April 11, 2024
By Bob O'Donnell
While Generative AI is expected to have a huge impact on many different applications, the one that’s expected to see some of the earliest returns is productivity. In fact, in the TECHnalysis Research study on GenAI in the Enterprise, office productivity applications were both the ones that companies were most likely to have deployed first and the ones they expected to show some of the best results.
Not surprisingly, then, companies like Google and Microsoft have been scrambling to integrate as many GenAI-powered features into their productivity suites as possible. At this year’s Cloud Next event, Google unveiled a huge range of these in their latest version of Workspace and even added a new GenAI-powered video creation and editing application to the suite called Vids.
Much of the Workspace news was tied into the general release of Google’s Gemini Pro 1.5 large language model, which now supports up to 1 million tokens for prompts, the largest of any commercially available product. This enables several important capabilities including the ability to summarize extremely large documents, the capacity to provide significantly more context and supporting data around a given request, and others. Even more importantly, Google also announced that Gemini Pro’s output can now be grounded by Google Search, meaning the results can be verified and linked to the latest information in Google’s search engine. This should significantly improve the quality and reduce the errors of the information that Gemini Pro 1.5 generates.
All of this gains new relevance in Workspace because Gemini Pro 1.5-powered Chat is available as a sidebar within Google Chat and the new LLM is being used to power several new capabilities in the latest version of apps in Workspace. For example, Workspace now has new text creation capabilities for mobile versions of Gmail that can turn voice input thoughts and ideas into polished emails automatically. Sheets is gaining the ability to instantly build fully formatted tables via what the company is calling “building blocks.” Docs has new tools to integrate multiple data sources as tabs within a document to help more easily organize complex projects. Meet will gain automatic caption translation capabilities, AI-powered video quality improvements, more advanced meeting summarization, screenshare watermarking and multi-language translation of meeting summaries.
The new Vids application, which is being made available to licensed users of Workspace starting in June, is designed to make the process of making corporate videos for things like product introductions, employee onboarding, training, news and more much easier. While it doesn’t generate new video content via GenAI, it helps you through the process of stitching together existing stock or custom footage, creating scripts, generating voice-overs and more with the help of Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities. For organizations that have access to other content libraries, such as Adobe Stock, those video assets can also be used to create the final output in Vids.
Google also unveiled several new pricing and packaging options for Workspace. For companies who want to access the improved Gemini Pro Chat capabilities and leverage the meeting summarization and translation capabilities of the Meet videoconferencing application, the new AI Meetings and Messaging service will be available separately for $10/user/month. From a pricing perspective, this compares well versus the $30 a month for large enterprises and $20 a month for small businesses that Google currently charges for the full Workspace suite (which also includes Chat, Meet and the new Vids app). It also lowers the price of entry into GenAI for companies who want to leverage the capabilities of LLM-based search and chats, but don’t necessarily feel the need for the full suite. Frankly, it’s also a way for Microsoft Office-based organizations to both experiment with some of Google’s offerings and leverage Gemini’s capabilities without having to commit to a complete switch over.
Google also unveiled a separate AI Security add-on for $10/user/month that leverages GenAI to automatically search through files in Google Drive accounts. The service marks the appropriate files as being protected and prevents them from being inappropriately accessed or shared. Google is also bringing some Data Loss Protection (DLP) capabilities to future versions of Gmail for customers who purchase this option.
Probably the most intriguing new option for Workspace is the ability to build custom AI-powered agents with Google’s Vertex AI platform and then integrate those agents into Workspace. While definitely a longer and more complicated process, the potential impact that these new agents could have on business workflows and processes within organizations is enormous. Google demo’d a variety of different examples of these during their Next keynote and the customizations to specific industries, tasks and even job roles was exciting and compelling. I expect to hear a lot more about these AI agents and what they’ll be capable of over the next few months.
The race to integrate GenAI into productivity tools is moving rapidly and it’s clear that Google sees an opportunity to try and further distinguish themselves and their Workspace offering with these new capabilities. Microsoft still has a commanding market share lead in office productivity, but for the growing number of organizations who are eager to dive into the transformational capabilities that comprehensive, home-built generative AI tools can enable, Google’s Workspace is bound to start becoming a very attractive alternative.
Here’s a link to the original column: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4683230-google-integrates-gemini-genai-into-workspace Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on LinkedIn at Bob O’Donnell or on Twitter @bobodtech. |
