News
Google has been on an AI tear as of late. A few weeks ago it rebranded its Bard chatbot to Gemini. With the rebrand, it also announced the release of Gemini Advanced, the most extensive version of its Gemini LLM to date.
This week, it launched Gemini for Workspace, which has been in the offing for a long time.
With the release of Gemini for Workspace, we get the pricing. And, as might be expected, it is not cheap.
The first thing to be said is that Gemini is going to be everywhere, including in the form of an AI-writing tool released yesterday in Google Chrome. All this means Google’s previous AI-for-Business plans are effectively dead.
In a blog about the recent changes, Aparna Pappu, GM and VP of Google Workspace explained: “Starting today, Duet AI for Google Workspace will now be Gemini for Google Workspace, giving customers access to Google’s most capable AI models. As part of this update, Gemini will be built into the Workspace apps that millions of customers use every day.”
The company is offering two different plans at the moment, including Gemini Enterprise add-on, which replaces Duet AI for Workspace Enterprise, and a new, less expensive Gemini Business add-on.
In practical terms this means that Google Workspace, which currently costs $6 per user per month for the "Starter" package, will cost an extra $20/month/user with the Business add-on. Both plans require a commitment of at least one year.
The new Business package will do everything we've come to expect it to do, like writing documents or emails or fill out Sheets and create images.
The Enterprise edition does all this and more. It adds AI for better meeting management and comes with translation abilities in over one hundred languages. However, it is going to cost a hefty $30/user/month on top of the Workspace licenses. However, you cannot just buy this through the Workspace website — you have to contact the Google sales team.
All of this is very promising for the digital workplace but when you start looking at the money involved you really must ask whether it is worth it or not. The primary benefit in this space is the promise of speed, as it is taking on work employees are already doing, albeit slower.
At this kind of pricing, the question must be asked whether an organization should not just bite the bullet and invest in building its own system.
Adobe Introduces Generative AI Assistant for PDFs
Elsewhere, Adobe is bringing its generative AI assistant to Acrobat PDF software, which the company states will completely transform the digital document experience.
According to a statement from the company, the new generative AI-driven conversational engine in Reader and Acrobat will be embedded deeply in worklists and will offer users rapid analysis and summaries from long documents that can then be shared in emails and reports.
According to Adobe, the new assistant will be able to unlock information from the three trillion PDFs in existence, which is a major plus given the amount of structured and unstructured data found in them.
The new assistant uses the same ML models and AI behind Adobe Liquid Mode. Liquid Mode is the same as responsive content pages — it adjusts PDFs to fit whatever device you are using. When a user chooses the Liquid Mode icon, Adobe Acrobat will use the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Adobe Sensei to study the content of the PDF and readjust it into a mobile responsive reading format.
There is more on the way too. Abhigyan Modi, VP for Document Cloud at Adobe explained in the statement: “PDF is the de facto standard for the world’s most important documents and the capabilities introduced today are just the beginning of the value AI Assistant will deliver through Reader and Acrobat applications and services.”
For anyone working with documents this is the key. While the new assistant is still only in beta, Adobe aims to unlock all the data and content contained in these PDFs, which has always been one of the issues in trying to optimize the value of documents. Among the new capabilities the feature introduces are:
- Document understanding: Answers questions about the document through a new intuitive conversations interface.
- Summary: Summarizes and pulls out main points of long documents.
- Navigation: Offers a way to find exactly what the user is looking for through links.
- Security: The assistant features in Reader and Acrobat will not keep or use any of the data in documents for training purposes.
It should be noted here that AI Assistant also works with other document formats including Word and PowerPoint in English. Support for other languages is expected down the line.
The new AI Assistant is available for Acrobat customers on Standard ($12.99 per month) and Pro ($19.99 per month), and is available across both desktop and web. AI Assistant will be available to those customers “at no additional cost” while the product is in public beta. There is no indication as to what it might cost once out of beta — Adobe has not said when it will go to general availability — and there is a private beta for enterprise customers.
Guru Enterprise AI Searches Slack
Elsewhere, while the announcement of Slack AI's launch captured the headlines on Feb. 14, another announcement the same day from enterprise AI-driven search platform Guru will also be of major use for Slack customers.
The new Slack AI offers channel recaps and thread summaries as well as generates essential highlights of conversations to help employees get caught up to speed quickly. However, Slack is much more than just Slack. It is also the sum of all the integrations available for the platform, which is where Guru comes in.
With Guru's new AI-powered Slack search integration, users can search across their company’s apps from within a Slack channel to find answers and information, wherever it lives.
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
According to a statement from the Philadelphia-based company, users can conduct searches of all a company’s apps, documents and chats for information they need for projects or conversations from within Slack.
More to the point, when you create a query in Slack designed to harvest information from across these apps, Guru comes back with responses and, equally important, sources for the information, such as SharePoint, Zendesk or Google Drive.
It also gives the user full control over who can see what so that the risk of divulging sensitive information is reduced.
Another feature is automatic answer suggestions. When someone asks a question in Slack, Guru pro-actively responds, pointing you to relevant company information without the need to start an active search.
Guru Enterprise AI Search is available for a free trial on the Slack App Directory.
Microsoft Finds New Source for Chips With Intel Partnership
Finally this week, Intel and Microsoft entered a partnership that will see Intel develop a new chip for Microsoft.
The announcement came on the same day that Nvidia broke Wall Street records following a stronger than expected quarterly earnings call. The one day gain saw its stocks increase 16.4% to close at $785.3/share, giving it a market capitalization of $1.96 trillion. According to Reuters, the rise was driven by demand for chips used in AI development and use.
Given Microsoft’s relationship with Nvidia — the two entered a multi-year collaboration at the end of 2022 to build an AI supercomputer powered by Azure infrastructure — it would be reasonable to expect the two to extend their collaboration to chip production.
That's not what is happening though. While Microsoft is already buying as many Nvidia chips as it can, the new Intel partnership marks a move away from Nvidia reliance for Microsoft. On Feb. 20, The Information reported the company was developing a new network card to further reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips.
In a statement about the new partnership, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella said, "We are in the midst of a very exciting platform shift that will fundamentally transform productivity for every individual organization and the entire industry. To achieve this vision, we need a reliable supply of the most advanced, high-performance and high-quality semiconductors.”
While the implications for the digital workplace will take some time to trickle down, the prospects for the future include better and faster AI that will not be entirely dependent on Nvidia.
Have a tip to share with our editorial team? Drop us a line: