Google Launches Gemini Enterprise As It Battles Microsoft, OpenAI For Workplace AI

Google’s cloud unit is launching an artificial intelligence platform called Gemini Enterprise that it hopes will reach everyday workers, setting up a deeper competition with Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI for business tools.

Unveiled Thursday ahead of the Alphabet Inc. company’s Gemini at Work event, the aim is to provide an easy-to-use AI tool that will help employees across departments automate complex tasks and generate content. The platform will cost a monthly fee of $30 per user, Google said. 

Gemini Enterprise provides workers “a single front door through which they can chat with all of their enterprise data, search for information and use agents to do a variety of tasks on their behalf,” Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian said in a briefing before the announcement. “We’re democratizing how people can access AI.”

With the launch of Gemini Enterprise, Google Cloud is directly challenging rivals such as Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, betting that a unified and open platform is the key to winning the battle for the AI-powered workplace. The announcement also plays into Google’s broader effort to show it’s gaining serious traction with business customers in the competitive enterprise AI market. The company recently said it was incorporating Gemini throughout the Chrome browser, pushing to weave its AI model into all of its products.

Kurian said nine of the top 10 AI labs in the world now get their computing power from Google Cloud, and the company recently revealed that it has as much as $106 billion in commitments from existing customer contracts that it has yet to fill — of which $58 billion is expected to turn into a revenue boost for the unit by 2027. In general, Google Cloud is viewed as one of Alphabet’s strongest sources of growth as the tech giant’s main search business matures.

Gemini Enterprise brings together many of the company’s existing technologies — including Gemini AI models, in-house and third-party agents and generative AI — into a single, unified platform. It will connect with data across a number of business applications, including ones from Salesforce Inc. and SAP SE, among others, Google said.

Though many of the individual tools have been offered by Google Cloud in the past, they were aimed primarily at developers and information technology professionals and existed as fragmented products across the Google Cloud ecosystem. Now, Gemini Enterprise will allow any employee to chat with a company’s own data and trigger workflows across business systems without needing to code. 

In a demonstration, Maryam Gholami, Google Cloud senior director of product management, showed how a marketing manager could use a “Campaigns Agent” to create a Halloween marketing campaign with a conversational AI chatbot. The AI agent performed research, identified key trends and automatically checked inventory, flagging a product shortage. It then allowed the marketer to approve a purchase order within the ServiceNow Inc. platform, and drafted an email to store managers about the incoming order. Finally, the agent created materials for social media and used Google’s image and video generation capabilities to animate a chosen marketing image.

Google said that Gemini Enterprise will be accessible in all countries where Google Cloud products are sold. The company is also offering support for the platform in more than a dozen languages at launch.