Google Apps For Work Becomes the Machine Learning-Powered G Suite

Google Apps for Work is now ‘G Suite’ – a set of “intelligent” applications that Google believes will make businesses more productive by saving employees time and fostering collaboration.

The search giant has also rebranded all of its cloud services under the ‘Google Cloud’ banner and this includes G Suite, which comprises Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Hangouts and other services.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President for Apps at Google Cloud, said the suite would benefit from a decades work in machine intelligence and that many of its applications already used the fruits of this research.

G Suite

For example, its calendar app can find a time where all participants are free and suggest the easiest conflicts to resolve if there is no suitable moment.

“Research shows that each week we spend the equivalent of three work days on common tasks like emailing, scheduling and attending meetings and gathering information, and only two work days on the role we were hired for,” he said.

“Repetitive, mechanical tasks that take up our time are exactly the kinds of tasks that computers are great at, and advances in machine intelligence help make this a reality. Today we’re launching new capabilities across G Suite to help employees reclaim their time and come together as teams on strategic and creative projects so they can better serve their customers.”

Google is also making two new products available to early adopters. Meetings for Teams is a video conferencing service that creates Hangouts for up to 50 participants and Team Drives is a collaborative cloud storage tool.

“Team Drives help streamline teamwork from end-to-end, from onboarding a new team member (add her to the team and she instantly has access to all of the work in one place) to off boarding a departing team member (remove him from the team and all of his work stays right in place), and everything in-between,” added Raghavan.”We’ve been previewing Team Drives with a small set of customers, and we’re excited to begin to extend this capability to more customers through an Early Adopter Program.”

Microsoft is also a big supporter of AI and has added intelligent features to its Office 365 suite and Windows. It has just created a separate AI division at the company and has joined forces with a number of other tech giants to form an AI alliance, which also includes Google.

“From the beginning our suite was built on the idea that when people can work together easily from anywhere, they accomplish more,” concluded Raghavan.

“Machine intelligence has been improving the user experience in our apps for a decade, and the pace is accelerating. These updates to G Suite help employees take back the time they spend on repetitive tasks and help teams break down silos and connect even when they can’t be in the same place. With our focus on machine intelligence and our commitment to transforming the workplace, there’s much more to come.”

Quiz: The Cloud in 2016!