Michael Brenzel, Google | Google Cloud Next ’24

[Savannah Peterson]

Google Cloud Next ’24 – Workspace Updates

Good morning, NerdFam, and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We’re here at Google Cloud Next, day one of three here on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous, brilliant brains, John and Rebecca. Thank you both for being here. Busy start to the day, very exciting. You’re smiling, you’re smiling. We don’t look too dried out yet, it’s a great sign. This show floor is really pumping.

[Rebecca Knight]

Workspace Updates – Energy Levels High

Energy levels are high, we’ll say that.

[Savannah Peterson]

Energy levels are high, and I think largely because of some of the most exciting announcements this morning coming out of the workspace.

Workspace Updates – Highlights

Michael, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me today. Today is a huge day for you.

[Michael Brenzel]

Of course. We have seen a lot of nice and amazing announcements. If you’ve seen the keynote earlier today, I think it’s a fantastic day to enjoy and to experiment with a lot of new features, and I’m very proud of what the product team on the workspace side has built and shown earlier today.

[00:01:01]

[Savannah Peterson]

Workspace Updates – Google Wits Announcement

Yeah, give us some of the highlights.

[Michael Brenzel]

Well, I would say the biggest and coolest ones, one feature that I saw, and I just met a few people by walking over here to your stage, was surely the Google Wits announcement, where you can really create videos simply just with a simple prompt, which is something people were really looking forward to say, okay, I need to create new animations and graphics to make things much more interactive, and yeah, much more fascinating presentations, and I think people were waiting long for this, and actually this was a bit of this wow effect, and I heard it also in the audience, so we’re quite proud of that, of course. Another cool thing was, of course, also the watermarking feature that we announced for Google Slides, or when you just do presentations that you can share automatically watermarks in the background so that you can follow up where things or data might have gone, as well as other features and highlights that you can have, reactions in Google Sheets to see when data is changed and updated. Did you see, okay, there was something different now. You realize it’s much more interactive, it makes it much more exciting for you to work and handle data, and even spreadsheets, so yeah, this was just a few of the things we announced today, which we are quite proud of, and yeah, it was very interesting.

[00:02:07]

[John Furrier]

Workspace Updates – Differences from Last Year

What’s the big difference from the last year? Obviously, the Vids is a cool product that’s going to change the game in the creator, marketing departments, and a lot of other things, too, from transcriptions, just the creation tools is big, and we’ve seen the massive changeover. The user experiences, they want that generative vibe, right, so what’s the big change from last year to this year, if you had to point at it?

Workspace Updates – Generative Vibe

Is it more generative, is it more Gemini, is it more, what was the big enhancements this year coming in just from eight months ago?

[Michael Brenzel]

I think last year we started with a few announcements that took a while to become available. People wanted to test it and try it, which is for many features we announced last year already happened already, and I think we created a lot of features that were able to create your emails, texts, et cetera, but now, after being able just to create images out of a prompt, which we had in Google Slides for a couple of months already, now with doing even videos and making it more interactive, and that helps you to create more content,

[00:03:01]

makes it more interesting, and I think more active, no matter what you produce, what content you do, I think this is the big difference, that it’s really more interactive for everything what you do now.

[John Furrier]

Workspace Updates – Gmail Features

I noticed Gmail has a voice prompt, help me write, that’s cool, I can always use that, and then Polish My Draft, what is that, like a spell checker, explain some of the new Gmail features.

[Michael Brenzel]

Yeah, so one of the coolest features you mentioned before is also that you can just on the go on your mobile to say, okay, you know when we are on the rush, typing on the mobile while walking, I mean, come on, how many typos does everyone have? A lot. Even if you’re a good person.

[John Furrier]

Everyone’s doing it. Yeah.

[Michael Brenzel]

It says, okay, just record the sentence, what you say, it understands it, translates it, and creates an amazing response email while walking, as if you would have been sitting on your desk writing it for half an hour. So I think it’s not just a time saver, it’s also a fascinating feature that has been built, and also reviewing documents and everything what it can do now, it’s just making everything much easier. Spell checks and stuff have never been easier before. Yeah, that’s awesome.

[Rebecca Knight]

Workspace Updates – Technology Evolution

Well, it’s a good thing, because I know Kevin Roos of the New York Times said that writing in AI makes you sound like an obsequious dork, so hopefully the Polish My Draft is just a little bit more you when you’re talking.

[00:04:11]

I want to, we’re talking right now about the head-spinning number of product announcements and updates that we had this morning, but I want to take it back to the beginning, because you were one of the first, your first experience with Google goes back to 2006, when you were one of the first beta testers.

Workspace Updates – 2006 Beta Testing Experience

I’d love to have you just reflect a little bit on how far the technology has come during that time.

[Michael Brenzel]

Yeah, well, I would say it has changed a lot, it’s just not even enough to say. From a browser-based collaboration system, back then it was even, I remember the time 2006, when even I was on the IT side, and people said, oh, you’re giving out the control of your mail system to someone else. That was back then quite a different thing, but of course it was the start of something new. Now we are, let’s say, fully browser-based, making it simple, and you can do so much more. You only need your browser to create animations, pictures.

[00:05:01]

You have support creating emails, content documents, just a different way of working compared to 2006, when we started with that. I think the users are more fascinated. It confirms we have over 3 billion users that use our platform, which is quite a lot, and I think we’re quite close.

[(Unidentified)]

3 billion? Yeah, sure.

[Michael Brenzel]

With that said, we built an amazing product that is now, I would say, the standard for emailing, and everybody knows how to use it. No matter if you’re quite junior, or even higher age, everybody has, or let’s say, many people have at least a Gmail account, so they know how to use it, and what Google Workspace can do. With all these new features that are now available also for many in the public, so you can try it out with Gemini, we got amazing feedback, and people love the features, of course, that we have.

[John Furrier]

Workspace Updates – Ecosystem

Michael, I got to ask you about the ecosystem, because the big theme we’re seeing emerge again. More horsepower, classic cloud problem, get more TPUs, TPUs, check. The user experience, expectations are generative, and the other one’s the ecosystem. Last year, we observed massive uptake and energy and enthusiasm around what’s going on in workspaces.

[00:06:03]

What’s the ecosystem look like now, and how do people get involved as partners as you guys open up workspaces to this new user experience, this next big thing? What are some of the highlights, and are you guys looking for more partners in certain areas? How would you talk about the partner equation?

[Michael Brenzel]

Yeah, of course. It’s important for us to have partners working and supporting Workspace, of course, as well. We’ve seen also a lot of interest and more interest from partners to start offering, selling Workspace Big, and everybody’s trying out, as well, Gmail here, not just with the good old, let’s say, creating emails. They want to see how Gemini is working, and I think adding Gemini to Google Workspace created a lot more interest, so that we have, also not just from the customer side, the demand covering the interest, so that they can also roll it out and sell it to more and more customers, having the features available that we announced not just last year, also just today, to use it in their day-to-day business.

[Savannah Peterson]

Workspace Updates – Partner Ecosystem

You see a lot of the partners on the show floor today. You’ve got Partner of the Year awards everywhere.

[00:07:00]

Definitely an ecosystem play.

Workspace Updates – User Experience

One of the things that I think we can all agree that Google’s always been known for is a really easy user experience. When you’re rolling out these enormous new tools, being able to create video from a natural language prompt is an achievement, and especially doing it in a way that feels real and fast enough.

Workspace Updates – Customer Feedback

What’s that feedback loop like within your customers and your community as you’re developing these features?

[Michael Brenzel]

Well, first of all, there were really a lot of people that wanted to try it out, to say, okay, wow, I can just have a short sentence, and it creates something for me. Wow. The interest is amazing, and we see a lot of people try it out, and it creates a lot of more, let’s say, innovation. We see a lot of companies coming back saying, wow, we have given access to Gemini now to different departments, and we learned that the feedback is quite different, so people that might have never been able to or interested or have never done graphic creation. We got feedback that they say, okay, now this helps us that even more people can picture and create what they’re thinking, so that even projects have been created faster and in a completely different way, and everybody was able to make it more interesting.

[00:08:05]

Even adding then, let’s say, the features in Google Meet to have then, let’s say, studio lightning and better quality around, or the audio features that are coming up as well soon that make it available much more convenient for people to have in video calls, better quality of understanding, et cetera, so people love the features, and everybody wants to try it out. I think this was really one of these Gen AI moments that is still up at the peak level that everybody wants to experiment, really, what is that, what can we do here?

[Savannah Peterson]

Workspace Updates – First Video Made

What was the first video you made? I’m dying to know.

[Michael Brenzel]

No, for me, it was just trying out how, let’s say, have a cat walking around in a room, because the very simple thing, because, I mean, find a real cat that does what you want to do, what you want to do, so just to have something created here was just amazing.

[John Furrier]

I don’t think they fly, but, you know.

[Michael Brenzel]

Yeah, I didn’t ask to have the flying cat, no, but it’s just, to have something created in that, it was just, it was so easy. If you do it the first time, when you think, okay, this must take now ages to see, but it just, you know, it takes a few seconds, and off you go, and just the simplicity of building this now is really a game changer and a big difference now for the users as well.

[00:09:07]

[John Furrier]

Workspace Updates – Grounding in Google Search

On the keynote, Thomas Kurian was, when he had the other announcement about grounding in Google Search, I thought it was a pretty big deal, given that there’s a lot of data in Google Search. He then said, ground it in the enterprise data, so I want to get your thoughts on how you guys see the enterprise’s value of the workspaces, because they got data too, like I get all the spam emails come in to me, they all look the same, can I just get Gemini to like take care of that, and what are some of the things that’s going to go on in the enterprise, because I know there’s a HubSpot announcement in there, you’ve got all these other productivity tools, like, we live on Google Docs and Google Sheets, can I just have that be organized for me, I mean, what’s the future for us productivity workers?

Workspace Updates – Productivity Angle

Me too, I’m on this train, we need the beta testers for that. Just the normal people. We actually had searched our cube schedule, and now we can search it, where’s the cube going to be in April, and it comes back from the sheet, so there’s more low-code, no-code stuff coming down the pike, what’s the productivity angle and the data angle for the enterprise with workspaces?

[00:10:05]

[Michael Brenzel]

Workspace Updates – Enterprise Value

There’s a lot in there, but go take it. There is a lot, absolutely, so good question here, so the point clearly is, for example, sidebar, which we announced, where you can just click on it and you have this small little prompt on the right-hand side, and you can just say, hey, create me an overview or a summary of my latest cube video productions we had, how many users, et cetera, based on this Google Sheets file, and really link the documents you have available, and get a half-page response created, a draft, an overview of feedback, what you wanted to know. The old-school days, you probably might have gone and looked it up in 10 different files and read through it, fine, it can do and access every data you have available in your Google Drive, for example, and build an output based on that, so for enterprises, of course, it saves time, makes outcomes and outputs done in a few seconds, and also, I think it helps you, of course, to find things if you are lost in finding data and things, of course, yeah.

[John Furrier]

And better presentation formats, probably, for us, the same old style I use, I’m terrible at PowerPoint.

[00:11:03]

You speak for yourself on that one, Fourier. Google Docs. No, I said PowerPoint. I mean, Google Slides. So that’s the difference.

[Michael Brenzel]

It will help you, of course, as well, John, yeah.

Workspace Updates – Intuitive User Experience

It’s a difference.

[Savannah Peterson]

Well, I think, I mean, it needs to be intuitive, and you’re meeting people where they are. I’m sure you had some of your existing customers already in mind when you were creating a lot of these new features. I’m curious if you’ve been surprised by the response by, say, a different group of customers, perhaps, that you weren’t attracting before, or even different types of creators now empowered by this new tool kit.

[Michael Brenzel]

Workspace Updates – Customer Response

Yeah, so it’s, of course, we always have early test customers that try out the things, or even some people, not just, let’s say, consumers, also enterprises, come back and say, hey, what about this idea? What about these features? So we, of course, try to build something that will be asked by the audience, but also helps us to shape creativity. So when we try out and pass these features to our customers, we want to know, do you like it? Are you users? Are you people using it?

[00:12:00]

And we try, of course, to collect this feedback. And the feedback was really usually this big wow effect. People say, wow, I’m so much more productive. And people automatically come back and say, wow, it saves so much time, and I can help do it. I can focus on the most important things instead of doing less of my administrative work, filling out things, searching for things, just, hey, okay, I have here five different Google Sheets files. I want to create an offer, a proposal for my customer. I can just tag them in this Google sidebar in the prompt, and it creates it for me in just a few seconds where people said they have spent at least half an hour or even more before. So I think the feedback that we are happy to hear is it saves time, it gives them value, and they like it, of course.

[John Furrier]

Workspace Updates – Business Momentum

Can you share any stats on the business momentum around revenue, customer base, some exciting highlights? What’s the numbers look like in the workspace area?

[Michael Brenzel]

So yeah, we have already over 10 million paying customers that are using our services, and the number, of course, is growing a lot.

[00:13:00]

As I said, the three billion users we have for the workspace side is growing fast, and we immediately had a very high number of users that wanted to try out Gemini in workspace. And the feedback that I get regularly when I run around here and some people speak to me, everybody wants to try out the very new things. Even after when I left the keynote session, everybody said, okay, can you switch it on for me now? I want to try it. So everybody wants to see the life experience and get a feeling on it. The interest is very, very high, and the demand is also there. So I will see it.

[John Furrier]

Yeah. Well, we’re a customer. So we’re a proud customer of Google since the beginning of SiliconANGLE. We didn’t have an IT department. We still don’t. That’s the best part of having the managed service.

Workspace Updates – Business Growth

So a lot of goodies. What can we expect as a business, small business growing up with Google of these years? Good question. More automation. What would you say to our team and me?

[Michael Brenzel]

We will, of course, focus on making your, let’s say, the way how you collaborate and work much easier and faster. We will continue to help building amazing products for our customers and users so that it helps you save time as well.

[00:14:00]

And you will be able to create very cool outputs with simple prompts. And I think the more interesting thing that we hear from customers that everybody is now trying around and experimenting with, who does the better prompts? Which cool output can I create with a short sentence or just doing five line sentences and having an animation, a video, a graphic, a text. And that’s, I think, one of the things that everybody is focusing on. Everybody gets more and more used to how to use prompts to create the outcome that he or she wants.

[Rebecca Knight]

Workspace Updates – Prompt Engineers

We’re all prompt engineers now. Now you are?

[(Unidentified)]

We’re competing all the time for prompts.

[Michael Brenzel]

Let me get in there. Yeah.

[Rebecca Knight]

So as a workspace evangelist, I know that a lot of your job revolves around thought leadership, around the future of work.

Workspace Updates – Future of Work

And when I’m not with theCUBE, but my day job is as a journalist covering the future of work, I’m interested to hear what you think is missing from the conversation in the mainstream media. I mean, I think we’re all really interested in how we’ll be doing our jobs in the future. But what do you think is really, what do you think is not being talked about that you think is a really missing element?

[00:15:05]

[Michael Brenzel]

Workspace Updates – GNI Impact on Workplace

I think it will be more and more that we will talk about how GNI will change the workplace, the way we work and how we interact with each other and what everybody can build. With all these features and tools and prompts that we are using now and have available already, more and more employees, users will learn how their job can change or will change and how things can be done easier. I think we should talk really more already what’s possible for the user so that more and more people get the interest also to try out GNI in their day-to-day job using Gemini for their day-to-day job and their collaboration solution. The feedback is just always so amazing. I think that we can highlight that and that will be a big, big portion when it comes to talking about the future of work. The GNI will have his space there to stay and not just to say hello once. This is something what I would say we can really highlight more and more that we show people what’s possible when you add GNI features in collaboration solutions like Google Workspace.

[00:16:03]

[John Furrier]

Workspace Updates – Developer Appetite

Rebecca, that’s a great question. The next step I would take it is, okay, developers. As we start seeing open source developers with the models merging, there are 130 models in Vertex available, there’s going to be a tsunami of apps. If you look at what they said in the keynote, I thought it was interesting because last year we were raving about the model garden. Love the name, model garden. It implies things are growing and being generated there. I won’t go there, Savannah. What they’re growing is a whole other story. Now they’re like, okay, model gardens, model builders, and agent builders. You start to see agents emerge as the hottest conversation, not chatbots, but agents that have reasoning skills. You start to see that next level indication coming. What is the developer appetite now for Workspaces? How do you guys see that developer portion? Obviously, you’ve got a developer cloud, you have a collaboration cloud. What’s the developer angle on this?

Workspace Updates – Developer Angle

Where’s the action and what should developers be thinking?

[Michael Brenzel]

I think we enable with all the features and tools that we’ve shown and already built in the last, let’s say, six to 12 months, we enable developers in a complete different way to build more things faster, more efficient, and probably also in new ways.

[00:17:12]

We will also help, let’s say, developers with low skills or less experience than others to also build bases and start building some very cool things very quickly. Especially when you’re building, sometimes some things can’t be built fast enough. I think we help engage the velocity really to build and create something.

[John Furrier]

Workspace Updates – Agents

You see agents as hot, too, right? You had one customer agent example in there. Are there other examples of agents emerging that you can share?

[Michael Brenzel]

We have seen, of course, also with combining Vertex AI with Workspace that you can really connect, let’s say, one customer that wanted to connect this complaint database when you get feedback from customers, that they can respond faster to their customers with issues, et cetera. It takes out the issues that it got back from, let’s say, when customer reports came in, it helps the agent to respond and build a response to the customer much faster.

[00:18:03]

The interactions with many, many more customers in less time will help to, of course, usually increase the customer satisfaction and maybe also help solving problems with your issues or customers that a client might have.

[Savannah Peterson]

Workspace Updates – Customer Happiness

Spreading more happiness. I think that’s something that we all want to achieve.

[Michael Brenzel]

Happiness, yes.

[Savannah Peterson]

Yes. You talked a lot about some of the at-scale applications.

Workspace Updates – New Entrepreneurs

I got two questions that dovetail together here for you. One, do you think toolkits like what you’ve just announced are going to usher in a new series of entrepreneurs? On the back of that, or businesses, perhaps, like we said, there’s so many partners on the floor here with us today, and then on the back of that, do you have some examples that have really delighted you in terms of use cases or things that you’ve seen created as a result of some of these newer tools?

[Michael Brenzel]

The feedback we get, especially when you say talking about entrepreneurs, yes. Many people are now feeling more confident to build things in a way they’ve never done it. Others that said, well, I don’t have, let’s say, 10 people building graphics or images for me.

[00:19:05]

They can now do it, at least a first instance, get it done. So I think, yes, absolutely. There will be probably more people being able to create stuff which they’ve never done before or were even not confident to do it. So I think GenAI helps in many ways now to shape or help these entrepreneurs and even startups to build things faster or on their own and make it more efficient. And it’s great also, using the word you said before, more happiness broadly on the customer side, of course.

[Savannah Peterson]

I love it. I love it. It’s great.

Workspace Updates – Future Announcements

Okay, I got perhaps one of our last questions for you today. Johnny referenced last year, big announcements this year. What do you hope you’re able to say sitting next to us when we have you on the show at the next Google Cloud Next that you can’t say yet today?

[Michael Brenzel]

I’m looking forward on one of the features we announced a couple of months ago was the attend for me, that you can send even the GenAI to the meeting for you. So maybe next time the AI will sit here and does the meeting for me instead. No, but just…

[00:20:00]

Wow.

[John Furrier]

We’ll have agents on our behalf, working on our behalf.

[(Unidentified)]

Well, obviously animated. We’ll use a little vid. Yeah.

[Michael Brenzel]

Holograms. Holograms, et cetera. No, but I think there are a lot of new things coming and everybody wants to try it out. And I think as soon as everybody had the chance to experience the features we announced today, many things changed. And I’m looking forward to see a lot of customers or even prospective customers getting their hands on the new Google Workspace, Gemini features that we announced today or in the last couple of months to get to see what’s possible in using it and to change the way how they collaborate in the future.

[Savannah Peterson]

Google Cloud Next ’24 – Closing Remarks

I love it. Well, you know, you’ve got happy customers sitting right here. And I know I speak for the three of us when I say we can’t wait to get our hands on that. Michael, thank you so much for being on the show. And congratulations again on the absolute plethora of announcements from your group this week and from everything else going on at Google. And thank all of you for tuning in from home or wherever you happen to be on this beautiful rock to our live coverage here on theCube in Las Vegas, Nevada at Google Cloud Next. My name’s Savannah Peterson. You’re watching theCube, the leading source for enterprise tech news.