The News: Google made several new product announcements at Google Cloud Next, its annual conference held in early April, focused on enhancements to its Google Workspace productivity and collaboration suite. The new products and additional features are designed to foster easier collaboration between workers, enable more creativity and productivity, and improve the way users interact with the suite. You can check out the press announcements on Google’s website.
New Workspace Enhancements Focus on AI, Efficiency, and Usability
Analyst Take: Google announced a plethora of new product and feature enhancement announcements at Google Cloud Next, its annual conference for developers, partners, and customers, focused on improving collaboration, worker productivity, and creativity and enhancing the user experience with its product suite. While generative AI is certainly underpinning many of these features, Google is incorporating many non-AI related tools and features as well, with the focus clearly on supporting enterprise workers.
Google Vids Leveraging GenAI to Improve Productivity
Google announced a new application to Workspace, called Google Vids, which is a video creation app that is designed to leverage Gemini to let users create videos using prompts, and sits alongside of Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The app can incorporate a wide range of source information, including documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and users can select a variety of style and format options to create a first-draft storyboard.
Users can then record themselves with a teleprompter to record video or a voiceover or they can type in a script and let Vid’s AI-generated voices speak the text. As the video comes together, Vids leverages Gemini features such as transcript trimming and generative remove (such as removing specific objects simply by prompting the tool to do so) to easily create a video from scratch without requiring specific video-creation or editing skills.
I see this feature as a significant example of the democratization of content creation, as customers will be able to leverage this technology across a wide range of use cases where video content is helpful but the organization may not want to invest the resources of a professional, particularly if the content changes frequently. For example, customers will be able to do things like create training content for frontline workers, team videos, marketing demos, or product explainers, and then easily modify them as new features or other content changes. Google says that the product will be released to Workspace Labs in June 2024.
New Enhancements Across Workspace Apps Drive Organization and Efficiency
Google announced that it is introducing tabs within its Docs apps, which is designed to provide an additional organizational layer to enable related information to be easily accessed. The tabs are designed to help users create and organize multiple documents together, including hierarchical organization, reducing the time it takes to sift through Drive or Gmail to find related project documents.
In addition, Google announced the availability of cover images created by Gemini in Docs, which enables users to generate or select a unique, full-bleed image using Gemini in Docs to create a more polished look for documents.
Within Sheets, conditional notifications will allow users to create specific roles that will be alerted when a particular action occurs within sheets. For example, if a date field hits a specific trigger, workers in relevant roles can be notified. Meanwhile, Google is also rolling out tables and building blocks in Sheets, which automatically can convert a table and apply format and structure to the data based on predefined templates.
Google has also added two productivity-enhancing features within Gmail. The first is polish my draft, which is available for both mobile and web, which automatically creates a more refined sentence based on the content being inputted. This is particularly helpful when trying to write on a mobile device. The second feature is the incorporation of Voice Prompting into Help Me Write on Mobile in Gmail, enabling users to write and send emails from the Gmail app using their voice.
Google is also making an AI security add-on available to enhance security, by leveraging AI to classify and protect sensitive files within Google Drive. This add-on supports data loss prevention controls and classification labels in Gmail. It is available for $10 per user per month and can be added to most Workspace plans. Google also said it is extending DLP controls and classification labels to Gmail in beta and is adding experimental support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in client-side encryption together with its partners, including Thales and Fortanix.
Collaboration Enhancements Focus on Authenticity and Experience
Within its Meet collaboration application, Google is making Screenshare Watermark available, which adds a visible text overlay on top of the screen share and calls. This watermark displays information about the viewer making any screenshots of this content very traceable, thereby protecting against unauthorized reuse or re-sharing of proprietary content.
Adaptive audio, meanwhile, will be launched in alpha, to allow Meet participants in the same room to use their laptop simultaneously while automatically eliminating any audio feedback. This is also a premium SKU feature that utilizes AI to select the appropriate microphone, based on the speaker in the room, reducing the need for conferencing hardware.
AI Meetings and Messaging Add-On, Powered by Gemini
Google is introducing a new AI meetings and messaging add-on that will bring Gemini capabilities to Meet and Chat for just $10 per user, per month. Although Gemini for Workspace Enterprise provides a complete AI experience, the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on integrates Gemini into Chat and Meet, providing users with enhanced AI-driven meeting and messaging tools. Google Chat now incorporates Gemini’s AI capabilities for conversation summarization, answering questions, automatic message translation, and increased spaces capacity, with support for up to 500,000 member spaces.
Other new features in Chat include:
- Enhanced home view in Chat: Priority home view helps users get started with the most urgent threat. I cannot live without this feature, which has truly helped me become so much more focused and prioritize what is important. There are also preview summaries, which will let users see what is being discussed without having to open and read an entire thread.
- Huddles in Chat: Huddles lets users join an ad hoc voice call via a single click and can also upgrade to add video.
- Board for Spaces in Chat: This new AI-powered board provides a persistent location for sharing and managing assets in a space, including messages, shared files, links for a project workgroup, or even an organization. AI-powered suggestions help to identify the relevant files to share based on the project.
- Interoperability in Chat: Google announced that it is enabling messaging interoperability between Chat, Slack, and Teams, enabling organizations to migrate the bulk of their workers or groups to Chat while still enabling other users to continue using their preferred messaging platform.
Creating Workflows with Workspace and Vertex AI
Google also announced it is making it easier to build custom AI agents with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Google Workspace. Leveraging Model Garden on Vertex AI, users can choose from more than 130 options, and the Workspace add-on framework will bring that custom agent into the productivity apps that are used in Workspace. This setup enables the creation of more streamlined and customized workflows, promoting better efficiency, more collaboration, and more time to spend on core activities rather than manually pushing work through various apps and procedures.
A Cornucopia of New Features, Driven By AI
It has only been about 8 months since the previous Google Cloud Next, but that did not stop the company from making a huge number of interesting announcements around AI, and AI-powered enhancements within Workspace, its productivity and collaboration product suite. Here are a few key takeaways from the announcements:
- Google is clearly trying to make sure that Workspace can meet or exceed its competitors, with respect to integrating AI and generative AI across the platform. However, the messaging seems to be more about embedding AI within the flow of work rather than highlighting a specific, branded tool. Of course, many of these features are available as add-ons with an additional monthly cost (unless the organization opts for a full Gemini for Workspace package), so there is a clear play of trying to push companies to adopt AI as much as possible while establishing that AI is still a premium capability.
- Google Vids is particularly interesting because it is a powerful video creation app that is targeted at non-creative types. This is a real opportunity for Google to expand its footprint via a new application that is clearly powerful but is simple and intuitive to use for a wide variety of worker types and roles. Because it leverages the content held within Docs, Sheets, and Slides, workflows are streamlined, which is not always the case when using a third-party video creation application.
- The ability to create custom agents via Vertex AI is quite interesting, as it should allow departments or teams to automate processes and workflows with the most appropriate model, improving accuracy and improving time to value. The challenge, of course, is that within each organization, there will need to be some sort of organizational oversight and control to ensure that these agents are properly logged and visible, to account for data and application dependencies, as well as manage data governance and security issues.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
