Artificial intelligence is one of the biggest buzzwords in the business world right now, with scores of companies rushing to take advantage of advances in machine learning and neural networks.

Facebook is one such company, and the social network has invested a great deal of time and energy into building support for chatbots and AI tools into platforms like Facebook Messenger.

It has also extended these functionalities to Workplace, its enterprise collaboration platform that now has 30,000 customers.

At MWC in Barcelona, Julien Cordoniou, Facebook’s vice president for Workplace, told Cloud Pro that artificial intelligence and bots are key to the tool’s future.

“The move from collaboration to automation is a pattern we see across every company, every industry and all of our customers,” he said. “Turning Workplace from being a collaboration platform into an automation platform is what we define as next-generation IT.”

According to Cordoniou, Workplace customers like Norwegian retailer Elkjop are changing the way they use the platform, making use of Workplace’s bot support to automate tasks like inventory management and shift management.

“I think it’s extremely important. If artificial intelligence can be used to automate some of the repetitive tasks that you don’t necessarily want to be doing, or that you don’t want your employees to do, I think it’s a big win for the company. And that’s typically the kind of thing that drives employee happiness, employee sentiment and hopefully employee retention.”

Amazon is also making a big effort to work AI into its commercial offerings, launching Alexa for Business as a way to let customers use voice-activated AI for practical tasks like booking meetings.

Most customers, Cordoniou said, are still buying Workplace as a collaboration tool, in an effort to reduce the distance between head office and frontline staff. The product has been particularly successful in the retail and manufacturing sectors, where workers on production lines or shop floors don’t have a desktop device with which to access traditional intranets or enterprise messaging tools.

Danone, for example, has 80,000 workers, half of whom are factory workers who have never had a company laptop – but they do all have mobile phones. This also applies to Walmart’s 2.5 million staff, who also use Workplace to communicate.

However, he told Cloud Pro that he thinks this is changing, and that bots and other solutions will soon be as big a driver as Workplace’s collaboration tools. “In a few years, people will buy Workplace for the network and the communication platform that it is, but they will also buy Workplace for the quality and the diversity of the applications that they will find on top of the platform,” he said.

“It’s certainly a conversation we have with every customer, and this is also where we want to take them to. We don’t just want to be a communication platform, we want to be the platform where you go to do your job, to get the job done – and that goes with automation.”

Facebook is also committed to building a platform rather than a product with Workplace. Rather than attempting to be a one-stop shop, Cordoniou said, Facebook’s strategy is to partner with best-of-breed companies like Box, Okta, Microsoft, Google and others.

This, he said, allows customers the specifically tailor workplace to their needs, or even to build their own solutions of top of it using tools like AI. “We don’t want to build everything ourselves. We know very well what we do well and what we don’t do well,” he said. “For me, it’s a partnerships play.”

Many government departments are still not adopting public cloud services, while the NHS have doubts over the RoI potential on cloud spending, according to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.

Less than a third of NHS trusts surveyed (30%) and under two-thirds of central government departments (60%) have adopted any level of public cloud services within their organisation, according to the FoI. 

Fewer than one in five NHS trusts and central government organisations believe they will get a return on their investment in public cloud adoption. Meanwhile, 41% of central government respondents (41%) and 79% of NHS respondents plan to migrate all their services onto a cloud platform.

This is despite the NHS setting out guidelines just last month designed to protect patient data while encourage trusts to adopt cloud services, and a longstanding cloud-first motto pushed by the Government Digital Service.

IT management firm SolarWinds, which received replies from 160 NHS trusts and 28 government departments to its FoI, said the findings are clear evidence that barriers to public sector cloud adoption still exist.

Chief technologist Paul Parker said: “Public sector users, particularly those handling sensitive data, have yet to be convinced that the public cloud is an integral tool that can provide considerable ROI.”

One problem identified in the research was the difficulty public sector organisations have in monitoring the public cloud as part of their broader data infrastructure. Approximately half of NHS organisations and just over half of central government departments use four or more monitoring tools to manage their infrastructure.

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Around half of NHS trusts said the biggest barriers to managing and monitoring their cloud environments were finding suitable workloads for the cloud and a lack of control over cloud vendors’ performance. For central government, 35% highlighted uncertainty around securing clouds as their biggest obstacle.

More broadly, 53% and 50% of NHS and central government respondents respectively believe legacy IT systems have contributed to the failure to adopt public cloud. They also blamed vendor lock-in and security concerns, while 25% of central government deparments complained that a lack of cloud skills was holding them back. 

In terms of cloud priorities for central government, the FoI found that 76% of departments using the cloud are migrating applications, 53% are using it for data storage, and 41% for databases. Within the NHS, 68% of trusts using the cloud are migrating applications, 43% using it to host databases, and 32% storing data.  

Apple is relying on Google’s public cloud to provide data storage for its own iCloud servers, according to a file that Apple recently updated on its website.

The proof that Apple is a customer of Google was spotted by CNBC and comes after it was widely reported by various media outlets that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) won a deal to host Apple’s iCloud in 2016, but the Cupertino firm never confirmed those reports.

The file comes in the form of a PDF called the iOS Security Guide, which Apple publishes new versions of periodically. Up until recently, the document contained language that suggested iCloud services were based on remote data storage systems from Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as Microsoft’s Azure.

But in the most recent version of the PDF, the Microsoft Azure reference has disappeared and has been replaced by Google Cloud Platform. However, the most recent version of the PDF doesn’t clearly state whether Apple will be using any Google cloud services other than core storage of “objects” like photos and videos. It’s also not clear when exactly Apple begun using Google’s cloud.

The confirmation that Apple is using Google’s cloud to support its iCloud services suggests the firm is starting to break ground in catching up to its competition such as AWS and Microsoft. It also comes merely weeks after it was revealed Google could be set to enter the video game industry by launching its own subscription-based game streaming service.

The cloud giant will reportedly offer the service through its Chromecast streaming stick or even a proprietary console, with the project – codenamed ‘Yeti’ – in the works for around two years.

Yeti will apparently operate similarly to Sony’s video streaming Playstation Now service. Users will be able to stream games through cloud servers via a Google console with its own controller. Rather than requiring hard copies, users would simply have to subscribe to access the streaming games through Google’s cloud servers.

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