Episode 347 - Neil Bowden, Europe AI lead, Dell

Artificial intelligence promises to transform how businesses operate, but with so much hype surrounding the technology, many organisations are still asking a simple question: where does AI genuinely deliver value?

In this episode, we speak with Neil Bowden, EMEA AI Lead at Dell Technologies, about how Irish businesses can take a pragmatic approach to AI adoption. From identifying real-world use cases and measuring ROI to avoiding costly mistakes and unnecessary spending, Neil shares practical advice for organisations looking to make smarter AI investments.

Whether you're an SME exploring your first AI project or a larger enterprise refining your strategy, this conversation cuts through the noise to focus on what really matters: achieving meaningful business outcomes with AI.

Visit www.thinkbusiness.ie for more news and supports for start-ups and SMEs in Ireland. If you want to start and grow a business, ThinkBusiness.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hello and welcome back to the latest Think Business podcast powered by Bank of Ireland. As AI rapidly moves from buzzwords to business tool, many SMEs are still asking the same question. Where do you start and how do you turn AI into something that delivers real value? As Google and Bank of Ireland join forces to provide 10,000 Google AI professional scholarships to Irish SMEs at no cost, we speak with Kira Brackage, AI specialist at Google, about how small businesses can use tools like Gemini Notebook to work smarter, save time, and unlock new insights from the information they already have. From turning meeting transcripts into instant action plans and accelerating staff onboarding to conducting low-cost market research and transforming documents into engaging audio content, Kira shares practical real-world applications that SMEs can put into practice straight away. She also addresses one of the biggest concerns for business owners today, how secure sensitive company data is when using AI-powered tools. One of the components of the course, it's an eight-hour course. You can do it in your own time, and at the end of it, you get a certificate. One of the modules in the course concerns what we know as Notebook LM, which I understand now has just been changed, the name of it has been changed to Gemini Notebook. So forgive me if I keep describing it as Notebook LM and correcting myself throughout this conversation. But Gemini Notebook is the new name. Anyone who's not familiar with it, it's a wonderful piece of technology that allows you to throw in, let's just say you're studying economics and you're, you know, you've got documents, PDFs, or it could be, you know, information, uh, statistics, and analytics around something that's scientific, for example. And it's a lot of information to understand, but you throw all of this into Gemini Notebook, and what it gives you back is a very realistic podcast of people talking about it in a very show style. Uh, and in a way, it's a really great way to get the information into your head or to understand things and have things broken down in a very conversational way. That's my rudimentary understanding of Gemini Notebook. Um, but Kira, you're going to tell us all about it and how SMEs can get the most out of it. So I understand you're an AI specialist at Google, and your job is to basically help SMEs all across Europe to understand AI and make them more productive. Tell us a bit more about your job.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Yeah, and thanks so much for having me here, John. It's it's really great to be here. And in your last episode, when you spoke to my colleague Karen, she already mentioned that incredible 45 billion AI opportunity for the Irish SMEs. So the big question uh we hear from business owners, and what I hear in my day-to-day when speaking to customers also always is how do we actually start capturing that AI value today without a massive technical budget, right? And that's exactly where I'm super excited for our chat today. Uh, we're really going to have a look at one of those tools, right, that is an absolute game changer for small businesses and that's incredibly easy to use. And in my day-to-day, I speak to SMEs all over IMEA on how they can best adopt these tools. And as you quickly mentioned already, before we dive in and how it works, um, we actually have some really fresh news to share, right, on the product. So we introduced Notebook LM in 2023 with a very simple goal help people learn and help people get access to the best information. Um, and now we have over more than 30 million people and over 600,000 organizations using it to transform from how they work, from how businesses uh are creating interactive onboarding materials, for example, to how students are converting notes into audio and visual summaries. And just yesterday, so very, very fresh of the press, Google officially renamed Notebook LM to Gemini Notebook. It's the same tool that we all know and love, but it's now deeply integrated with our most advanced Gemini ecosystem. And it's actually also my personal uh favorite tool, if I'm completely honest with you. I use those Gemini notebooks every single day to organize my work, to find information across massive piles of documents, right? To maybe answer my colleagues' questions about OI products and also to draft my own content. So yeah, very, very excited to deep dive a bit more into Gemini Notebook today.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

It's the kind of technology I wish existed when I was a student. I was a student a long time ago, and we didn't even have broadband back then in the 90s. So uh things have come a long way in a very fast, rapid change for everyone, especially in the last four or five years of of AI, particularly. Uh but like the the interesting thing about it is that this as a manager, it's brilliant for getting information into your head. Like you can say studying cramming for an exam, or you might be, you know, working on a big project, or you might be just dealing with a lot of technical information, and it's just having it broken down and discussed uh in a very uh conversational way really, really helps people to understand things. Now, if I was thinking about how an SME can use this, uh I'd be I'd be thinking of things like training, uh, for example, or you know, getting staff to understand things better about, you know, a new product or a new process, or you know, let's say health and safety, for example, and the do's and don'ts of, you know, if you're saying a hotel and you want people to know the importance of cleanliness and hygiene and you know what can go right and what can go wrong, and these are how e-business does this. Um, it's a great way of just getting that information into people's heads without saying here's a whole here's a big sheaf of documents. But can I ask you how an SME can use meeting transcripts or call recordings in Gemini Notebook to instantly generate kind of things like you know, even more interesting results like emails, project briefs, task lists, the productive stuff that usually has us, you know, up to our necks in work, but really the promise of the AI age is to make all that kind of oh well not go away, but simply be a bit more um fluid, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Yeah, of course. Um I think this is actually one of the most immediate high value ways to really save time uh using an AL tool, an AI tool like this. So if anybody who's listening also wants to try our Gemini notebook, um here's how you can get started with this very specific use case. So, for example, let's say after you finish a call with a client, you can take your Google Meet recording or an audio file or even something like a written transcript from the call and drop it straight into your Gemini notebook. And then within seconds, the tool digests the entire conversation. And you can simply type something like, okay, draft me a client-facing follow-up email outlining our key decisions, and also from my operations team. And then that's done, right? It takes a few seconds. And unlike any more general AI chatbots that might improvise or hallucinate details, Jamalin Notebook is really strictly grounded in the specific files that you upload. So if something wasn't set in that meeting, it won't make it up. And even better, also every single point it generates features a clickable citation. So you can click it and it will show you the exact sentence in the transcript, or let's say timestamp in the audio or on a video, and where the point was discussed. So it really eliminates that admin bottleneck completely and comes up with really great results.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

I really wish this existed when I was in a student.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

So I always say that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Um, what is the most practical way a small business can use this tool like next week to solve internal bottlenecks like staff training and onboarding?

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Yeah, that's actually a very great idea for a use case, John. So a very easy day one project for any small business could be to build a 24-7 interactive onboarding mentor, let's say for new team members, for example, right? Because every small business, and also we're on is also us of Google, we used to struggle with onboarding and kind of finding the time to create onboarding material, right? Because that usually requires very senior staff to spend hours repeating the same training, while new hires then need to search to scattered Google Drives, PDFs, emails, and so on to find basic information. So you can really fully transform this process now using GemLA Notebook. So if you want to get started, this could be a step-by-step plan for you to use next week. First, of course, you want to open the Gemini Notebook tool, which you can access, for example, via your Google Workspace or Google AI subscription, which you actually receive via the AI Scholarship that we're offering together with the Bank of Ireland. So great way to use it.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Sign up. It's free. It's all the determining determination of the terminology we're meant to use at no cost. So it basically it's all fully funded. So yeah, it's theirs. Sign up for it.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Yeah, exactly. So you get access to Gemini Notebook via that. And then you can create a brand new notebook in Gemini Notebook. Second, you would upload your assets, as you said already, right? So you can upload any documents, your product sheets.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Can you also put in URLs, like for example, uh like say an article that you want to also include in your research that you want to refer to in on site as part of it?

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Yeah. Of course, you can include websites, even videos, right? So if you have any video recordings of past training sessions, for example, that could be relevant, it's multimodal, meaning it will understand everything across text, uh, image, and video, which is very cool. And then finally, you have everything in there and you can just give your new colleague access to this notebook, and then instead of showing someone or guessing uh shadowing, the new hire can log in and treat the notebook as their personal AI mentor. So they could ask something like, How can I submit an expense report? Or what's our return policy for damaged goods and so on. And then the notebook will instantly answer their questions with the precise citations, as we said already, pointing directly to your documents. And this is really something that saves teams dozens of hours of hours and empowers your new employees to really get up to speed at their own pace, right? Which is very nice. And I think it's all about starting small here. So small businesses don't need to learn how to code and generate like a fully new onboarding app or something like that. Just taking an hour or two next week to build one simple onboarding notebook, this can already completely unlock um this kind of bottleneck.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

Yeah, because I'll be I would jump the gun and jump ahead, but eventually, as this can tie into other applications and stuff as well, I mean it'd be interesting to see. Uh, you know, I mentioned there are like, you know, follow-up emails, project briefs, task lists. Uh be interesting to see how that can manifest. But in terms of, you know, how an SME can leverage the new agenc web search features that you can use to run, you know, for market research and competitor research. Um how how do how are businesses using it tactical?

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Yeah, this is really where Gemini Notebook has evolved from just a great reading assistant into a powerful active research workstation, right? So traditionally, as you mentioned, something like market or competitor research really required um hiring expensive agencies or spending days manually searching the web. And now Gemini Notebook features incredible agentic capabilities that really democratize this process for SMEs. So let me give you for examples of what you could do here. One could be live web retrieval. So now you can ask the tool to research a specific competitor or market trend. It will actually directly connect to Google search as well to dynamically locate relevant sources, things like pricing pages or press releases, pulling that real-time data directly into your workspace. And then with our latest release, every notebook also includes a secure cloud computer running in the background. And I know this sounds complicated, but really what this means is that the AI can write and execute code for you. So, how could an SME use this? Imagine you're downloading a public file containing competitor pricing or market growth rates, right? So you upload that to your notebook, and the AI will write the code for you to clean the data, analyze trends, um, even generate visual charts, right? So really cross-referencing everything with the live web data. So essentially, you have a world-class market research analyst working for your business, completely free of charge, and really running on enterprise-grade secure infrastructure. So this will really be a game changer for SMEs going forward.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

We hope you're enjoying this podcast. Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day, funding investments, working capital, and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, Google Bank of Ireland Business Banking. Bank of Ireland is licensed by the Central Bank of Ireland. You know, Gen AI is one thing, uh, but this kind of bolt-on is a technology, or not one even call it bolt-on, but it's uh it arrived simultaneously, is incredible, really brings it to life. Um, what are some of the creative ways that small businesses are using things like the audio overviews feature to turn dry business documents into kind of engaging client-facing content?

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Yeah, the audio overviews feature really is easily the most talked-about part of the tool. I know that's the one you mentioned first as well, which makes sense because you're a podcast host, right? But in general, it's very popular. And what it does is it takes your uploaded documents and with one click generates a highly engaging conversational discussion between two AI hosts who really break down the material like a professional podcast. And we actually saw a fantastic large-scale example of this recently with Spotify. And I'm sure if you're listening to this podcast on Spotify, you're aware of their super popular yearly Spotify Wrapped. And they partnered with us with Google to build the Spotify Wrapped AI podcast using this exact audio overview technology. So instead, yeah, super interesting. And instead of users just scrolling through a flat list of their annual music and podcast statistics, they could now listen to our two iconic AI hosts really unwrap their musical journey in a completely personalized, highly engaging uh podcast episode. And I know Spotify, we're now thinking, okay, this is such a big company, they have lots of resources, right? So, what could be some ways for SMEs to replicate this? And the SMEs I'm working with are really taking this exact same concept and using it super in a super creative way and in very brilliant ways. One idea could, for example, be um to use this for pre-meeting warm-ups. So let's say if you're pitching to a client um and sending them a dense 30-page proposal, let's be honest, they will probably not read the full 30 pages, right? So many SMEs are now, yeah, many SMEs are generating a five-minute audio overview and stats, right, of this proposal, and then sending that to the client saying, Look, here's a quick podcast summary of our proposal. Maybe you can listen to this on your commute. Amazing, right? Or also instead of sending clients dry user manuals, SMEs are converting those into lively audio walkthroughs to explain how to get the most value out of their product. And then one of my favorites. This could be conversely.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

So it's instructive. This could be very useful for presentations as well. Like, you know, for example, you are making a presentation to your boss or a customer, you throw it all into this and it comes back with a podcast. But even then, the talking notes and the way it's structured kind of will help you fine-tune again. Maybe you're not going to say you're going to repeat everything the podcast says back, but how it's presented, it makes you maybe even make it help you rethink how you're putting in the information as well.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah, 100%. And when generating this audio overview, you can even give it some instructions. So you can say what should the podcast focus on, right? Which topic and should it be longer or shorter? So that's very cool. And and one of these use cases I just wanted to mention as well, which I really like, is also creative newsletters. So I've seen a few companies that usually would send out a monthly newsletter or let's say a business PDF update. They really turned this now into a fun downloadable podcast for the local customer base. So it really took this dry text and makes it very personal, right? So think about, for example, a local bakery that sends out a newsletter. Instead, they send out a quick audio overview um talking about what the newest products are and what they're working on. So I think that's a very nice way to use audio overviews.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

I'll tell you, we're living in the future. Um if if a business was this is where it gets kind of interesting in terms of uh, you know, because business information is sensitive, right? So yeah, people, and that's one of the let's be honest, people are very reticent about using AI in some respects because they're, you know, if it's not so in the case, if it's not say Wall Garden or something or ring fence in some way, they fear I'm putting this into a very public place, you know, what if this information is accessible? Um for the for if a business was to upload sensitive financial data or proprietary client contracts to a notebook, uh is that data safe from being used to train public AI models?

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Yeah, I'm glad you asked this because data privacy is really the single biggest question I get every day from the companies I work with at Google. And the short, absolute answer is yes, your data is completely safe and secure because Google has designed Gemini Notebook with a very strict institutional great trust boundaries, right? So by default, Google never uses the sources you upload or the questions you ask or your chat history to train our public foundational Gen AI models like Gemini, right? So your data remains entirely your own. And when you use Gemini Notebook, you're really getting the full power of Google's secure infrastructure, meaning you can analyze proprietary client contracts or financial statements with absolute peace of mind because we won't use them for any training.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

It's very interesting because um, yeah, I mean, that'd be the thing. Like people like want to use this, but if that fear is dogging them, they might kind of be reticent about getting the most out of it. So if it's if it's safe from that, then that will help people to kind of feel more confident, especially if you're talking about things, even if it's down to onboarding or you know, training. Um, you know, your information is specific to your company. So you want to make sure it's totally safe.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

100%, yeah. And I've seen many ways where customers have been using um these tools for internal use cases, right? Like the onboarding agent. But then also it's completely safe to use for external use cases, like when we're saying the audio overviews, right? To use that for um addressing your customers on your website, right? So all of that um is safe to use with the Gemini Notebook.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

And can I ask you, I mean, uh, I would wonder about like, well, you mentioned there you work with businesses from all over Europe, SMEs and stuff. Tell me about some of the things that have impressed you most about how how businesses themselves are you know adopting it and uh have they had any standout examples of how they've done it in such a way that's impressed you greatly.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

Yeah, I think just how creative companies are getting, because we we really see I as an amplifier, right? For people to get creative. You save time, so you can also get more creative in in how you want to work with the tools. So I think audio overviews are one great example, but then there's also a feature where you can even generate full-on explainer videos. So I've worked with one company in the education space where they pretty much have a training platform, let's call it a training platform, with lots of video content. And they fully now use uh Gemini Notebook to generate those training videos. So they would just upload plaintext files um of a specific topic, let's say on the World Cup, right? Everybody's speaking about the World Cup now, uh on something in the World Cup, let's say ethics in the World Cup. And then um Notebook Alam, or I'm calling it Notebook Alam still. Gemini Notebook.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

I thought I was gonna do that.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Gemini We're so used to it, we're so used to it. Gemini Notebook uh will then generate an explainer video, which is very cool because you can also um personalize it, make it shorter, longer, right? So they were really able to generate lots of content and lots of AI videos at scale. This would have taken them weeks, right? Or a few days at least to generate a single one. And now they're having lots of videos out there. They're reaching a bigger target group with their training videos, and it's just been uh all around a great use case for this company.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

And uh can ask you uh internally at Google, I know I don't want to be delving into Google's big secrets or anything, but uh for the staff at Google and your you know your colleagues and yourselves, uh, in terms of how you guys are using it just on a day-to-day basis. Can you tell me a bit about um you know how it becomes part of your own personal work style? You mentioned earlier on that you use it yourself every day. Uh I'm imagining you use it in your own personal life as much as your own as your work life, I think. Um but tell tell tell us about how you know it's typical of uh in a typical working day at Google, how uh Gemini Notebook, I was never going to say anything, uh, is is is um you know making an impact on your day-to-day work style.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Yeah, of course. Uh and I told you already it's my favorite product, but I also know that most of my colleagues are using it as well in their day-to-day. So for me as an AI specialist, um, as you know, we're moving really fast now in terms of new AI models coming out and lots of product updates, right? So also for us internally, it can be hard to keep up with all of the updates. And then as an AI specialist, I'm the central point of contact for most teams. But if they have any questions about the products, they would usually come to me. And now what I did is I just uploaded all of our product FAQs and any new product statements, the websites, the roadmap document, and so on. All of these documents, I've uploaded them in a single notebook. So I do one notebook per product. And then whenever somebody comes to me, I just open up that notebook and I ask the notebook the question first. Um, and what's so great about this is that I immediately have the source in it as well. So I can click on the citation, I find the right document, and I can send that over to my colleague and say, look, here you can find the right information. So it's really saving me so much time a few years ago. I mean, we launched this in 2023, right? So not too long ago. But before that, I would spend so much time searching through our internal documentation. So this really has been a game changer for me when it comes to finding information.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

There you go. I I I said it's this is the third time saying it. I think we're living in the future. Gemini Notebook definitely is one of those things I could never even have imagined, you know, 20 or 30 years ago. And now it's it's there, it's available, you just log in, you you use it, and uh, you know, it's it's it's it's it saves people time and also helps get vital information to people in a way that's understandable and cohesive. So uh with that cure bracketage, thank you so much for your time. That was brilliant. Anyone who um hasn't already signed up for the uh Google um AI professional certificate, um do so. It comes at no cost, takes about eight hours of your life, and you will have a certificate at the end of it. Eight eight to ten hours, I think is the correct way to put it. Uh, but you will have a certificate and uh qualification. And yeah, to to a lot of people the AI age is fast moving and confusing. But I I think Gemini Notebook is one of those uh applications that will stand a test of time for its uh usefulness and uh yeah, it it moves beyond chat, right? It moves really beyond chat into actual doing. Would that be a fair way to put it?

SPEAKER_01 23:45

100%, yeah. And doing it and we said as well, multimodality, right? So it goes also to video and image and all of that. So it's a very exciting tool to use.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

Brilliant. Kira, which thanks for your time. Thanks again. Look forward to talking to you again. Thanks again.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Yeah, thanks for having me today, John. And it was a pleasure to chat and hope everybody signs up for the scholarship and trays out Gemini Notebook as soon as possible because it's a small change, right, that I think can make a big difference for many companies. So definitely try it out.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

We trust that you enjoyed this podcast and found it informative. Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day, funding investments, working capital, and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, Google Bank of Ireland Business Banking. Bank of Ireland is licensed by the Central Bank of Ireland.