The One Thing Your Business Can Immediately Take Away from Google I/O

Google leads the world in technological advances that affect the way we live and do business. At the Google I/O developer conference this week, we glimpse a preview of how people will interact with computing in the near future.

Google I/O conference
Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA, scene of the 2017 Google I/O conference

Kicking off the conference, CEO Sundar Pichai opened a two-hour keynote to a packed audience of developers, tech reporters and others who were joined by viewers in 85 countries watching online to hear what was new from the tech giant, including one overarching announcement:

We have shifted from a mobile first to an AI first world.

This shift into an “artificial intelligence first” world will impact the way customers find your business AND the way you interact with those customers.

Lots of articles no doubt list the many Google feature announcements coming out of the I/O conference. But here, we zero in on something that all business owners should be aware of as we move forward into this AI-powered, machine learning-based new world…

Focus on solving user problems

One thing becomes clear as you watch the tech giant unveil feature after feature: Each new product is designed to solve a problem. You could say this is the key to Google’s success.

During yesterday’s keynote alone, Google announced many coming AI-enabled features that exemplify this problem-solution strategy. Here are just a few.

  • Google Assistant will be much more connected, even allowing people to type their interactions through a phone instead of speaking them — because there are times you don’t want people to overhear what you’re saying.
  • Google Photos is getting Photo Sharing, a new feature that can recognize people in your photo and proactively suggest sending them the file — because people have a problem following through and sharing their photos.
  • Google Visual Positioning Service will be able to guide your indoor movements through a store such as Lowes to help you find what you want — which solves a big problem for visually impaired people, not to mention the rest of us who need help navigating aisles.
  • Google Lens is a fascinating new AI feature that takes visual identification to new heights. In one application, Lens can remove obstructions in front of a subject, such as a chain link fence (see demo tweeted below), and fill in the missing elements — because people want to be able to take better pictures.

Let’s apply Google strategy to your business. In a nutshell:

To find the opportunities awaiting discovery for your own business, ask yourself two questions:

  1. What do people complain about in my industry? Complaints expose problems just waiting for a new product, service or technology to solve. This kind of negative feedback also provides clues for how to best engage your prospective customers.
  2. What is difficult or time-consuming for prospective customers to accomplish today? In addition to listening for pain points, also just observe. Look for processes that everyone just accepts, but which require a lot of time and effort to do.

If your business innovates a solution to a problem, you can make people’s lives or jobs easier, potentially jump ahead of your competition, and grow your business.

But even if you’re not going to invent the next great product, by understanding people’s needs better you can offer solutions more effectively. Your marketing campaigns will ring truer (and have better click-through rates!) if they come from a point of empathy.

Solving people’s problems underlies the majority of Google’s advancements. Make it your business’s mantra, too.

Note: You can watch Google I/O to see various presentations live May 17–19 (check out the schedule here).

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Paula Allen started at Bruce Clay Inc. in 2008 as a senior technical writer and now manages the company's content and documentation. An English lover at heart, Paula enjoys working in a team where grammar is frequently discussed and in an industry where there's always more to learn.

See Paula's author page for links to connect on social media.

Comments (27)
Still on the hunt for actionable tips and insights? Each of these recent Digital Marketing Optimization posts is better than the last!

27 Replies to “The One Thing Your Business Can Immediately Take Away from Google I/O”

At this time, Google Lens is available within the Google app, which is great for while you’re out shopping.

Its amazing . Google Assistant & Google Lens feature are very enchanting

Google algorithm is now concentrating on keywords which is very good. The latest algorithm BERT has more specification for google business.

Machine learning is the future of automation, next revolution would also be led by Google. China is also making a lot disruption in machine learning era but it might be harder to out beat Company like Google which takes lead in almost all most creative things. China although have beat them in 5G but still beating Google and other top notch companies would remain a biggest challenge.

Great post about Google I/O 2017. I think “Focus on solving user problems” is the most important for future business marketing strategies. And this Google positioning service can be a game changer for digital market, so digital marketers have to keep on eye on that.

Around of applause for your blog post. Muchos Gracias for your article post. Google Lens and other releasing apps are too amazing. No limit for Digital World

Great article! I liked your points about solving user problems. It’s so simple but key to success.

https://www.terrieragency.com/

I’m Wondering if Google assistant means SEO for voice will finally take off…

Paula Allen

Matt: Bingo! Bruce wrote about about voice search in a May post (see https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/surviving-seo-in-a-voice-search-world/)

Google photos is nice feature for phones. my iphone data fills very quickly,this app helps me a lot. all photos & videos are uploaded to Google photos. :-)

I think Google focus on quality of links & content of the sites.

Incredible Conference for all.Great work was done by GOOGLE.
Always looking for improvement in customer quality services which is the biggest building block of achievement of GOOGLE.

Google AI assistant is interesting but I really look forward to seeing interesting products carved out of google’s tensor flow and self driving car projects.

This is indeed an amazing post.Google Assistance and Google positioning service – first heard of this here. Moving to AI world will have a great impact on every business. This is fantastic! Thanks for sharing this.

I like this type of information with everything well summarized and with a lot of variety of elements, thanks for this information !!!!

Wow, i am so agree with this! “What do people complain about in my industry?” .. it’s a very important question before starting or improving our business. Thank you Allen for the article!

Really a amazing post on Google Assistant & Google Lens feature. we must try this.

Thanks! and keep posting on Google Assistant and Google Lens

hi Paula, Its just amazing . Google Assistant & Google Lens feature are very enchanting and artificial intelligence has no limits to grow!!!

This year there was a lot of new things at Google I/O. I really look into further development of Google Assistant. Right now I don’t use it very often but I see potential in this tool, especially in connection with inteligent houses.

Amazing, I hadn’t known about Google situating administration. Appears like it could be enormous for retail and unite advanced promoting to this present reality as it were. It will enthusiasm to perceive what huge box mark adjusts utilizing this first and how it can be utilized to help clients and bolster showcasing/deals.

Paula Allen

Guarav and Snap Agency: You both were intrigued by Google’s visual positioning system (VPS). Here’s an article with more detail: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/io-2017-augmented-reality/

Wow, I hadn’t heard of Google positioning service. Seems like it could be huge for retail and bring together digital marketing to the real world in a sense. It will be interesting to see what big box brand adapts using this first and how it can be used to help customers and support marketing/sales.

Paula: True. In I/O 2017, Google has focused more on solving user queries with some intelligent products using AI. It’s really commendable that they always try to enhance user experiences.

Great breakdown of the conference, Paula. Small business owners have been solving their customer’s problems from day one; I think it won’t take the smart ones long to see the value of A/I.

Paula Allen

Matt: Agreed. And to speed up the worldwide problem-solving even more, Google’s offering all kinds of resources people can use to apply AI and ML themselves. The conference mentioned a new TensorFlow API, more programming language support and others, not to mention improved transliteration and translation services to help facilitate human interaction across language barriers. It will be fascinating to see how people – and businesses – apply all of this.

J. Ustpassing

It’s nice to see someone catch it and spell it out,
but it’s not new.

Solving problems is a long-standing marketing method.
Ranging from things like cook-books through to fix-it manuals,
companies have been producing such things for decades.
It’s also a primary approach for Sales (pain-points etc.).
Providing answers and solutions is an old method of establishing worth and authority, gaining trust and recognition, as well as earning loyalty.

If you look at the direction businesses have had to take over the past 2 decades – the larger percent of popular content is problem-resolution (ranging from straight up Q&As, through to solving lack-of-knowledge).

The AI side of things isn’t “new” either. G have used AI and ML for a long time, to varying degrees, for various projects.

What is “new” is the speed of their development, and the level of accuracy.
The success likely originates from 2 key points;
1) Computational Resources – with the current availability of tech, it’s capabilities and the ability to sequence/serialise it – it’s possible to do things in minutes that a decade ago took a day. This means we are not only able to do old-things so much faster, but approach problems and select methods that (even a few years ago) were considered unfeasible.
2) Volume of Data – Machine Learning, in any of it’s guises, generally has a “ceiling” of accuracy. Start of the Art often occurs and remains in the final top 10% (so 90-98%). Hand crafted rules, machine observed patterns, manual corrections etc. etc. etc. can only go so far. For starters, improvement rates typically decelerate (each improvement yields smaller values). Second, there will always be exceptions.

But, when you have an inconceivable quantity of data, and a ton of resources available – then those barriers kind of almost disappear.
Time isn’t a concern – the machine can keep iterating, gauging and making micro-improvements at the rate of 0.01% per week. G can afford it.
What were originally perceived as rare and outliers are now simply low-occurring, anomalies are easier to identify, and handling can be improved.

If you think about – G currently have more knowledge and data than anyone, ever, period.
Just sit back and let that soak in.
Then ask yourself, what could you do if you had all that information, all that data and all those resources?

Paula Allen

Hi J. Ustpassing – What an excellent response! It IS mind boggling to consider how much data Google has and what they can do with it all! I think that’s why their developer conferences get the attention of a state of the union address mixed with a rock concert! Everyone wants to find out what’s coming next, and the revelations truly affect people’s lives.

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