GOOG Alphabet Inc

By Sara Castellanos 

Enterprise technology executives are at the center of Google's new strategy to drive business for its cloud-based artificial-intelligence services.

The company's Cloud AI division, looking to carve out a larger slice of the enterprise market, announced tools Wednesday aimed at helping chief information and technology officers address common business problems.

The tools include prepackaged AI services that can understand invoices and contracts and offer supply-chain recommendations and predictions.

"The CIO is the critical person in this. We're focused on specifically transforming companies' digital presence, and we're really determined to go [after] central business problems," said Andrew Moore, head of Google Cloud AI, who reports to Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian.

Google Cloud is fighting for a bigger stake in the cloud market. Microsoft Corp. had 13% of the world-wide market in 2017, according to Gartner Inc.'s most recent data. Amazon.com Inc., which pioneered the business, held nearly 52%. Google's share was 3.3%.

Artificial intelligence has been a critical component of the cloud business for Google, an Alphabet Inc. unit. Mr. Kurian's predecessor, Diane Greene, invested heavily in AI tools such as specialized processors for machine learning to give its cloud a performance advantage over competitors. Machine learning is the study of getting computers to act intelligently without being explicitly programmed.

Under Mr. Kurian, Google intends to dramatically boost the sales and support staff for its cloud-services division.

Google Cloud's AI focus was partly what led information management services firm Iron Mountain Inc. to choose it, said Fidelma Russo, chief technology officer of the Boston-based firm.

Iron Mountain, which manages corporate records and other information, is using Google Cloud AI's document understanding tool to help customers analyze unstructured data, such as photographs of documents and PDF files that aren't yet in rows and columns. Historically, it has been hard to perform machine learning analysis on such data.

Google's algorithms are trained using hundreds of examples to identify the particular shapes and blocks of text associated with certain parts of an invoice, for example. The AI models can then figure out what parts to extract into a database.

The tool enables Iron Mountain to work with customers to identify personal information in documents to be compliant with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation requirements, said Jim O'Dorisio, senior vice president of Emerging Commercial Solutions at Iron Mountain, who reports to Ms. Russo.

Google Cloud's AI tools also can identify specific people in unstructured data such as video footage. That feature lets Iron Mountain's clients in professional sports easily search through and extract video clips of specific players for marketing campaigns, for example.

Google Cloud AI expects companies to use its tools to take artificial-intelligence initiatives out of the experimental, proof-of-concept stage and into deployment. To do that, it needs buy-in from IT executives and their direct reports.

Companies in sectors outside of technology, such as finance, retail and real estate, are slowly hiring data-science teams because they realize AI has business value, Mr. Moore said. But building intricate AI systems for specific use cases requires a lot of talent, and competition for data scientists is fierce.

Google has developed AI builder tools that take the "drudgery" out of building AI models, so that in-house data scientists can build AI models faster, Mr. Moore said. Google also has developed prepackaged AI tools for industries it thinks will benefit from them the most, such as retail. One such tool can predict when a retailer is likely to run out of inventory or what products are in stock.

"AI is no longer an interesting research topic," said Mr. Moore, formerly Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. "It's a tangible tool for businesses to be able to leapfrog against their competitors."

Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 10, 2019 12:14 ET (16:14 GMT)

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