Full-disclosure: We’re a Google shop. It’s a client of ours, but also, like a lot of businesses, we’re built on a Google tech stack. We’re power users of products like Gmail, Chat, Meet, and Docs/Slides/Sheets, and our day-to-day work involves heavy use of Google Analytics and YouTube. And we have quite a few Android fans on the team who will take any opportunity to wax rhapsodic about open ecosystems.
We also believe, as tech marketers, a big part of our job involves staying current with the latest technologies.
So when an event like Google I/O rolls around, we treat it like a season premier of Succession. Live watch parties, chat threads, and obsessively following the media coverage.
This year, there were a ton of big changes to Google’s productivity tools, mostly involving generative AI, a subject about which we have some opinions. (We even published a zine on the topic last week). So we figured it’d be a good idea to share our perspectives on how we see these tools integrating with our day-to-day work.
Here’s what you need to know.
Bard
Bard launched earlier this year as Google’s flavor of generative AI chatbot. We’ve been using it for a few weeks, and it’s now available to everyone at bard.google.com.
Lots of different industries are experimenting with generative AI, with everyone from marketers to app developers to Dungeons & Dragons players learning how to streamline repetitive tasks, and hopefully giving themselves more time for critical, creative thinking.
There’s a ton of hype around this stuff too, so our stance is to be enthusiastic about the potential, while remaining skeptical about the overpromising.
If you’re curious about where to begin, here are some good starter projects:
Research
- Bard is pretty good at answering the kinds of basic research questions that come up a hundred times a day. “Who are the top TikTok influencers in Dallas?” “Who was president in 1806?” “What are the image-sizing standards for Instagram?” “What are some women’s health startups that deal with fertility?” We definitely double-check answers for accuracy, but Bard is a permanent open tab in our browser and has already started saving us time.
Formulaic content creation
- For writers, editors, and PR professionals, Bard can create summaries of longer documents, generate copy blurbs, and help with best practices. We wouldn’t recommend using Bard as your final editor, but if you need a quick proofread, or some language to jumpstart your thinking, it can save you time. Likewise, if you need a gut-check, asking “what are the steps to creating a landing page?” lets you know you’re on the right track.
Design
- Google also announced a partnership with Adobe, which allows the AI to generate simple art from prompts. The translation of text to image can help create more integrated marketing teams, with cross-functional creatives who aren’t limited by legacy toolkits. This space is evolving quickly and it’s a bit messy, so far. We love Midjourney but getting what we need from it has taken some trial-and-error. So we’re hoping the Google x Adobe collab improves the user experience. It won’t replace designers, but we’re interested in seeing how Bard can bridge the gap between creative teams.
Duet AI for Google Workspace
Google Workspace also got a boatload of AI updates that can help marketers check off their most tedious to-dos. We haven’t tried them yet, but we’re watching this space with interest, because Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and Gmail are such critical tools to our work. And the AI features that have rolled out over the past year, like Conversation Summaries in Chat and Smart Reply, have been pretty useful.
Google’s calling the Workspace features Duet AI, and they’ll be available through the new Workspace Labs.
Here’s what we’re most interested in:
Sheets
- Users can automatically generate tables, saving the hours spent formatting and organizing data into a digestible format. For example, input rough data points and Sheets will organize them into a table to create a content calendar. We’re thinking it could be particularly useful for our strategy and analytics teams.
Slides and Meet
- We’re pretty excited about this one. Imagine if you didn’t have to spend so much time looking for images for your decks. With Duet AI, describe the visual you want, and you’ll get an AI-generated image you can use to punch up a presentation, or create a custom background for your next video call. We’re also interested in Duet AI’s automatically generated speaker notes, though we suspect that finalizing our VOs is a task better left to our humans.
Docs
- The blank page is every creative’s canvas and every creative’s nightmare. Duet AI in Docs will soon be updated with a Bard-like chat window to help you get started writing. You’ll be able to prompt the chatbot to do things like pull out examples of specific formats, like product descriptions or speeches. Like Bard’s current functionality, we see this as an interesting jumpstart to our creativity. How much we really lean on it remains to be seen.
If you’re a Google organization like we are, it’s worth digging into the Duet AI announcement and the I/O speech from earlier this week, to learn more about the tools coming to Workspace. We’re looking forward to trying out the new features and seeing how our work habits, productivity, and creativity evolve over the next year.
