Education turns out for Google Cloud Next ‘23

Educators, researchers, IT professionals, student developers, and C-suite leaders showed up in full force in August for Google Cloud Next , our global showcase for the latest cloud technologies and success stories. They attended breakout sessions, product demos, and keynotes to explore the potential of new tools like generative AI and gain insights into how it is already transforming teaching, learning, and advanced research across the country.

Gen AI offers particular benefits for the education community, which faces constant demands for speed and scale in their key missions of driving scientific breakthroughs and preparing the next generation for the workforce. It can generate cost efficiencies–the time to value for insights– for both research and operations. It can improve user experience for students, staff, and faculty. It can accelerate content development and customize large models to analyze the ever-growing mountains of data generated on campuses everywhere.

Here are some of the top takeaways from the education sessions and demos: At Secure Your Organization with Zero Trust Controls and Google AI : IT leaders at the University of Notre Dame demonstrated how they used AI to gamify cybersecurity training for over a thousand students. By designing an interactive AI-based Google Wizarding College and a Cybersecurity Carnival they made security training fun and effective. “Security is everyone’s responsibility,” Chas Grundy, Director of IT Strategy and Transformation, says. “Google tools help us set defaults and automate controls to make that burden easier on students and admins.

” The panelists at Responsibly Driving Student Success with AI began by pointing to some of the challenges facing higher education today: the learning losses in math and reading since the pandemic and the overwhelming need to retrain tomorrow’s workforce in new skills.