying to help detect phone scams and to improve customer service agents. Back in 2023 it said it would be axing up to 55,000 jobs with one-third to be replaced by AI.
The news comes on the heels of two streams of development. Google is on a development tear at the moment with its AI business. Last week saw the launch of a host of new Gemini developments, specifically Gemini 2.0, which starts to work around multimodal generation and understanding in real-time, using word prompts to generate images, a new robotics model and advances with its lightweight Gemma model.
Separately, the U.K. government making a huge push to promote more AI development both within its ranks and more widely as an industry at the same time that European businesses are pushing for less reliance on Big Tech, in favor of homegrown businesses and services.
It’s laid out plans, and is pressing individual divisions, to demonstrate adopting more generative AI services aimed at speeding up paperwork and building services across data that had previously been siloed by function and department.
The government’s dogfooding is part of a bigger strategy: its hope is that AI really will prove to be a big economic wave, and it wants to make sure the U.K. can catch it. To show that the U.K. is “open for business” for AI it’s made commitments to AI regional zones that will include data center capacity as well as regulatory changes to smooth the way to working with more data, among other measures.
“These models are global and used everywhere and we need to set an international standard for this,” Hassabis said of of the move to relax how IP is handled in AI environments in response to a question today about how the U.K. is looking to change rules around how AI companies can use intellectual property to train models, one of the more controversial topics around how AI is being ushered into use in the U.K.
Interestingly, the two main firms the government has named so far that it is working with are OpenAI and Anthropic, two rivals to Google in the area of generative AI services. Google’s announcements are late to the party but could pave the way for more collaboration on the government front going forward.
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