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Google has announced Gemini Enterprise, a suite of AI tools which it claims will be able to access all of your key business data.
Allowing AI to roam across all of your business data has become something of a theme recently. For instance, Notion AI now allows you to connect the service to apps such as Slack, Teams and Outlook so that you can use Notion to get answers from different pots of business data in one place. Glean offers a similar service, claiming to connect to more than 100 different apps. Even ChatGPT allows you to fish answers out of Gmail/Google Drive and Microsoft services.
Now Google is making its pitch to make Gemini Enterprise your company’s all-seeing AI. “You need to feed the large language model the documents that you frequently use, the people you communicate with, the projects you’re responsible for,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.
“So we give you packaged connectors to connect the large language model and Gemini Enterprise to all your internal systems – Microsoft Office, SharePoint, ERP systems, CRM systems, coding tools – to make it easy. You don’t have to do it, we integrate it for you.”
Google demonstrated this capability with a fictional company, in which the AI purportedly looked at sales data and flagged low stock of an in-demand item. It then offers to order more stock automatically from the company’s inventory system, crucially forcing the employee to give manual approval before it placed the order. Google insists that Gemini Enterprise will roll out with granular access controls, so that employees can only access data and perform actions within their level of authority.
The company went on to demonstrate how the AI would automatically generate an email to the company’s store managers, advising them that new stock of the in-demand item was on its way. It then created social media marketing materials to drive sales of the product.
The question bubbling to the top of many employees’ minds – and indeed CEOs’ – will be how much is all of this designed to replace human labour?
Google rolled out the CEO of Virgin Voyages, Nirmal Saverimuttu, to explain how his company had benefited from early access to Gemini Enterprise and he claimed that the AI had led to a 35% reduction in creative agency costs incurred by the company’s marketing team, while improving the click-through and conversion rates of marketing campaigns, largely through greater personalisation.
So while Saverimuttu claimed that “AI is not just about cost reduction and replacement of human capital – it’s a growth multiplier of your human capital,” it also seems likely that it’s going to have an impact on headcounts, even if that comes indirectly (ie. the agency lays off staff instead of Virgin Voyages).
Gemini Enterprise will comprise of five parts: the large language model; a “Workbench” with which you can chat with enterprise systems and use/build agents; a pre-packaged set of agents from Google and its partners called Task Force; the integrations with third-party services; and a governance element that offers a centralised monitoring/auditing dashboard.
Gemini Enterprise will begin rolling out from today with annual plans starting from $30 per seat per month.
