During their I/O 2021 conference, Google announced the launch of a new machine learning platform called Vertex AI. 

Craig Wiley, the director of product management for Google Cloud’s AI Platform, told TechCrunch : Machine learning in the enterprise is in crisis, in my view,” As someone who has worked in that space for a number of years, if you look at the Harvard Business Review or analyst reviews, or what have you — every single one of them comes out saying that the vast majority of companies are either investing or are interested in investing in machine learning and are not getting value from it. That has to change. It has to change.

Vertex AI is designed to enhance the deployment and maintenance of artificial intelligence models. The functions at the disposal of engineers include managing images, video and tabular datasets; they can also build machine learning pipelines to train and evaluate models using Google Cloud algorithms. Google say that Vertex AI takes about 80% fewer lines of code to train a model compared to some of its competitors.

Vertex AI replaces legacy services such as AI platform Data Labelling, AI Platform Training and Prediction, AutoML Natural Language, AutoML Video, AutoML Vision, AutoML Tables, and AI Platform Deep Learning Containers.

Vice president and general manager of Cloud AI at Google Cloud, explained their motivation for launching the new platform: “We had two guiding lights while building Vertex AI: get data scientists and engineers out of the orchestration weeds, and create an industry-wide shift that would make everyone get serious about moving AI out of pilot purgatory and into full-scale production.”