Google I/O 2017: AI, Privacy And You

An AI-first world is still first powered by advertising.

- Alvin Soon

Last year, almost a year into his new role as CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai boldly declared that Google would shift from a mobile-first strategy to AI-first (artificial intelligence).

This year’s I/O developer conference demonstrated the fruits of that AI first focus, where Pichai once again emphasized, “ …in an AI-first world, we are rethinking all our products and applying machine learning and AI to solve user problems, and we are doing this across every one of our products.”

One of the most impressive of these AI first products is the new Google Lens. As part of Google Assistant, Lens can analyze the real world via a smartphone camera and return relevant results on it. Google demonstrated pointing the camera at a flower, and Lens then identified its species.