Google announced on Thursday the launch of Gemini Enterprise, a comprehensive new AI platform for businesses. This move is the latest significant effort by the Alphabet-owned company to compete with booming AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI in the rapidly expanding market for workplace AI tools.
New Platform, New Customers
Google announced several high-profile inaugural customers for the new Gemini Enterprise platform, including the software design firm Figma, the buy now, pay later company Klarna, the foodservice distributor Gordon Food Service, Australian retail bank Macquarie Bank, and Virgin Voyages, a cruise line that has already deployed more than 50 specialized AI agents on the platform to autonomously perform tasks.
Google is insistent that this launch should not be confused with mere rebranding, despite the complex and sometimes overlapping nomenclature used by its Google Workspace enterprise brand. While Google Workspace adopted the Gemini branding in February 2024 and offered a generative AI add-on called “Gemini Enterprise,” that product was later discontinued after Google started including basic AI features in its general Workspace plans. The new Gemini Enterprise that launched Thursday is not a Workspace add-on; it is a dedicated and secure platform built under Google Cloud that functions as an AI agent toolkit—a full suite of resources that lets companies custom-build and deploy their own AI assistants. Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, described it in a blog post as “the new front door for AI in the workplace.”
Functionality and Pricing Structure
Gemini Enterprise is specifically designed to let businesses securely create, share, and utilize AI agents for a wide variety of essential workplace tasks across sales, marketing, engineering, human resources, and finance. For the first time, Google stated that these AI agents can access, combine, and analyze information from internal enterprise systems and existing Google AI tools like Code Assist and Deep Research within a single, unified workflow.
This orchestration is managed through a Gemini Enterprise chatbot that securely connects to a worker’s data, including Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 environments, as well as business applications like Salesforce and SAP. The comprehensive platform bundles Google’s core Gemini AI models, a collection of pre-built Google agents (such as those for deep research and data insights), a no-code product that allows employees to automate internal processes, and a centralized governance framework for visualizing, securing, and auditing all agents in one place.
The price of this “front door for AI in the workplace” starts with annual plans. The Gemini Enterprise standard and “plus” editions begin at $30 per seat per month. A cheaper Gemini Business annual plan, intended for small businesses, startups, or individual departments, is priced at $21 per seat per month. Google announced that the business edition is available immediately and includes a 30-day free trial period for all customers.
The launch of Gemini Enterprise reflects Google’s latest and most aggressive effort to capture a larger share of the enterprise market, which has become a crucial battleground as generative AI embeds itself into workplace tools. Both major booming AI startups, Anthropic and OpenAI, have established enterprise products and secured high-profile customers. OpenAI claims on its website that it has 5 million business users of its ChatGPT Enterprise product, which launched in 2023. Meanwhile, Deloitte recently announced plans to roll out Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to its nearly 500,000 global employees.
What The Author Thinks
Google’s launch of the distinct Gemini Enterprise platform, separate from its productivity suite, signifies a strategic masterstroke to pivot the conversation from isolated “copilots” to comprehensive “orchestration” of AI agents. By offering a secure, centralized toolkit that integrates seamlessly with competitors’ software like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, Google is wisely positioning itself as the neutral, full-stack operating system for all enterprise AI. This move is designed to make the platform indispensable regardless of which core LLM—Gemini, Claude, or another—an enterprise prefers, providing a critical layer of control and governance that directly addresses the security concerns that have held back widespread corporate AI adoption.
Featured image credit: Vitya_maly via GoodFon
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