Google Workspace With Gemini Enhances Employee Productivity, Improves Work Quality, And Enables Secure AI Adoption At Scale

Google commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) organizations may realize by deploying Google Workspace.¹ Based on interviews with representatives across five organizations, Forrester found that over three years, a composite organization experiences a return on investment (ROI) of 416% from adopting Google Workspace with a net present value (NPV) of $123.7 million. This abstract focuses on Gemini and NotebookLM, the AI offerings included with Workspace at no extra cost. The interviewees who spoke of their use of Gemini and NotebookLM include:

• The senior manager of infrastructure at a consumer goods organization with 35,000 employees.

• The VP of digital experience at a financial services organization with 25,000 employees.

• The senior manager of workplace technologies and the manager of collaborative technologies at a technology company with 25,000 employees.

• The director of AI products at a telecommunications company with 17,000 employees.

• The head of AI adoption and the AI project manager at a financial services organization with 15,000 employees.

With Google Workspace, interviewees reported that their organizations quickly and safely adopted AI across their workforces and improved operational efficiency, enhanced employee capability, and established a foundation for long-term innovation. Gemini and NotebookLM were embedded directly into existing workflows and enabled employees to work more effectively, improve the quality of their outputs, and take on more complex and higher-impact tasks. Interviewees emphasized that Workspace’s enterprise‑grade security and data privacy protections allowed their organizations to confidently deploy AI at scale.

Investment Drivers

Before adopting Google Workspace and its AI offerings, interviewees’ organizations relied on legacy collaboration suites along with point solutions as needed. Interviewees described struggling with common challenges in their prior environments, including:

• A need for AI-powered tools that enabled employees to take on higher-impact work. Interviewees said employees increasingly expected familiar and intuitive tools that enabled them to work more effectively. Their organizations sought AI-augmented tools that empowered employees to more easily complete their day-to-day work, leaving more time for analysis, creativity, and decision-making. The senior manager of workplace technologies observed: “The AI in Workspace is accessible to anybody at any skill level. People get value with it from when they first start to dabble, and they can just keep going and going.”

• Uncertainty around how to adopt AI safely and for the long term. Interviewees’ organizations were focused on deploying AI quickly while ensuring it would remain secure, well‑governed, and capable of continuous improvement as the market evolved. Interviewees favorably cited Google’s rapid pace of improvement, clear roadmap, enterprise security and privacy controls, and advantages as an integrated, end‑to‑end solution. The head of AI adoption in financial services added: “Google has demonstrated they can move and improve very quickly. They’re a market leader.”

• Cost and complexity of adopting AI at scale. Interviewees noted that scaling AI across the enterprise entailed cost and procurement considerations and could introduce operational complexity as tools needed to be licensed, integrated, and governed. Several interviewees emphasized that having Gemini and NotebookLM included as part of the Workspace subscription enabled enterprisewide AI adoption without incremental licensing costs or added complexity. The director of AI products in telecommunications added, “Having Gemini and NotebookLM bundled and incorporated within Workspace would alone justify the move to Workspace.”

Key Results

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

AI-powered assistance with Gemini, which saves the average user at the composite organization 3 hours per week and 2.4 million hours organizationwide, creating a financial impact of $76.1 million. Interviewees described Gemini as a transformative tool that sat at the center of their organizations’ AI strategies. All interviewees’ organizations conducted large-scale employee surveys to understand Gemini’s adoption and impact, resulting in particularly robust datasets detailing its effect on employee efficiency, capability, and quality of work output. Across all interviewees’ organizations, approximately 80% of employees used Gemini regularly. Gemini usage spanned nearly all job roles and functions, and interviewees consistently reported significant time savings. Beyond efficiency gains, interviewees emphasized that Gemini served as an assistant, allowing employees to improve the quality of their work, take on more complex tasks, and operate with greater confidence and creativity. Interviewees further highlighted the following benefits of Gemini:

• Employee preference and widespread adoption. Interviewees consistently reported that Gemini was highly popular among their employees, with usage extending to essentially all job roles, including operations, HR, finance, legal, sales, marketing, IT, engineering, analytics, and R&D, as well as customer‑facing teams, executive leadership, middle management, and frontline staff. The head of AI adoption in financial services said: “Gemini has been a massive success as 78% of users interact with it daily, and there’s a CSAT [customer satisfaction] of 83%. There are tangible and measurable impacts, as 95% report an increase in their productivity.”

• Substantial employee time savings. All interviewees reported that Gemini resulted in substantial time-savings across the workforce, averaging 3 to 5 hours per week per user. The VP of digital experience explained: “Across all business units, the average user saves about an hour a day using Gemini, which is an incredible number. It has freed them up to do other work. We saw a lot of gains from rolling out Gemini, and 80% of our end users are actively using it.”

• Gemini integration into Workspace apps. Interviewees highlighted that Gemini’s deep integration across Workspace apps created an unfragmented AI experience. The VP of digital experience in financial services explained: “Everything in Workspace has an integration with Gemini. It’s woven in and very, very helpful. I don’t have to open another window. In Docs, there’s Gemini prompting right there. In Meet, it can take notes and create action items.” The director of AI products in telecommunications added, “Gemini is embedded in Meet, so I can focus on the discussion instead of writing things down.”

• Improved quality of employee work output. In addition to substantial productivity gains, interviewees repeatedly observed that Gemini improved the quality of work output. The director of AI products reported, “[Among our employees], 92% said Gemini inspired innovative ways of working, and 80% said it improved the quality of their work.” The head of AI adoption added that 79% of users enhanced the clarity and objectivity of their writing by using Gemini to write, improve, and correct texts.

• Broad range of AI use cases across roles and functions. At interviewees’ organizations, most employees used Gemini daily across a broad range of use cases, including research and summarization; idea generation; meeting preparation; understanding contracts and legal documents; data overviews; marketing content creation; and coding and other technical tasks. The senior manager of infrastructure added: “Around 80% of our employees are using Gemini every day. They are unlocking a lot of value. They are increasing their productivity. They are working faster. It creates a mindset change.”

• Augmented employee capabilities. Interviewees said Gemini allowed employees to complete work they previously avoided or were unable to execute and lowered the barrier to tasks like creating effective presentations, analyzing data, generating ideas, and coding.

• Greater employee confidence and willingness to take on complex work. Interviewees emphasized that Gemini augmented employee capability rather than replacing it and expanded what both office and frontline workers could take on. The manager of collaborative technologies said: “Gemini is augmentation. It is enhancing people’s capability. I love the stories from our users saying they are more confident and that they take on bigger challenges.”

• More time for high-impact work. Time savings from Gemini allowed employees at the interviewees’ organizations to focus on more strategic and impactful work, such as contributing to strategic discussions and decision-making, analyzing additional data sources for more robust insights, and developing deeper understanding of customer accounts. The VP of digital experience in financial services added: “[With Gemini], we’re doing better work and we’re doing it in less time, so we’re able to reallocate the time savings to other areas. We’re seeing it all over the place at the beginning of this AI gold rush.”

• Specialized help based on specific knowledge with Gems. Interviewees also highlighted Gems as a valuable component of Gemini that enabled employees to build and reuse specialized assistants that streamlined and improved tasks, such as budgeting analysis, HR processes, and sales coaching. The senior manager of workplace technologies in technology said, “Gems delivers amazing value.”

• Advanced, reusable agentic workflows with the Gemini Enterprise app. Some interviewees’ organizations adopted Gemini Enterprise, a premium offering that enabled employees to build, orchestrate, and scale more advanced agents and subagents across workflows. Interviewees said this allowed teams to extend AI to more complex, multistep workflows.

• Gemini Enterprise app delivered significant value across operational efficiency and innovation use cases. The AI project manager in financial services explained: “Gemini Enterprise bridges both operational efficiency and innovation use cases. Ninety percent of our employees using the platform saw value and reported efficiency and improved decision-making.”

• Ease of use and strong adoption of Gemini Enterprise app. The same interviewee added: “Our employees already see Gemini as a strategic partner. The same is true for Gemini Enterprise [app]. User adoption and satisfaction are really strong as the tool is integrated into the team’s weekly rhythm. [Adoption] was really easy for users. We gave them access and they started immediately using the platform and developing agents and subagents.”

AI use cases with NotebookLM and Google Meet translation capabilities, which saves up to 500,000 hours annually and retains 1,200 jobs at the composite organization, delivering $34.2 million in value. Interviewees said teams that worked with large volumes of information heavily leveraged NotebookLM, especially senior employees who needed to synthesize, understand, and act on data. NotebookLM’s structured outputs and clear citations based on user-provided sources helped ensure accuracy and trust. Interviewees reported that these users saw substantial time savings of 10 to 12 hours per week per user on average. Furthermore, interviewees reported that Workspace’s real-time translation in Google Meet and other AI‑powered tools upskilled existing employees and supported workforce retention. For example, the VP of digital experience said these features enabled their financial services organization to retain more than 1,000 employees as it integrated acquired companies into global teams. Interviewees further highlighted the following benefits:

• Broad, cross‑functional adoption of NotebookLM. Several interviewees reported broad adoption of NotebookLM, especially among document and information-heavy departments. The senior manager of infrastructure in consumer goods noted: “We have a lot of NotebookLM users. Marketing, R&D, finance, IT, and operations and logistics are the top five areas using it. They use NotebookLM to summarize documents and information and create emails, images, and videos.”

• High value for senior employees. NotebookLM particularly benefited senior employees whose functions focused on understanding and acting on large volumes data. The head of AI adoption in financial services reported: “We’re using NotebookLM a lot and it’s fantastic. Senior employees who manage a lot of information love it. It orders data and makes it easy to find what is needed. It’s very useful.”

• Support for core business objectives. Interviewees described a wide range of NotebookLM use cases that drove business value, such as consolidating sales enablement materials to support revenue generation, analyzing market trends, supporting legal review, and enabling learning management initiatives such as short videos that lay out complex concepts in simple terms.

• Improved contract analysis and supplier management. The head of AI adoption in financial services explained that NotebookLM improved contract analysis and supplier management: “We use NotebookLM to manage the contracts we have with suppliers. It’s very, very useful for understanding the specific terms. It improves productivity and work quality.”

• Enhanced customer insights and internal communications. Marketing teams used NotebookLM to analyze customer data and share insights across the business. The senior manager of infrastructure in consumer goods said: “Marketing uses NotebookLM for understanding customer data, surveys, and the trends. They [frequently use the] podcast and video summarization [features]. NotebookLM summarizes information on specific products to share with our internal teams.”

• Retention of acquired workforces enabled by real‑time translation. The VP of digital experience noted that their financial services organization leveraged Workspace’s real-time translation to retain existing workforces as it acquired new companies. The interviewee explained: “We wouldn’t be able to absorb new companies and employees the way we’re doing [without Workspace]. We’d have to rehire.”

• Upskilling and retention. The same interviewee elaborated on how Gemini, real-time translation, and the broader Workspace suite upskilled existing employees and made their retention possible: “A lot of times when we acquired a company in the past, we pretty much had to replace most of the people to get the skill sets that we need. But we’re able to leverage these existing workforces much easier with the Workspace tools.”

Secure use of AI, improved security, and IT efficiency, which reduces ongoing management effort by 50% at the composite organization and saves $6.5 million. Interviewees emphasized that secure AI was critical for their organizations. They said Google consistently provided the requisite enterprise‑grade security, data privacy protections, and control over organizational data across the entire Workspace platform and its AI capabilities. More broadly, interviewees identified Workspace’s cloud‑native architecture, centralized identity and access management, and integrated security model as supporting a strong overall security posture. While interviewees did not assess improved security primarily through an ROI lens, they nevertheless reported meaningful cost savings and efficiency gains, including approximately 50% less IT effort for management and maintenance compared to legacy systems. Interviewees further highlighted the following security benefits:

• Enterprise-grade privacy protections. Interviewees said that Google’s enterprise-grade privacy protections were a major factor in deciding to invest in Workspace and its AI offerings. The senior manager of workplace technologies in technology concluded, “We feel very confident in the security that Google provides.”

• The preferred platform of security teams. The same interviewee said that Workspace was the preferred platform of their security team: “Our security team had a big say when we were deciding whether to invest in Google Workspace, and they wanted it because they felt it was easier to secure. Our security team has a very positive viewpoint and is very impressed with the level of security.”

• Secure AI usage. Interviewees noted that these security and privacy protections applied to the entire Workspace portfolio, making it easy to approve the AI tools that were rapidly adopted and increasingly central to how employees worked. The manager of collaborative technologies in technology explained: “I can tell our employees that Gemini, NotebookLM, the whole portfolio [of AI tools in Workspace] is what we are providing because they’re secure. It’s a nice, simple message that I can convey, and I don’t have to qualify it. It’s an advantage that Google has.”

• A unified security approach. This unified security approach also allowed interviewees’ organizations to quickly roll out new Workspace apps or features. The director of AI products in telecommunications said, “A benefit is that whenever we start trying a Workspace application, such as NotebookLM or Workspace Studio or something new, we can be assured that it’s within the umbrella of Google security and we can easily deploy it.”

• Google’s fully integrated AI stack. Interviewees also said that Google’s approach of creating, owning, and delivering AI as part of a fully integrated stack gave them greater confidence in data privacy and governance and enabled faster deployment of AI capabilities than approaches relying on third parties. Interviewees said this approach also positioned Google to innovate and evolve its AI capabilities more rapidly than others.

• Secure, high-quality AI tools and shadow IT avoidance. Providing secure, approved, high-quality AI tools with Workspace helped prevent the emergence of shadow IT and its attendant risk at interviewees’ organizations. The director of AI products explained: “If the company did not take action [by adopting the Workspace AI tools], one thing for certain is that employees would pursue these tools in their personal capacity and that would contribute to shadow IT. ... Those unofficial solutions could have security issues and issues in terms of data leakage.”