Google Workspace is a collection of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheet, Slide, Meet, and other applications. It is widely seen as intended to unsubscribe from Microsoft’s office. In January, Google incorporated Gemini AI, a family of leading multimodal language models directly into its core products, including workspaces.
In an exclusive interview with the AI business at Google Summit London, Kristina Behr, vice president of product management for Google Workspace’s collaboration apps, shared insights on how the technology giant is integrating AI into its productivity suite. Focusing on practical applications rather than theoretical possibilities, Behr highlighted Google’s commitment to making AI accessible and useful within existing workflows.
After spending 18 years at Microsoft, including five years as product vice president for frontline products such as Microsoft Teams, Behr has brought a valuable perspective to Google’s AI integration strategy. She highlighted Google’s comprehensive approach, leveraging AI-Accelerated Hardware, a unique large-scale language model, and practical applications to provide meaningful productivity gains while maintaining security and compliance.
AI Business: How does Google focus its AI approach to its workspace?
Christina Bear: One of the core values of Google Workspace is that you really think about how to use AI to help you quickly and get sucked into all the hype. I made a big decision to put AI in the box as part of my existing plan for my workspace, and it was embedded in all products and made available immediately.
How do you collaborate with such diverse organizations on knowledge sharing and collaboration?
Workspace serves a wide range of customers, from 3 billion and 11 million customers worldwide, from very small businesses to consumers to Fortune 500 companies in almost every industry. When developing features that support communication and productivity, we zone in about what people are trying to do: “work to do” or “critical user journeys,” and think about how AI can make it faster and easier.
How has Gemini integration evolved since January?
That was my dream as a product manager. Rather than thinking about add-on experiences, it’s embedded, so it seems to be turned off about what you think of gloves about creating a truly useful product. Every month, all products have 2 billion AI assists. It uses videos to generate videos, create images, create documents, integrate them, and summarise emails.
How do you collect and implement customer feedback?
We have many outstanding customers who are involved in trustworthy tester programs and Alpha Experiences. They were important to the way features were prioritized and intuitively rolled out. This summit was a great opportunity to sit down with our best customers and hear more feedback on the specific controls they want.
What is your vision for AI in productivity tools?
People continue to see us walking the path we are already in, thinking about how people are writing documents today and how they can improve it. Currently, Google Docs allows you to use AI to refine certain segments. What if you can provide useful advice, such as refinement of the entire document and suggesting that you close the paragraph, or better represent the content as a bullet or table?
How do you balance the balance between functionality, security and compliance?
Security and compliance are the best mindset for our customers, especially for our large businesses. The cloud-first architecture makes it easier to think about security compliance overall. Customer commitments include: Data is data. It does not use interactions with Gemini to train the base model or confirm their interactions with humans. We will give people complete control over the experience and prevent Gemini from accessing documents that are inaccessible.
How do you measure success beyond productivity?
One customer said he was excited about the wider deployment, not just because of efficiency, but because the CEO realized the quality of his work has improved. That’s a dream and helping people to show up in their work as their best self. There are statistics showing time savings and faster business processes, but we all want to operate at a higher level. That’s what excites me the most.
How do you imagine a balance between AI systems and human creativity?
Human creativity lies at the heart of this. That’s why I love working on AI in the context of my workspace. That’s the people we care about. We think about what part of your job you don’t like doing and how to use AI to make it smoother.
