Google Cloud is partnering with Mayo Clinic as it tries to expand use of generative A.I. in health care

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote address at the Google I/O developers conference at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, May 10, 2023.

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Google's cloud business is expanding its use of new artificial intelligence technologies in health care, giving medical professionals at Mayo Clinic the ability to quickly find patient information using the types of tools powering the latest chatbots.

On Wednesday, Google Cloud said Mayo Clinic is testing a new service called Enterprise Search on Generative AI App Builder, which was introduced Tuesday. The tool effectively lets clients create their own chatbots using Google's technology to scour mounds of disparate internal data.

In health care, that means workers can interpret data such as a patient's medical history, imaging records, genomics or labs more quickly and with a simple query, even if the information is stored across different formats and locations. Mayo Clinic, one of the top hospital systems in the U.S. with dozens of locations, is an early adopter of the technology for Google, which is trying to bolster the use of generative AI in the medical system.

Mayo Clinic will test out different use cases for the search tool in the coming months, and Vish Anantraman, chief technology officer at Mayo Clinic, said it has already been "very fulfilling" for helping clinicians with administrative tasks that often contribute to burnout.

For instance, if a physician needs to see information about a cohort of female patients aged 45 through 55, including their mammograms and medical charts, they can enter that query into the search tool instead of seeking out each element separately. Similarly, if a physician needs to know which clinical trials a patient may match, they can search for that, too.

"It's going to save a lot of time, it's going to prevent physician burnout, it's going to reduce administrative overload," Anantraman told CNBC in an interview.

Generative AI has been the hottest topic in tech since late 2022, when Microsoft-backed OpenAI released the chatbot ChatGPT to the public. Google raced to catch up, rolling out its Bard AI chat service earlier this year and pushing to embed the underlying technology into as many products as possible. Health care is a particularly challenging industry, because there's less room for incorrect answers or hallucinations, which occur when AI models fabricate information entirely.

Aashima Gupta, global director of health care strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, said Google is taking a "safety over speed" approach with its Enterprise Search tool, which is why the company has limited it to select early adopters like Mayo Clinic instead of rolling it out more broadly.

"We want to be very thoughtful and responsible in how we leverage such a powerful tool like generative AI in an enterprise setting, especially in health care," Gupta told CNBC in an interview.

Google said its approach to privacy ensures customers retain control over their data and noted the new service is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Anantraman said Mayo Clinic has created "safe sandboxes" for workers to test applications of the technology and identify where it can be the most helpful.

"We take privacy of patient data very, very seriously, and our needs of our patients come first," he said. "That's one of the reasons health care has to be very cautious in general as an industry in adopting technology that may not be fully tested, may not be fully vetted."

Google Cloud and Mayo Clinic signed a 10-year partnership in 2019. Mayo said at the time it selected Google Cloud to be the "cornerstone of its digital transformation." The partnership announced Wednesday is the first step in an expanded agreement between the two companies to work together on AI applications in health care.

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I'm a former Google engineer who founded an AI startup. Here are the AI tech skills to learn and the tech roles AI is set to replace.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Zach Smith, founder of Nova AI. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When you think of the sort of people who land high-paying software engineering jobs in big tech companies, you might imagine teenage tech geniuses who got computer science degrees at top universities. And it's true that many of them are.

But the path to my dream career – founder of a newly launched startup called Nova AI – wasn't straightforward or easy for me. And now I want to share what I can clearly see is the future of jobs in tech: Some functions are going to go away, replaced with AI. And the people who do them should prepare themselves to be shifted towards different, more creative tasks. 

From college drop out to a master's degree and job at Google

CONSTELLATION BRANDS, INC.

When I was 19 years old, I dropped out of college because I was studying finance and knew it wasn't for me. I spent a couple of years trying a bunch of stuff: real estate, credit finance, all having no degree and none of it was working for me.

I knew I had to go back to school and opted for computer engineering because I was a builder, meaning I always liked making things. Once I decided on engineering, I crafted a future resume for myself that articulated both current and future milestones. This gave me an ideal state to work towards that would, in the near future, be all-encompassing of the skills I already had and the skills I would acquire. I looked at the best courses that were free or affordable in conjunction with a formal Bachelor's route.

This path of self-education, in addition to schooling, was how I secured my first job as a software programmer at a large company prior to finishing my degree. Once I chose my path, I stayed in school until I earned a master's degree in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology at age 26. I loved that program. It was fully online but cost effective and I could also continue working while I did my masters.

One job led to another until I obtained my graduate degree and landed at Google working on cloud-related teams like one that helps Google cloud customers use a lot of automation technology.

I don't want to make it sound like I just skipped my way from one job to another. Technical job interviews are difficult and I found resources and studied for each one in order to do well. (One resource I recommend is Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle McDowell.) 

Earlier this year, I left Google and launched Nova AI. We are building a startup that uses AI to automate repetitive software engineering chores, particularly in quality assurance (QA) work, helping free up engineers time to work on more creative tasks, like building new products and features.

So when I say that embarking on a career in software development can be both exciting and overwhelming, it's because I've been there. 

Now, in my work as a startup founder, there's a new area to consider for people with careers in tech: You will need to be relevant in the age of AI.

AI impacts QA engineering, technical writing

In truth, staying relevant in the age of AI is going to impact a lot more people than just computer engineers. For instance, I know people working on AI bots that replace fast food workers who take drive-through orders.

But in the tech world, "AI is like having an orchestra of tireless worker bees, buzzing away at the repetitive tasks, while you, the master beekeeper, focus on crafting the sweetest honey of innovation," That's what Chat GPT 4 told me when I asked it to describe AI's role.

For instance, Nova AI is building features that automate some of the most repetitive tasks that quality assurance engineers currently do such as user acceptance testing. That's when the QA engineer goes through a product manually clicking on everything to test all product features.

While I don't think that QA engineers are going to be entirely replaced, all of the manual functions they do will be automated. QA engineers will become the ones that run and train these AI automation tools. Each QA engineer in the future will be far more productive, meaning companies won't need to hire as many, but also that people in these roles will be freed to work on more creative tasks. User experience (UX) design is the type of creative role that AI can't replace.

Another function I believe AI will automate is technical documentation. AI will be able to look at what the code does and then generate the documentation that describes it. We're using some of those tools here at Nova AI.

The third function that is going away is code maintenance. Code gets old, libraries change, everything needs to be updated to the newest versions, newest patches. Currently many engineers spend a chunk of their time doing this kind of work. 

In fact any function that relies on stitching – do a task and take the output of that and do the next thing – AI will do all of that in the future. 

On the other hand, AI is also going to create a lot of jobs: data science, machine learning engineering (ML), AI ethics and design will be new functions in high demand. Within AI there will be many specialities: auditory ML stack (dealing with sounds), computer vision, robotics.

So yes, AI will change the tech jobs landscape from what it is today. But despite the doomsayers, humans are creative. AI only knows what it's been trained on. The next generation of jobs will be more creative and less mundane. People won't be replaced. They will be shifted.

66degrees Partners with Google Cloud for Generative AI Solution Launch

Among other areas, 66degrees is developing solutions for Education, Customer Experience and Customer Support using Google Cloud’s foundation models and generative AI capabilities in Vertex AI

CHICAGO, June 08, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 66degrees, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, announces a partnership with Google Cloud to develop new generative AI solutions. The partnership is a continuation of the work 66degrees has been doing with Google Cloud, including the development of best practices for building more traditional AI/ML solutions.

66degrees has been a Google Cloud partner since 2011. The firm has 500+ Google Cloud certifications, 84 Expertise designations and 12 Specializations, including Cloud Migration - Services, Data Analytics - Services, Work Transformation - Enterprise, Infrastructure - Services and Machine Learning - Services. 66degrees was the Google Cloud Expertise Partner of the Month in April 2023.

“As a Google Cloud partner, we have witnessed firsthand the profound impact of generative AI,” said Matt Kestian, CEO of 66degrees. “It has unveiled a new era of creativity and innovation, empowering businesses to reimagine what's possible. From generating code, content or hyper-realistic images to crafting personalized customer experiences, generative AI is revolutionizing industries and unlocking untapped potential. Embracing this transformative technology is not just an option; it's a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to lead and thrive in the digital age."

“66degrees will help launch and deploy new and innovative solutions to organizations across industries,” says Jim Anderson, Vice President, NA Partner Ecosystem & Channels at Google Cloud. “We’re excited to expand our work with 66degrees and customers to accelerate their AI-driven transformations.”

66degrees has a dedicated Data Science practice consisting of data scientists and AI/ML experts who work with clients to unlock valuable business insights and enable data-driven digital transformation. For example, the Data Science team worked with Designer Brands to improve its customer personalization and recommendations using Google Cloud’s smart analytics and AI/ML capabilities.

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Recently, 66degrees began incorporating generative AI into its AI/ML projects. Already, the Data Science team is building solutions for Education, Customer Experience and Customer Support using Google Cloud’s foundation models and generative AI capabilities in Vertex AI.

Vertex AI provides purpose built tools for data scientists and ML engineers to efficiently and responsibly automate, standardize and manage ML projects throughout the entire development life cycle. Using Vertex AI, data scientists and ML engineers can easily train, test, monitor, deploy and govern ML models at scale, reducing the work needed to maintain model performance in production and enabling scientists and engineers to focus on innovation code.

“Google Cloud has consistently demonstrated its leadership in AI and ML, starting with the original frameworks for Large Language Models, which is why we’re excited to continue and expand our partnership,” said David McDaniel, a Google Cloud Fellow, Field CTO & Chief Architect at 66degrees. “Clients will benefit from our deep Google Cloud and AI/ML expertise, which has led to the development of new solutions across industries and departments.”

About 66degrees

66degrees helps organizations modernize their cloud and data infrastructure and develop data-driven solutions using Google Cloud, while making sure everything’s done securely. In the current environment, so many companies are looking to modernize that it’s hard to find the Google specific skills or experience needed. To achieve their business objectives, it takes a consulting partner who brings a “build stronger, innovate faster, optimize together” approach. This is why companies ranging from born-in-the-cloud disruptors to world-class enterprises rely on 66degrees, an award-winning Google Cloud partner. More info at www.66degrees.com.

Contact:Kevin Wolfkevin@tgprllc.com