Interview: Tuba Islam – Shaping the Future of Business with Google Cloud and the Power of AI
Tuba Islam, Google Cloud's AI/ML Lead Specialist, reveals how she’s transforming businesses with generative AI while empowering human creativity
Meet Tuba Islam, a trailblazer in the world of AI and machine learning who’s helping shape the future of business with the power of generative and predictive AI. As a lead specialist at Google Cloud, Tuba’s mission is clear: to solve complex business problems (mainly in the UK and Ireland) with elegant, efficient, and impactful AI solutions. Her journey, however, didn’t start in the bustling streets of London but in the vibrant tech landscape of Türkiye, where she pioneered speech recognition for the Turkish language. Since then, she’s travelled across continents, delivering groundbreaking projects from rogue trader fraud detection in capital markets to hazard detection in healthcare, transforming industries along the way.
What sets Tuba apart isn’t just her technical brilliance but her passion for understanding the heart of business challenges and designing creative solutions that not only work but inspire. She’s not just building models; she’s crafting possibilities. In a rapidly evolving AI landscape, where prototyping has shrunk from months to days, Tuba is at the forefront, turning ideas into impactful realities.
In this conversation, Tuba shares her journey, her insights on the ever-changing world of AI, and how she envisions a future where human creativity is amplified, not replaced, by artificial intelligence. Get ready to be inspired by a visionary.
How would you summarize the key findings of your AI work in just two paragraphs?
Anything is possible with AI and gets easier with the recent developments in generative AI. However, you need to spend a good amount of time to define your goal to let AI get you there. There is so much that can be achieved with simple models. Start with the low-hanging fruit, that will give you confidence and trust and keep building upon that.
What has been your work's most unexpected discovery or insight?
You don’t need millions of observations or thousands of images to build a sophisticated AI application. The data is still gold for the last mile to give you the differentiation. The time for prototyping an AI application has decreased from months to even days. You can start right ahead once you have a good idea.
What can we expect from your future work?
Gathering more knowledge from untapped data sources. Reducing noise by better personalisation. Improvement in workforce productivity.
How has your perspective or work focus shifted over the last year?
Shift from building machine learning models to solve complex business problems, to using generative AI models to build complex applications.
In your view, what is the role of AI in enhancing human creativity?
Unblocking the barrier of surfacing creativity by providing tools to help humans complete mundane work easier and faster.
Talking to Tuba is like catching a glimpse of the future – a future where AI is not just about algorithms and data but about solving real-world problems with heart and creativity. From her early days of developing speech recognition engines in Türkiye to leading transformative AI projects at Google Cloud, Tuba’s journey is a testament to the power of perseverance, curiosity, and vision.
She reminds us that while technology evolves at lightning speed, the key to impactful AI lies in simplicity, in understanding the problem deeply before designing the solution. Her belief that even simple models can create extraordinary impact if built on a well-defined goal is a lesson in itself.
Tuba’s story is not just about machines learning from data; it’s about people learning to dream bigger, innovate smarter, and embrace the endless possibilities of AI. As she continues to break barriers and redefine what’s possible with generative AI, one thing is certain – the future is in good hands.
Tuba is creating a world where human creativity is unleashed and amplified by the power of AI. And that is truly inspiring.