Google challenges Microsoft, OpenAI with $30/month AI assistant

Google Cloud announced a new artificial intelligence service on Thursday that puts advanced AI tools in the hands of regular office workers, marking a fresh challenge to similar products from Microsoft and OpenAI.

The service, called Gemini Enterprise, went public before the company’s Gemini at Work event. It will charge businesses $30 each month for every person who uses it. The platform aims to help workers handle complicated tasks and create content without needing technical skills.

Thomas Kurian, who runs Google Cloud, explained what the service does during a meeting with reporters. He said Gemini Enterprise gives 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.” He added that Google is “democratizing how people can access AI.”

The launch puts Google in direct competition with Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. Google believes its approach of building an open platform that works across different systems will help it win customers in the growing market for workplace AI tools.

Google Cloud shows strong business growth

The announcement comes as Google tries to prove it can attract serious business customers. As Cryptopolitan reported, the company recently said it is adding Gemini features to its Chrome browser and working to put its AI technology in all its products.

Kurian shared that nine out of the ten biggest AI research groups now buy their computing power from Google Cloud. The company also revealed it has $106 billion worth of contracts with current customers that haven’t been completed yet. About $58 billion of that amount should turn into actual revenue for the cloud division by 2027.

Google Cloud has become an important growth area for Alphabet as its main search business gets older and more mature.

Gemini Enterprise combines several tools that Google already offers, including its Gemini AI models, automated agents from both Google and outside companies, and technology that creates content. The platform can connect to data from many business programs, including software from Salesforce and SAP.

While Google Cloud has sold some of these individual tools before, they were mostly designed for programmers and IT workers. The tools also existed as separate products spread across Google Cloud’s offerings.

The new platform changes that. Now, any worker can talk to the system about company data and start automated processes across different business programs without writing any code.

How the system works in practice

Maryam Gholami, a senior director at Google Cloud, showed how the platform works during a demonstration. She played the role of a marketing manager using something called a “Campaigns Agent” to build a Halloween marketing campaign.

The AI assistant did research, spotted important trends, and checked product inventory on its own. It found a shortage and let the marketing manager approve a purchase order through ServiceNow. Then it wrote an email to store managers about the order. Finally, it made social media materials and used Google’s tools to turn a marketing picture into an animated image.

Google said Gemini Enterprise will work in every country where the company sells its cloud products. The platform will support more than twelve languages when it launches.