AI has triggered 'so many concerns in the world' - Google Cloud CEO

Diane Greene says that AI is a 'power for good', but warns that the tech industry has to address worries

Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene warned that artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered "so many concerns in the world" at the tech giant's Next London event.

Speaking during a keynote, Greene talked up the firm's own AI capabilities, but said that work has to be done to address concerns.

"We have built a large team now doing applied AI, taking the best of our research," the CEO said.

"This is such a powerful technology and has a lot of power for good, but we also see that there's so many concerns in the world. What is this powerful tech that is making decisions? So we are very involved with the industry to work out how this should move forward, because it is solving so many of our world's most pressing problems.

"If you think about it, AI is everybody's biggest opportunity, and cybersecurity is everybody's biggest threat and Google has the best of both of these."

Greene said that Google's years of being in the "crosshairs" of hackers, and servicing its billions of users made its cloud platform incredibly" secure.

"We filter 10 million spam and phishing attacks per minute and we stop 7,000 bad URLs per minute," she claimed.

"Our security is built into every layer of the system. Our assumption is that anything on the network is a risk.

Greene also touched on the cloud platform's expanding European presence, with London, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Zurich added as cloud regions in the past 18 months.

She stated that the company was providing training in its AI, data analytics and security across 20 countries in the EMEA region to fulfil the requirements of its customers as they migrate to the cloud.

"We are early in the cloud - about 10 per cent of workloads have moved to the cloud - but it's really clear that it is this major vehicle for digital transformation and that's where so many of our customers are going to be digitally transforming themselves," she stated.

"It's more secure; it's where the most advanced technologies are and there [are] bottom and topline benefits to it."