Austin, Texas, USA, May 20, 2025
Google Is Quietly Positioning Its AI-Enabled Chromebook Plus Devices To Help Expand Its Ecosystem Footprint in the Enterprise
AI-enabled Chromebooks, dubbed Chromebook Plus devices, are gearing up to not only reset expectations for the Chromebook’s viability in the enterprise but also help drive enterprise adoption of Google’s broader productivity ecosystem, according to Futurum. If Google successfully captures more enterprise PC market share thanks to its robust AI-enabled solutions portfolio, it could further disrupt the enterprise PC market.
“Chromebooks have been largely overlooked outside of specific verticals, like education, for several years now,” explained Olivier Blanchard, Practice Lead and Research Director as Futurum, “but AI is changing the equation for Chromebooks, both from a strictly on-device AI perspective, and a full device-to-cloud ecosystem perspective as well.”
Google’s investments and progress in expanding its enterprise-facing solution ecosystem in recent years are starting to gel around a new category of AI-enabled Chromebook called “Chromebook Plus.” Set to compete against Windows-based AI PCs and AI-enabled MacBooks, Chromebook Plus devices are designed to meet the needs of specific use cases and user personas that would benefit from low-cost, low-TCO (total cost of ownership), enterprise-grade cloud-based notebooks.
Cloud-native information workers, frontline field workers, call-center and customer service agents, and remote workers are the types of use cases and user personas most likely to be ideal targets for Chromebook Plus adoption.
Google’s push into the enterprise with Chromebook Plus devices comes at a time when AI-enabled PCs are not only driving the latest PC refresh cycle but disrupting the platform status quo: Arm-based PCs have begun to capture market share from incumbent x86 vendors, and new AI-centric feature sets are driving IT decision-makers to consider bringing new types of systems and platforms into their PC fleets to maximize ROI, lower TCO, and future-proof their organizations for AI.
Figure 1: ITDM Priorities Driving Current PC refresh Cycle: Next 12 months
“As many as 1 in 3 enterprise ITDMs we surveyed in January indicated that use cases would drive their decisions regarding PC system configurations,” Blanchard explained. “We interpret this as a willingness by IT buyers to be thoughtful about matching the right type of PC to the right type of user if the benefits outweigh the extra work and friction. Since Chromebook Plus devices, and perhaps more importantly, the ecosystem of solutions they bring to IT departments, do deliver some specific advantages for certain types of users in well-defined verticals, Google has a very real opportunity to capitalize on this refresh cycle to displace a significant percentage of Windows PCs in those specific areas.”
How the Chromebook Plus category delivers unique value to the enterprise
The simplest way to begin understanding how Chromebook Plus devices deliver a unique value proposition to enterprise environments is to highlight how they differ from standard Chromebooks:
- Performance: Chromebook Plus devices typically offer 2x the processing power, memory, and storage compared to standard Chromebooks to ensure smooth multitasking across numerous browser tabs and demanding web applications.
- AI-Powered Productivity: Features like “Help me write” (for drafting emails, reports, web copy), “Help me read” (for summarizing long documents or articles), and Gemini integration can significantly boost their efficiency directly within their workflow.
- Enhanced Collaboration: AI-powered video conferencing tools (better lighting, noise cancellation, generative AI backgrounds, Live Translate) improve the experience in Google Meet, Zoom, etc. Screencast features facilitate the easy creation and sharing of demos or training.
- Seamless Cloud Integration: Native integration with Google Workspace and streamlined access to Microsoft 365 web apps (with improved PWA experiences and OneDrive integration) fit their cloud-first approach.
- Security & Manageability: IT departments benefit from ChromeOS’s inherent security, easy cloud-based management via Google Admin Console, and lower TCO.
AI-enhanced productivity features at a glance:
- Gemini: Google’s AI assistant, accessible from the home screen, can help with tasks like brainstorming, planning, writing, and learning.
- Help me read: This feature can summarize websites, articles, or PDFs and allow users to ask follow-up questions.
- Help me write: An AI tool that assists with writing and refining text in various apps and web pages that can generate text, suggest edits, or adjust tone.
- Live Translate: Google is extremely strong in this feature, which provides AI-translated captions for audio and video content in real time across various platforms.
- Recorder app: An AI-powered app for creating transcriptions that can detect and label speakers and provide summaries.
- Magic Editor in Google Photos: Allows AI-powered photo editing, such as repositioning or resizing objects and improving lighting and backgrounds. (This feature is exclusive to Chromebook Plus for laptops.)
- Enhanced video call features: AI improvements for lighting, clarity, sound, and background noise cancellation during video calls.
“Gemini, and more broadly Google’s leadership in natural language processing and agentic AI is the real secret sauce here,” Blanchard continued. “The Chromebook Plus devices themselves keep getting better and more competitive, even against Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs. Upcoming specs for Chromebook Plus devices being released soon are really impressive. But ultimately, it’s the integration of Google’s whole cloud-native ecosystem and chip-to-cloud AI that brings it all together. It’s the clean, simple ChromeOS experience that keeps driving the entire solution stack forward.”
Concerns Regarding Integration with Complex Legacy IT Infrastructure and Specific Peripherals
While Chromebooks integrate well with modern cloud services and many standard peripherals, some enterprises have deeply entrenched legacy systems, complex network configurations, and specialized peripherals that may lack robust ChromeOS support or require complex workarounds to work appropriately with Chromebooks, creating insurmountable deployment friction for the category.
As a result, IT departments often hesitate to introduce Chromebooks into their PC ecosystems, knowing that they will likely create compatibility islands and require significant effort to integrate with existing, business-critical infrastructure. Addressing these challenges through continued OS development, stronger application virtualization, clear communication of capabilities, and targeted use-case deployment is crucial to facilitate Chromebook adoption in the enterprise.
Google has been actively working to address the common challenges hindering Chromebook adoption in the enterprise by tackling five key friction points: Persistent application compatibility concerns, particularly with legacy software; perception challenges (reframing Chromebooks for the era of AI), perceived Limitations for Power Users and Highly Specialized Roles; dependence on internet connectivity for full functionality; and integration with complex legacy IT infrastructure and specific peripherals.
Through these focused efforts, Google is already reducing critical friction points for enterprise adoption, making Chromebooks, particularly its Chromebook Plus line, more compelling and viable for enterprise environments.
Chromebook Plus Might be a Sleeper Disruptor
Chromebook Plus could be as disruptive to the AI PC reset as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite was to x86 platform vendors in the PC segment when Copilot+ PCs first launched. Not quite disruptive enough to completely throw incumbents off balance, but disruptive enough to capture double-digit market share in specific categories of use cases where the benefits clearly outweigh the costs.
As Google continues to simultaneously address pain points that have hindered Chromebook adoption in the past and bring competitive AI-enabled hardware to market, the case for Chromebooks becomes increasingly easy to make. And with as many as one-third of IT leaders open to a more granular, strategic approach to PC platform selection in their transition journey from traditional PCs to AI-enabled PCs, Google does have a legitimate chance to restart the demand engine for the Chromebook category, thanks to its increasingly enterprise-friendly own chip-to-cloud solutions ecosystem.
Read the full report, Why Google’s Chromebook Plus Strategy May Turn into a Case Study in Quiet Disruption, on the Futurum Intelligence Platform available exclusively to subscribers.
About Futurum Intelligence for Market Leaders
Futurum Intelligence’s AI Devices IQ service provides actionable insight from analysts, reports, and interactive visualization datasets, helping leaders drive their organizations through transformation and business growth. Additional information is available at https://app.futurumgroup.com/.
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Author Information
Research Director Olivier Blanchard covers edge semiconductors and intelligent AI-capable devices for Futurum. In addition to having co-authored several books about digital transformation and AI with Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman, Blanchard brings considerable experience demystifying new and emerging technologies, advising clients on how best to future-proof their organizations, and helping maximize the positive impacts of technology disruption while mitigating their potentially negative effects. Follow his extended analysis on X and LinkedIn.
