Google Cloud Next 2026: How Workspace Intelligence Is Redefining The Future Of Work

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This podcast only exists because of partners like NordLayer. I'm incredibly grateful for the support that helps me deliver these conversations every single day. And one of the things I've learned in those many conversations is that hybrid work has changed everything about how teams operate. People are now working from different locations on different devices and often outside traditional networks. But the one constant here, no matter where people are working, is the browser.

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And it is that balance between flexibility and control that is where a lot of companies are still struggling. So if anything that I mentioned there resonates with you, if it sounds familiar, please, I encourage you to take a closer look at nordlayer.com/browser. But now, on with today's show. Welcome back to the Tech Talks Daily podcast from Google Cloud Next here in Las Vegas, where one of the biggest themes this week is simple. Work itself is being redesigned.

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Yeah. For years, productivity tools were all about helping us do the exact same work, but a little faster. Better email, better documents, better meetings. But AI is changing this conversation completely. We're now moving into a world where the tools themselves understand context, anticipate needs and help people focus less on managing work and more on doing the meaningful work.

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And let's be honest, most of us spend far too much time chasing updates, searching for old emails and documents that you filed away into a folder somewhere three weeks ago on a Wednesday afternoon, digging through documents, trying to remember that one important conversation, how it happened, where it happened. This is not a strategic part of work and it's definitely not the most enjoyable part. And that is exactly where today's conversation begins because today I'm going to be joined by the Vice President of Product for Google Workspace at Google. She leads one of the most widely used product suites in the world, covering everything from Gmail and Google Calendar to Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides, and newer products like Google Vids. But her team is literally shaping how billions of people work every day.

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Now at Google Cloud Next, she introduced Workspace Intelligence, which is a major step forward in how AI work inside productivity tools. And rather than acting like a disconnected assistant, Workplace Intelligence pulls together context from your emails, meetings, files and organisational knowledge to help create documents, prioritise your inboxes, take meeting notes and automate some of that repetitive work that quietly eats away at your desk. So today we will talk about exactly what Workspace Intelligence actually is, how it differs from third party AI connectors and understand why context and governance matter so much for Enterprise AI and how businesses can become truly that AI first organisation without creating new security risks. And we'll also discuss one of the most important questions of all: how AI can help people spend less time in the process of work and more time doing the work that they actually care about. This is one of those conversations that feels immediately relevant to almost everyone listening.

[00:04:04] - [Speaker 0]
It certainly did me. And I hope at the end of the conversation, you will go straight out there and want to read more about workspace intelligence and how it can work for you. But enough scene setting for me. Let me introduce you to my guest right now. So thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

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For everyone listening, can you tell them a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:04:25] - [Speaker 1]
Thank you so much for having me. I am Yuli Kwon Kim. I'm a VP of product at Google, and I lead the Workspace team. And Workspace includes all the apps people use every day, ranging from Gmail, Google Calendar to Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, newer apps like Vids, and more.

[00:04:45] - [Speaker 0]
Awesome. And one of the things I try and do every day on this podcast is demystify areas of technology and ecosystems. So to ensure we don't leave anyone behind and just to set the scene, what is Workspace Intelligence?

[00:04:58] - [Speaker 1]
This week at Cloud Next, we announced it at the opening keynote. And basically, it solves a a big problem for everyone out there who you has to use emails, docs. And what it basically does is it brings it all together. So the problem that we all face is, for example, when you're wanting to write something, say a customer brief or an executive update, what's the first thing that you do? You start gathering your notes, conversations that you had from email.

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You might look at your calendar to see what are the meetings that I had with the relevant people that I want to talk about or the topics that were discussed in the past? What are the documents? What are the spreadsheets that have some of the data that I want to refer to? And you start gathering all of that up, and then you start synthesizing it next, all to produce that executive brief or whatever document that you're pulling together. And now what you can do is basically, in a Google Doc, write a prompt that, describes what you're trying to do.

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And Workspace Intelligence will go and pull all of those sources for you and create a great first draft. So it cuts down lots of time, all the busy work for you.

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And what would you say are the the main features enabled by Workspace Intelligence? For for people listening and wanting to get to grips with it, what what are some some of the big features that are enabled there?

[00:06:33] - [Speaker 1]
Well, there's Google Docs, which I mentioned, helped me create a doc. In Gmail, we have AI overviews, which we launched earlier this year, or announced earlier this year. And this helps you to find past emails that and you can't even remember what was oftentimes, you can't remember the name. Sometimes I'll I'll go, what who was that painter that we hired last summer? How are you supposed to find the email when you can't remember the name?

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But with, AI Overviews, which now leverages workspace intelligence, it understands your intent. So it can actually tell you what that name of that painter was. There's also Gmail AI inbox, which helps you to understand what's most important for you to tackle now. Many of us face the challenge of information overload. At work, you might get hundreds of emails every day.

[00:07:28] - [Speaker 1]
What if very often it's easy to miss the ones that are more important? But because workspace intelligence not only is connected to your files but understands the meaning behind all of this. It can understand what are your priority projects, who are the people that you work with, what are the high pry things that you would want to know about earlier rather than later, and it can bubble that up in AI inbox. So that's another great example of it.

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And so much of what you said will have people nodding in agreement now. Think we've all lost hours of our time searching for those lost documents and lost emails. But for the for the techies that are already using AI, how is Workspace Intelligence different from, let's say, a third party connector? What what makes it unique?

[00:08:14] - [Speaker 1]
So there are many AI solutions out there that you can choose to use, but there it's not enough to be a really powerful capable LLM model or agent. What's really important is that the agent also understands you and has context on you and your organization. Otherwise, it's producing in kind of a generic vacuum. Right? And what's gonna be really important is that it helps helps you in your context.

[00:08:45] - [Speaker 1]
And so what's different is that it not only has connection to your data, but it understands the meaning behind it, the semantic understanding. So that's what I mentioned is that it's not just keyword matching, but it actually understands your intent. And then it also is real time retrieval. And so that means that it's not something that happened in the past, but it understands what's fresh now. An example of this is the org chart.

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How many of us have the problem where the org chart that you saw is outdated? Who can keep these up to date? Right? And who can continually keep feeding this to the AI so they know who's who in your organization? But with workspace intelligence, you don't need to do that.

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It understands who you're collaborating with. It knows, oh, this is the engineering partner that I work with every day, or Thomas is my boss. And so knowing that it can help really help shape the updates that I might send to Thomas, I might write an email to him that is very different than how I write to the engineer that I'm working with every single day. Right? And so those are the really helpful ways that workspace intelligence works, and it gives you a little bit of a glimpse of what's happening behind the scenes.

[00:10:03] - [Speaker 0]
So many cool things there, and the pace of change is happening so quickly and transforming businesses. And for business leaders listening, what do you think is needed to be truly an AI first enterprise?

[00:10:15] - [Speaker 1]
Yep. Yep. So I mentioned a little bit how it's not enough to have very capable LLM models or agents. You also really need context to for your agents to be grounded in so it really understands your you and your business. And then the third thing that I would say is really important is that you need agent governance and security over what the agents are doing and how they're handling your data.

[00:10:41] - [Speaker 1]
We hear stories all the time about the agent or the data that got away from you. Right? And what is really, I think, great about Workspace Intelligence for people who want to use Workspace is that it's native. So there's no installation. There's no big setup that you have to do so that it knows your org chart.

[00:11:01] - [Speaker 1]
And it's secure because it's all in one place. So you don't have to connect to an additional system and wonder which data is being, you know, sent outside of your system and what's not and and all of that. So we make it very simple and easy for people to use, get the best of AI in a very safe way.

[00:11:23] - [Speaker 0]
I'm glad you mentioned both security and governance there. With regards to workspace intelligence and the shift to deploying agents in the workplace, anything else you can share around how you think about security and and safety at Google in this area?

[00:11:38] - [Speaker 1]
Well, one of the things that our customers have told us is they really appreciate the fact that when they are using AI and Gemini inside of Workspace, that all of the IT setup that they have done to prevent data loss, their data exfiltrating out of their organization or access control to docs is automatically respected by AI. And so what you don't have is agents all of a sudden being able to access different docs or communications that a person wouldn't have access to. And so that makes it also very simple and straightforward for organizations where they don't have to go and figure out a bunch of additional things.

[00:12:23] - [Speaker 0]
And there'll be many people listening, hearing about this for the first time, but you're right in the heart of this space. So I've got to ask, what are you most excited about with all things Workspace Intelligence? What really excites you?

[00:12:36] - [Speaker 1]
So one thing that I'm really excited about is how we are empowering people to do the work that they really love. And so much of our day is stuck in the process of work. Mhmm. Right? Managing the process, finding things, hunting things down, chasing people for updates.

[00:12:59] - [Speaker 1]
That's not the fun part of the job. The fun part is when you get to be creative or strategic or you get to spend more time with your clients or with your team. That's the part of the work that everyone really loves, and yet that ends up being a smaller fraction for most people in their day to day. And so I'm really excited that we can help people to delegate more of that busy work to AI so that they can focus on what they really care about.

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One of the great things about attending a conference like Google Cloud Next is all the different people that you speak with, people that you don't automatically get that time with, whether it be customers, partners, anyone in between, or just attendees. But what are you hearing? What kind of feedback are you hearing from customers? What kind of conversations are you having?

[00:13:43] - [Speaker 1]
A lot of excitement. Yeah. Actually, they I I keep getting a lot of excitement from all of the people that I'm talking to. They can't wait to try the new features that we announced here at Next. There's Workspace Intelligence and how it shows up across all of our apps.

[00:14:00] - [Speaker 1]
There's also other new features that we announce. So, for example, we announced for Google Meet in person take notes for me. And so what that means is, you can have a conversation with someone in person and just put your phone on the table and Google Meet can help take notes for you. And until now, you could only do that when you were in a video call, and it's been an extremely popular feature. And so what we are doing now is making it so that you can get AI, note taking assistance in any type of situation that you might be in, in person or on video.

[00:14:37] - [Speaker 0]
Wow. That is incredibly cool. That's something I'm gonna be looking up there. That'll be coming handy for myself. And there has been so many announcements this week.

[00:14:45] - [Speaker 0]
It can be hard keeping up to speed with everything. But from every everything that's being announced, anything else excites you this week?

[00:14:51] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Yeah. So much, actually. It's it's it's really hard to pick. Another one that I shared about here is Workspace skills.

[00:15:00] - [Speaker 1]
And there's been a lot of excitement in Workspace Studio. It's been so incredible to see what people are building with Workspace Studio. And, basically, what you can do is take all of the repetitive work that you do every day and automate it with AI. And on top of that, we're introducing skills. And what that does is enable people to further automate the standard operating procedures that they have in their company.

[00:15:27] - [Speaker 1]
So every single function, whether you're finance or IT or any other group, there's a lot of things that you do that's very specific to how your company works. And you have to do them over and over again. So the example I used in my talk was I'm a salesperson, and when I pitch a customer, I have a standard way of doing it. And I pull together a deck that's customized to that prospect. And now what I can do is build a skill, and I might call it perfect pitch.

[00:15:59] - [Speaker 1]
And not only does that help automate that whole process for me in the future, but I can share that with the rest of my team. So my everything from my brain starts to become the company brain, which is pretty incredible because now more and more people can really leverage what people are doing with AI across the organization.

[00:16:21] - [Speaker 0]
Incredibly cool. And obviously, so much forward thinking here and sharing of ideas. If you look ahead, what would your vision for Workspace be over the next year or or even longer?

[00:16:34] - [Speaker 1]
It's it's a little bit of what I shared earlier, where I am super excited about helping to empower people. You can get more things done that do more of the work that you really want to. One of the things that we talk about that we're really excited internally at Workspace is how when our engineers leverage AI to for coding, we're able to actually get a lot more done. Previously, we might only be able to, in our roadmap, get through all of our p zero features. But now, because they are assisted with AI, they're able to do a lot more, which means all of those things that we always dreamed of being able to bring to our customers and our users, those p ones, those p twos that would make so many users happy, we now have the capacity to do.

[00:17:22] - [Speaker 1]
And that's one of the things that I'm excited about bringing to everybody is that extra capacity so that you can get more done and really, for yourself, but also for whoever you're serving out there. The other thing that I'm really excited about is AI providing people with new skills. So for example, with Google Vids, it's our most recent app where anyone can build video presentations with AI leveraging Vids and Lyria and some of the great multimedia models that are coming out of Google DeepMind. And the thing about video is that historically, you had to have budget. You had to have video production skills and expertise, which is out of reach of your everyday person.

[00:18:07] - [Speaker 1]
But now everyone can can build a real professional looking video presentation, which is really powerful because that's one of the most effective ways to communicate with people.

[00:18:18] - [Speaker 0]
And for anybody listening that's hearing about work space intelligence for the first time, maybe they feel inspired by everything that you've just laid out there. How can they get hands on with it? Where should they start?

[00:18:28] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Just come to Google Workspace, on our website, and you can, you can learn more there. And the other thing that you can do is just start with a Google Doc

[00:18:38] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah.

[00:18:39] - [Speaker 1]
Or a g go into your Gmail account. There's lots there to explore and see. So I encourage people who want to learn more about AI to just try it out.

[00:18:48] - [Speaker 0]
Awesome. Excellent advice. I will get all the links added to that. I'll also include a few videos, make it nice and easy for people. But more than anything, thank you for taking time to sit down with me today and and bringing all this to life and demystifying it.

[00:19:01] - [Speaker 0]
And I urge everyone listening, go out there and try Thank you. Yeah.

[00:19:03] - [Speaker 1]
Thank you so much for having me.

[00:19:05] - [Speaker 0]
So much I loved about this conversation, in particular the fact that we focused on something every single one of us understands instantly: frustration. Everyone knows what it feels like to lose time hunting for that right document, trying to remember who sent an email or sitting in a meeting while also trying to take notes and stay present. These are the small frustrations that we've just put up with and accepted as the norm, quietly shaping the entire workday. And her point that AI should remove the busy work rather than add another layer of complexity, I think really landed for me. Because the best technology often disappears quietly into the background, seamlessly helping people without forcing them to completely change how they work.

[00:19:50] - [Speaker 0]
And for me, this is what makes workspace intelligence feel so practical rather than theoretical. And her explanation of context, I think, was incredibly important too. Because a powerful model alone is simply not enough. AI becomes truly useful when it understands the relationships, the priorities and the rhythms inside an organisation. But knowing who your manager is, which projects matter most and how your team actually works, that changes everything.

[00:20:21] - [Speaker 0]
So I'm glad we touched on trust too because security and governance remain one of the biggest concerns for leaders And her point that existing permissions and controls are automatically respected is the exact kind of reassurance organisations need if they're going to move confidently into AI first workflows. But perhaps the most powerful idea here was the shift from individual productivity to a more shared intelligence. Turning what lives inside one person's head into something the whole organisation can benefit, that feels like a much bigger story than productivity alone. So a big thank you to my guest for helping demystify how AI is changing the future of work. And for everyone listening, if AI could take one repetitive task off your plate tomorrow, what would you choose first?

[00:21:10] - [Speaker 0]
Let me know your thoughts. Head over to techtalksnetwork.com. If you go to the podcast episodes, there will be a blog post associated with this episode. And you'll also find links to everything that my guest mentioned. So you can read up on all things Workspace Intelligence.

[00:21:27] - [Speaker 0]
But most importantly, don't just read and listen about it. Have a play and let me know what you think. But that's it for today. So thank you for listening as always, and I'll speak with you all again tomorrow. Bye for now.