Google’s AI Updates for Enterprises Point to Big Tech’s Ambitions for B2B

Google’s AI Updates for Enterprises Point to Big Tech’s Ambitions for B2B

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Big Tech giants have always targeted enterprises.

And with the recent announcement during Alphabet’s annual Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday (April 9) of several new, business-focused artificial intelligence (AI) updates to Google Workspace, the impact of AI software for B2B applications is top of mind for companies looking to modernize their workflows.

That’s because Google’s ambition with its enterprise AI products is not just to streamline tasks, but to transform them into more intelligent, automated processes.

“With these…advances, enterprises can do things today that just weren’t possible with AI before,” Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, said during Tuesday’s event.

One of the advances Pichai was referring to is the announcement of Google Vids as a part of Google Workspace. Google Vids, an AI-powered video creation app for work, allows firms to create short videos using text prompts that can be used for employee training videos, customer testimonials and marketing initiatives.

In June, Google Vids will join other Google Workspace apps such as Slides, Docs and Sheets in the enterprise dashboard toolkit — underscoring the place Google sees the new AI app holding among other business-focused solutions.

“We’re bringing the…magic of real-time collaboration to video, allowing people everywhere to tap into immersive storytelling at work,” said Aparna Pappu, general manager and vice president, Google Workspace, in a blog post.

Observers believe the move by Google is part of a broader push by the “Magnificent 7” (formerly known as FAANG) into the B2B space.

Read more: Tech Experts Share What to Ask When Adding AI to Business

Business Tech Tools Are Redefining Enterprise Processes

Google’s cloud-based business software is one of the more popular workplace suites around, and the new, embedded AI features offer a glimpse into a future where AI plays a central role in business strategy and workflows.

As the company itself noted, “70% of enterprise users who use Help me write in Docs or Gmail end up taking Gemini’s suggestions, and more than 75% of users who create images in Slides are inserting them into their presentations.”

“[AI] is something that every knowledge worker, everyone who works on a computer, really, can get some value out of,” Eddie Zhou, head of AI at Glean, told PYMNTS in March during a conversation for the “AI Effect” series.

On Tuesday, PYMNTS also reported on how Discover Financial Services announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to provide generative AI (GenAI) tools to Discover’s contact center agents.

One of the capabilities provided by Google’s GenAI tools is intelligent document summarization, in which the tools analyze and summarize complex policies and procedures and provides agents with information and insights to answer customers’ questions. The tools also deliver real-time search assistance that allows agents to use natural language to access knowledge bases and find relevant information during live interactions.

“AI is going to be an imperative for every company, and what you do with AI is what will differentiate your products,” Heather Bellini, president and chief financial officer at InvestCloud, told PYMNTS. “Functionally, it might get rid of a lot of the manual work people don’t want to do anyway and extract them up to a level where they can do more things that have a direct impact on the business.”

Read also: AI’s Future Is Becoming Indistinguishable From the Future of Work

A Major Leap Forward for B2B Operations

The integration of AI tools like Google Vids into business operations will catalyze a shift toward more efficient and personalized business practices. It also highlights the growing importance of video content in B2B marketing and communication strategies.

Since GenI first burst onto the landscape, PYMNTS has been tracking how the innovation can impact finance departments and what CFOs are doing to use it.

“Businesses are becoming much more aware and much more savvy about how to operate digitally,” James Butland, U.K. managing director at Mangopay, told PYMNTS in January.

PYMNTS Intelligence’s report “Understanding the Future of Generative Al” found that enterprise AI systems could impact 40% of all working hours, and the generative AI industry is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion by 2032. It is projected to give back workers and employees their productivity by optimizing legacy processes.

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Salesforge, an AI-copilot for sales execution, has raised €470k from BADideas.fund, Spring Capital, Fiedler Capital and super angel Maciej Zawadzinski, supercharging the team’s ambition to redefine the landscape of B2B sales.

As Frank Sondors, CEO and co-founder notes, this ex-Google, Kevin and Horde co-founder team is building a product to make sales teams leaner and meaner. Having led large sales teams, most recently as SVP Sales at Whatagraph, Frank observed that the prevailing model of large, expensive sales teams that relies on volume-based tactics like mass emailing and cold calling, is outdated.

“B2B sales leaders increasingly find themselves between a rock and a hard place – on the one hand, the buyer personas are tired of generic messaging, pushing sales leaders for larger and more personalized campaigns. On the other hand, email providers are introducing stricter deliverability standards, making oldschool spray-and-pray campaigns obsolete,” Sondors said. “We believe that the sales teams of tomorrow are going to be very lean and execution will be more programmatic, which will drive significant conversion lift across the sales funnel. Our approach combines a keen focus on multi source AI personalization with an eye for deliverability, which is underscored by a flexible, usage-based pricing model, solving the problem of bloated teams.”

For now, Salesforge has two products – Salesforge and Mailforge, which, when taken together, address both of these challenges. Salesforge crafts unique emails in any language with a big focus on deliverability, while Mailforge provides the necessary infrastructure with easy domain & mailbox management.

“Salesforge capitalizes on an opportunity in a market that currently sees tectonic shifts leveling the playing field for new entrants. AI-driven personalization and tightening email controls, taken together with rising labor costs, have created a world where single-person sales teams are not just possible, but they can thrive. Dogfooding their own product for months, Salesforge is the prime example of that,” highlighted Raimonds Kulbergs, CEO of BADideas.fund.

The current funding round will fuel Salesforge’s growth to unlock new channels, enable autonomous capabilities together with CRM integrations to cover the entire pipeline generation process. The team’s current growth is a testament to its hunger – having boostrapped until now, Salesforge has attracted over 800+ customers across the US and EMEA growing to $1 million ARR in less than 10 months with only a four-person team.

Looking forward, Salesforge wants to become an AI-age ecosystem of sales tools known as forges for B2B sales teams, on par with another regional success story, Pipedrive, which became a unicorn by redefining the CRM landscape.

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New research by BrightEdge offers a snapshot of the kinds of queries that tend to show Google AI Overviews (AIO) and provides insights into the kinds of queries and verticals where AIO are more prevalent.

The findings show dramatic differences in the amount of AI Overviews shown across different verticals in a way that reflects the kinds of queries that are common. This effect works in reverse as well, where some verticals experience less AIO search features.

Is This A Paradigm Shift?

While BrightEdge calls it the greatest paradigm shift in decades, I think that’s understating shifts to Google search in the recent past, not just the ones in 2024. Something that’s not widely understood is that Google Search has been an AI Search engine since at least 2015 with the introduction of RankBrain and other subsequent changes to the backend side of search.

The big change in Search this year is that AI is more obvious on the front-end as a Feature in Search, largely replacing the role that Featured Snippets once played. Perhaps more importantly there may have been an infrastructure change at the beginning of 2024.

BrightEdge Generative Parser

BrightEdge has a technology, called the Generative Parser, which tracks and analyzes patterns in Google’s AI search features. BrightEdge used their Generative Parser to produce research findings about Google’s new AI Overviews (AIO) search feature.

Albert Gouyet, VP of Operations at BrightEdge said this about the BrightEdge Generative Parser:

“It’s fascinating to see the BrightEdge Generative Parser™ giving marketers a front-row seat into how AI in search is developing and giving the community a glimpse into the future. For marketers who rely on organic traffic, early indications suggest that AI will help reach new customers and present new opportunities to create content that serves multiple needs and elevates brand performance.”

What Triggers AIO

BrightEdge’s report indicates that Featured Snippets and questions were likely to trigger the AIO feature. Featured Snippets are answers to questions that are created with direct quotes from websites. BrightEdge found that AI Overviews were more likely to appear when there was also a Featured Snippet.

What Doesn’t Trigger AI Overviews

The research showed that local search queries were the least likeliest to trigger an AI Overview search result. That makes sense because a user is looking for a structured search result (business names, addresses, phone numbers), information that can’t be usefully summarized.

Similarly, search queries that generate sitelinks were also less likely to trigger AIO. Sitelinks are search results related to branded searches which feature multiple links to inner pages of a website. For example, searching for the name of a clothing store can generate a search result that features inner pages for women’s clothes, men’s clothes, etc. This also makes sense because it’s the kind of search query that is best answered with direct data and not a summary.

Verticals Most Likely To Contain AIO

Search results that tended to feature AI Overviews were wildly different when compared by verticals (verticals means specific industries or topics). This likely doesn’t mean that Google was targeting specific verticals for showing more AIO. Search features are always tied to the helpfulness of the features. The helpfulness of features are tested with the Search Quality Raters, workers who test out new kinds of search results and rate them for helpfulness and other criteria.

Search queries related to Healthcare tended to generate AI Overviews at a rate of 63% of the time. That makes sense for search queries that are information-seeking.

B2B technology queries tended to generate AIO results 32% of the time while Ecommerce search queries triggered AI Overviews 23% of the time.

Interestingly, restaurants and travel related queries did not tend to trigger AIO results.

AIO Shown Less Often Than SGE

Another interesting data point is that AIO is triggered 20% less times than Search Generative Experience (SGE) answers were.

BrightEdge offered three insights related to why AIO is shown less than the experimental SGE was.

“This indicates that AI is getting more precise when generating helpful experiences. This is likely because AI now caters better to people’s needs, such as looking for summaries, recommendations, or conversational experiences. Ultimately, Google is getting better at selecting answers.”

BrightEdge research pointed out that Google is improving the ability to anticipate follow up questions by providing AI search summaries that more completely answer a question.

They write:

“Since Google l/O, the overlap between citations in AI and traditional results has diminished. Google is ensuring users do not get the same results in the two types of different results. It is also now delivering on its promise to do the second, third, and fourth search for you. AI is beginning to anticipate the following question and give options before a user even asks. This often happens with ‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘how’ intent-based queries.”

Early Days Of AIO

Google has received overwhelmingly negative reviews from users and the news media about the quality of Google’s AI Overviews, which in turn can lead to trust issues. BrightEdge’s report can be considered a snapshot of Google AIO today and I’m certain BrightEdge will be back with new data in the future when Google’s (AI) SERPs eventually change again.

Featured image by Shutterstock/Marco Lazzarini