2024 was a year of incredible innovation and progress, as we continue to invest in bringing the best of Google AI to our customers around the world. The public sector is adopting the latest AI technologies with the right guardrails built in, and we are seeing incredible energy around this technology in agencies across the country – whether that be gathering and analyzing information at the most critical times to create operational resilience and readiness, protecting our nation's critical infrastructure and resources, or creating more innovative and secure ways to protect and serve constituents.

Google’s AI innovations and advancements are accelerating missions and impact, from advancing defense research at the Air Force Research Laboratory, to transforming DoD's data utilization with generative AI, improving access to children's behavioral healthcare resources with the Illinois Department of Human Services (DHS), addressing climate challenges with Hawaii Department of Transportation, modernizing infrastructure and supporting a cutting-edge research program with UC Riverside, and developing AI models to assist augmented reality microscope (ARM) detection of certain types of cancer with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).

Over the last year we unveiled transformative AI breakthroughs that will have a lasting and positive impact on people and society. Here are some of the latest AI innovations from Google that I am most proud of, that will help improve government services, enhance decision-making, and ultimately create a more efficient and effective public sector.

A leap forward in quantum computing

Google's latest quantum computing chip, Willow, demonstrates significant advancements in the field. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements. The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years. Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe. For public sector customers, this means enhanced research capabilities, as quantum computing can revolutionize fields like life sciences and drug discovery by enabling complex simulations and analysis.

The next generation of AI models

In October 2024 at our Gemini at Work event, we showcased transformative generative AI use cases from our customers across industries and shared a number of announcements. Building on that momentum, we have made several exciting announcements including Gemini 2.0 - our most capable model yet, which represents a significant evolution in AI capabilities and the next era of models built for this new agentic era. With new advances in multimodality — like native image and audio output — and native tool use, it will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant.

We also unveiled Google Agentspace which unlocks enterprise expertise for employees with agents that bring together Gemini’s advanced reasoning, Google-quality search, and enterprise data, regardless of where it’s hosted. We’ve also made important updates and upgrades including:

• NotebookLM, our powerful research assistant, used by millions globally, is getting even better with Gemini 2.0 Flash, a new interface, and premium features in NotebookLM Plus.
• Project Mariner, which combines strong multimodal understanding and reasoning capabilities to automate tasks using your browser and Project Astra, our research prototype exploring future capabilities of a universal AI assistant.
• Open foundation models to help developers more easily build AI models for healthcare applications, initially focused on imaging applications in radiology, dermatology and pathology. Our Nobel Prize winning work with Google DeepMind further underscores how AI is accelerating scientific breakthroughs and being used to help to address the world's most pressing challenges.

For public sector organizations, we believe these advancements in AI, quantum computing and other cutting edge technologies will enable increased agility and efficiency by automating tasks and processes and freeing up resources for more strategic initiatives. We are also providing improved data accessibility through integration with existing data sources, and bolstering security by leveraging Google Cloud's robust security infrastructure. Together, these advancements represent an exciting milestone in the Gemini era and highlight Google's commitment to pushing the boundaries of technology and delivering innovative solutions for our customers.

Our commitment to the public sector

Looking ahead, we remain committed to helping our public sector customers - spanning state and local government, civilian, defense, and intelligence agencies - as they look to Google Public Sector to help meet their mission. We will continue to invest in our accredited commercial cloud, ensuring the public sector gets what the private sector gets: the same features, services and compute power that’s critical for AI workloads. Today, we have 140 services and counting at FEDRAMP High as well as the General availability of 51 services for CJIS compliance within Assured Workloads including Vertex AI services. Google Cloud provides the most extensive data center footprint for FedRAMP High workloads of any cloud service provider, with nine U.S. regions to choose from.

In addition to investing in an open platform powered by the latest AI innovations and most robust security, we are also investing in training and upskilling the next generation of public sector leaders. We recently announced our Google Cloud Launchpad for Veterans - a no-cost training and certification journey to equip veterans in all roles and at all levels with the cloud knowledge and skills needed to drive innovation, and contribute to their employer’s digital transformation strategy. We also introduced a new AI training initiative through Google.org’s AI Opportunity Fund – with $15 million for AI skills training to help U.S. public sector workers develop responsible AI skills.

At Google Public Sector, we’re passionate about supporting your mission. Learn more about how Google’s AI solutions can empower your agency and see examples of how we are helping accelerate mission impact with AI here.