Google Accelerates Its “AI in the Workplace” Ambitions with Gemini Enterprise

Google on Thursday launched a comprehensive enterprise AI platform called Gemini Enterprise, the Alphabet-owned company’s latest effort to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI in the rapidly growing market for workplace AI tools.

As part of the launch, Google announced several new Gemini Enterprise customers, including software design company Figma; “buy now, pay later” company Klarna; foodservice distributor Gordon Foods; Australian retail bank Macquarie Bank; and Virgin Voyages, a cruise line that has deployed more than 50 specialized AI agents capable of performing tasks autonomously on Gemini Enterprise.

Gemini Enterprise builds on previous iterations of the company’s efforts to bring AI capabilities to businesses. But Google says this shouldn’t be confused with a simple rebranding, despite the ever-changing and sometimes overlapping nomenclature used by its Google Workspace corporate brand. For example, Google Workspace adopted the Gemini brand in February 2024 and announced complementary generative AI products called Gemini Enterprise that were available to businesses. Google discontinued this Workspace Gemini Enterprise add-on earlier this year after it began including AI features in its Workspace Business and Enterprise plans.

Gemini Enterprise launched Thursday is not a Workspace add-on product; It’s a separate, secure platform under Google Cloud that functions as an AI agent toolkit – essentially a suite of tools that allows businesses to create and deploy their own AI assistants. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian described it in a blog post as “the new gateway to AI in the workplace.”

Gemini Enterprise is designed to enable businesses to securely create, share and use AI agents for a variety of business tasks in sales, marketing, engineering, human resources and finance. Google also said that, for the first time, these AI agents can access, combine and analyze information from Google’s internal systems and AI tools such as Code Assist and Deep Research within a single enterprise workflow.

All of this work is done through a Gemini Enterprise chatbot that connects to a worker’s data, including Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, as well as business applications like Salesforce and SAP. The platform includes Google’s Gemini AI models as well as other products such as a collection of pre-built Google Agents for deep search and data insights, a no-code product that allows employees to analyze information and automate internal processes, and a central governance framework that allows users to view, secure and audit all of their agents from one place.

This new “gateway to AI in the workplace” comes at a price. The company said its annual Gemini Enterprise standard and “plus” editions start at $30 per seat per month. A cheaper annual Gemini Business plan, aimed at small businesses, startups, or individual departments of a large company, costs $21 per seat per month. Google announced that the Professional edition would launch on Thursday and include a free 30-day trial period for all customers.

Gemini Enterprise reflects Google’s latest efforts to capture a larger share of the enterprise market, which has become increasingly crowded as generative AI becomes an increasingly important tool in the workplace. Growing AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI offer enterprise products and both have landed high-profile clients.

OpenAI says on its website that it has 5 million business users of the ChatGPT Enterprise product it launched in 2023. This month, Deloitte announced plans to roll out Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to its nearly 500,000 employees worldwide.