Exercise: weigh a platform pitch

Original fictional scenario. No cloud account, API calls or paid services are required. Difficulty: intermediate · Estimated duration: 20–25 minutes

Northwind Outfitters, a fictional retailer, must decide whether to build its customer-service assistant on Google Cloud. Its leadership has a vendor pitch containing the four statements below, and its own requirement list. Its staff use Microsoft SharePoint and Jira; nobody uses Google Workspace. Its two developers have no infrastructure experience.

#	Statement in the pitch	Evidence attached
1	"The models are built from the ground up for multimodality."	None
2	"Our custom chips make every AI workload faster."	None
3	"This is the most accurate assistant platform for retail."	A public leaderboard screenshot
4	"The platform is enterprise-ready: secure, private and reliable."	None

Northwind's requirements: zero data retention for customer chats; the assistant stays up if one region fails; each agent can reach only the order system; answers draw on SharePoint and Jira content; the option to switch to a cheaper open model later.

Your decision

Classify each statement as a description, a comparison or positioning, and say what test would make it useful to Northwind.
For statement 4, list what Northwind itself must configure to make each requirement true.
Say where Google's ecosystem integration helps Northwind and where it does not.
Explain what switching to an open model later would require, and how Northwind could avoid running servers.

Rubric (10 house points)

3 points: all four statements classified, each with a concrete test on Northwind's own work.
3 points: a configuration for each of zero retention, regional resilience and per-agent access.
2 points: integration value tied to Northwind's real tools (SharePoint, Jira), not Workspace.
2 points: names re-evaluation after a model switch and a managed path for open models.

Reference solution

Statement 1 is Google's description of how it built Gemini; test it by running Northwind's own mixed customer messages, photos included. Statement 2 overreaches Google's own documentation, which says Cloud TPUs are optimized for specific workloads — treat it as positioning and ignore it until a Northwind workload is measured. Statement 3 is a comparison; a public leaderboard cannot settle it, because Google says evaluation on your own tasks gives insights that leaderboards and general benchmarks cannot. Run an evaluation on a few hundred past Northwind chats instead. Statement 4 is positioning that becomes true only with configuration.

For the requirements: zero data retention needs the specific customer actions Google lists — it is not automatic. Regional resilience means deploying to endpoints in several regions or using the global endpoint. Per-agent access means granting each agent narrow permissions with Agent Identity.

Integration helps through Gemini Enterprise's prebuilt connectors to SharePoint and Jira; the Workspace benefits do not apply, because Northwind does not use Workspace. Rejected: choosing Google Cloud because Gemini is embedded in Workspace.

A later switch to an open model means re-running the same evaluation before going live. Managed APIs serve open models without managing infrastructure, which suits Northwind's two developers. Rejected: "the platform is the same, so the new model needs no testing."

Sources and scope

All company names, statements, requirements and the rubric are house-authored. Product facts are grounded in:

Weigh a platform pitch — decision exercise

Exercise: weigh a platform pitch

Your decision

Rubric (10 house points)

Reference solution

Sources and scope