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Exclusive | This is just the start of an AI tech cycle: Google’s Pat McCarthy

Jan 23, 2025 03:21 PM IST

Organisations are finding relevance for AI in their workflows, & Google’s McCarthy believes businesses shouldn’t be forced to think of AI as a separate decision

They came upon a fork in the road, and Google made its choice. A few days ago, the tech giant reworked its Workspace subscription plans to include the Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) functionality across Gmail, Docs, Meet and NotebookLM Plus, for business users. That negates the need for a separate Gemini Business add-on, otherwise a cost of around $20 per month, or 1,500 for users in India. As Pat McCarthy, vice president of Google Workspace tells HT in a conversation, “the market previously was forcing customers to think about these as separate decisions.” The change means existing Workspace subscriptions will see a $2 price increase to cover for the new AI capability bundle (real-world subscription numbers may not be exact, because companies often get customised contracts from Google).

Vice president of Google Workspace Pat McCarthy, who was in India recently, believes Google Workspace has the scale to drive this simplification, and thereby a change which sees rapid AI adoption in organisations (Official image) PREMIUM
Vice president of Google Workspace Pat McCarthy, who was in India recently, believes Google Workspace has the scale to drive this simplification, and thereby a change which sees rapid AI adoption in organisations (Official image)

McCarthy, who was in India recently, believes Google Workspace has the scale to drive this simplification, and thereby a change which sees rapid AI adoption in organisations. Numbers back that theory—Workspace has been used in some form by more than 10 million businesses of different sizes globally, and more than 100,000 of these customer enterprises have begun to integrate Gemini AI in their workflows. He told HT about examples of Indian organisations that have done so too. Jindal Steel and Power, for instance, find Gemini useful in Sheets to help employees and team leaders submit and review progress on projects. At Zomato, Gemini is proving useful for primary research and analysis tasks, with employees manage emails and creating presentations. JK Cement employees find relevance with AI summarising documents and emails too. HCL Software made a recent switch to Google Workspace, since they need an AI driven solution completely delivered from the cloud. It is a similar transition story with Vodafone India, or Vi.

Google’s McCarthy talks to us about the structural changes to Google Workspace, data privacy, how India’s businesses provide insights that become relevant globally and rapid evolution of AI-driven tech that the next year will bring. Edited excerpts.

There have been significant pricing changes for Workspace subscriptions. Have we reached that juncture that signifies a shrinking space between Workspace apps and the AI layer?

The market previously was forcing customers to think about these as separate decisions. We know for a fact that is not what customers want. They don’t think about these things being separate, they think about the processes that exist inside of their businesses as being ubiquitous. Now, it’s about how do you have the support of AI across those processes. We obviously have a distinctly different view, compared to others in the marketplace, about this.

Is this simplified pricing also indicative of an evolving business model with a growing need for revenues from AI, and would you classify this as a correction of previous AI pricing strategies that weren’t attracting enough customers?

The Gemini business inside of Workspace is very strong. It is hitting its metrics and is on target. Therefore, it wasn’t about the business of Gemini it is about what’s better for customers. That’s really where this came from. My perspective has been through several tech cycles, and if you just imagined a tech cycle as a 24 hour day, we’re presently in the first second of a 24 hour day. That’s how early we are in this. I don’t think about it in terms of commercial models and other dynamics. I think about it as an investment in our customers in the capabilities that we think they need to be really successful. When our customers are successful and when they understand that we have a differentiated offering in the marketplace, we’ll be successful.

In an Indian context, how do you see enterprises and businesses adopting AI? Are there unique learnings from this part of the world, in terms of AI development as well as usage, which prove relevant elsewhere?

I believe India as a market is dynamic. We have institutions here, we have startups here and a set of companies in between. I have a strong belief having been coming to India for many years that east can lead west in thinking about how do we deploy technology, how do we consume technology and the next generation business processes. The Indian market from an age perspective is also very interesting. You know, one of the things that I hear often is, the next wave of knowledge workers don’t want to use the solutions and tools that their grandfather used, and they want to use the next-gen platforms. They want to have this, and are very comfortable with this idea of assistance.

Also Read: Tech Tonic | India should align with OpenAI’s mega AI Stargate Project

They are not resistant to having Gemini and an assistant help being more productive. In fact, they will make decisions about where they work based on the portfolio of applications that are available to help them do their job. I’ve met with over 20 companies in a short amount of time that I’ve been here and I find the Indian companies to be very collaborative, even if they’re competitors in the marketplace. They’re free in sharing their ideas and their concerns, free in sharing how they think about the future and sharing the insights that they’ve learned That’s an exciting dynamic in the Indian market in particular.

How challenging is the privacy aspect of all this and what sort of feedback do you hear from organisations in terms of how they want their data to be safeguarded?

Google is phenomenal on this particular topic, and that is because Google’s origins and the spaces that they’ve operated in, data privacy has always been a core key tenant of how we’ve architected our solutions, and that includes how we’ve built our applications and our data centres. When we talk about our approach to privacy, whether that’s through how we build our applications to how we train our models, our customers are incredibly comfortable that we’ve taken the right approach. We don’t use our customers data to do any enhancements to our models, we don’t use any of their content or their information or pull that back in to use in any way that would expose them to risk.

How do you see the AI roadmap, and with individual app updates for the broader Workspace, evolving over the next year?

McCarthy: It’s going to be very fast paced. There are two angles to this. One, we’re trying really hard to educate the broader marketplace, our service partners and others around about what’s possible. We’ve got a lot of education initiatives around that to make sure that the broader ecosystem is ready to support. Second, we’re going to see a lot of experimentation in some of the more advanced areas like NotebookLM, Gems agent and more. Simultaneously, we will have customers look at their business processes and for that, we will have to find the most effective and efficient way given all of the capabilities to introduce a new product, reduce that time cycle and have a better understanding of product market fit in advance.

The next 12 months will be a very exciting time around transformation. We see a lot of customers starting with their customers, and our customers are starting with questions such as, how can I improve my responsiveness to my customers or how can I make this a more empathetic engagement with like my customer? Those would be the three horizontal aspects that we foresee, combined with I would say, a very strong spirit of usage of the advanced capabilities.

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