Let’s face it. Marketing professionals aren’t exactly suffering from a technology shortage. Between CRMs, marketing automation platforms, analytics dashboards, content management systems, social media schedulers, and project management apps, the martech toolbox has limitless options. But they don’t sync for a seamless workflow; the norm for marketers is having at least ten browser tabs open.
Google is introducing something worth exploring: generative AI capabilities embedded directly in the applications many of us use every day. Through Google Workspace Experiments, formerly known as Google Workspace Labs, eligible users can test emerging artificial intelligence features powered by Google’s Gemini technology.
What makes this particularly interesting isn’t necessarily what Gemini can do. After all, most of us have become familiar with AI-generated content, summaries, and research assistance. It’s where Gemini can do it that makes Google Workspace Experiments a game changer.
What Exactly Is Google Workspace Experiments?
Google Workspace Experiments is an early-access program that allows eligible users to test generative AI capabilities across Google’s productivity applications, including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Forms, and other supported tools. This new dashboard provides access to features while they’re still being developed by Google. How you use the tools will help make them even better.
The important distinction is that Gemini is Google’s AI technology, while Workspace Experiments is a program for testing emerging features. Google also offers Gemini capabilities through eligible paid Workspace subscriptions.
For marketers, the attraction is convenience. Instead of interrupting your workflow to open another AI assistant or tool, you can work with Gemini directly in the document, spreadsheet, email conversation, or presentation you’re developing.
1. Google Docs: Because Every Campaign Starts Somewhere
If you’ve worked in marketing long enough, you’ve probably experienced the joy of opening a blank document and realizing you need to create an entire campaign strategy before tomorrow morning’s meeting. Audience personas, positioning, key messages, distribution channels, campaign objectives, content requirements, and performance metrics—preferably with a little creative brilliance sprinkled on top.
Gemini in Google Docs can help brainstorm initial campaign frameworks. For example, if you’re launching a new B2B software product, you could ask Gemini to develop a campaign brief containing sections for your target audience, product positioning, campaign objectives, recommended channels, content deliverables, and key performance indicators. Instead of staring at an empty page, you’re starting with an organized document that you can refine using your own research and experience.
Gemini can also assist with rewriting passages, developing outlines, summarizing information, and suggesting alternative messaging approaches. That makes it useful for content development, creative briefs, product announcements, and campaign planning.
2. Gmail: Finally, Something Useful for Those Endless Email Threads
Ah, email. The communication tool that sometimes manages to generate more communication than it resolves. Anyone who’s managed a service or product launch—or any other cross-functional marketing initiative—knows how quickly an email conversation can become a digital archaeological excavation. Unfortunately, that also means there’s a high probability of missing something important in a thirty-page conversation.
Gemini in Gmail can help summarize lengthy email conversations, identify important information, draft responses, and refine written communications. For marketers managing stakeholders, agencies, vendors, and internal teams, this could substantially reduce the time spent sorting through routine correspondence.
Imagine returning to your desk after several meetings and finding a lengthy email thread concerning a campaign. Rather than reviewing every response individually, you could ask Gemini to summarize the feedback, identify decisions, and highlight unresolved questions. Which conversations trailed off without a definitive decision? Gemini can highlight them for review.
3. Google Drive: Finding the Document You Know Exists Somewhere
Let’s discuss another universal marketing experience: spending twenty minutes looking for a document that someone insists is in the shared drive. Marketing departments accumulate an extraordinary amount of information. Campaign reports, product specifications, brand guidelines, customer research, creative briefs, content calendars, collateral, and sales presentations can multiply across folders. Or folders within folders. It’s a time sink.
Gemini in Google Drive can assist with locating relevant files, summarizing documents, and answering questions about information available in supported files. For marketers preparing campaigns, this creates opportunities to retrieve existing research and reference materials without opening every document to check manually.
4. Google Sheets: Making Sense of Marketing Data
Gemini in Google Sheets can help organize information, generate formulas, create tables, and explore patterns within data. For marketers responsible for campaign reporting, budget analysis, or lead-generation performance, these capabilities could simplify some of the more repetitive analytical tasks.
Imagine importing email campaign results into a spreadsheet and asking Gemini to help compare click-through rates, conversion rates, and other performance indicators. You could also ask it to suggest formulas, identify unusual changes, or structure information for a management report.
However, there’s a distinction between identifying a pattern and understanding its cause. If a campaign shows declining engagement, Gemini can help you spot the trend, but determining whether the issue is audience fatigue, messaging, targeting, deliverability, or market conditions requires a deeper investigation.
5. Google Slides: From Campaign Brief to Executive Presentation
Marketing professionals don’t simply develop strategies. We also spend considerable time explaining those strategies to other people.
Executive presentations, sales enablement materials, campaign proposals, quarterly business reviews, and product launch decks are all familiar territory. And while creating presentations can be enjoyable, formatting slides and organizing information can consume hours of time better spent on other priority marketing deliverables.
Put Gemini to work by asking it to generate presentation content and graphics, develop slide layouts, and edit existing ones. Start with a campaign brief in Google Docs, then use Gemini to develop a presentation covering data sets, engagement, target audiences, messaging, recommended channels, timelines, and performance measures.
Marketers can also transform a Google Slides presentation into a video easily. #MicDrop
6. Google Forms: Turning Customer Feedback Into Marketing Intelligence
We spend a remarkable amount of time developing messages intended to influence customers. It makes sense that we should also spend some time listening to them. Google Forms isn’t new tech, but it provides a straightforward way to collect customer feedback, conduct surveys, and gather market research. Experimental Gemini capabilities can help generate questions, develop forms, and summarize response patterns into actionable strategy.
Consider a company planning to introduce a new professional service. Before building the marketing campaign, the organization could survey prospective customers about their challenges, purchasing considerations, expectations, and preferred solutions. Gemini could assist with developing the questionnaire and help identify recurring themes once responses have been collected.
Surveys can inform product roadmap planning, test interest in a new service, and serve as the starting point for a sequential lead-nurturing campaign.
7. Google Vids: Exploring Video Without Starting From Scratch
Video marketing continues to create opportunities for businesses to educate customers, demonstrate products, and communicate complex ideas. Unfortunately, video production can also consume considerable time and resources.
Google Vids offers AI-assisted capabilities for developing storyboards, creating drafts, generating visual elements, and producing supporting audio. For marketers with limited production resources, these tools may provide an accessible way to begin developing video concepts.
Create a short educational video introducing a new software solution. You could use an AI-assisted workflow to explore a basic storyboard, develop a draft script, and organize the timeline. Refine the draft with your team, and you may have saved a lot of the time it takes to plan and execute branded video collateral.
Before You Start Experimenting, Let’s Talk About Privacy
As appealing as these capabilities sound, there are a few important considerations before introducing experimental AI into your daily marketing workflow.
First, Google Workspace Experiments is an early-access testing program. Features may change, disappear, or become available only to certain users. Anyone remember Google+ (I miss it!). Access also varies depending on account type, language, location, and Google’s rollout schedule. Some capabilities described here may be available through commercial Gemini subscriptions rather than the experimental program itself.
Google’s experimental program has its own privacy terms, which allow certain prompts, inputs, outputs, and feedback to be collected and used to improve its technology. If you’re handling confidential client information, proprietary marketing strategies, sensitive customer records, or regulated data, govern thyself accordingly.
The Bottom Line: Better Marketing, Not Just Faster Marketing
What interests me most about Google Workspace Experiments isn’t the novelty of having another AI assistant available. From our phones, to our smartwatches and laptops, we’ve reached the saturation point where artificial intelligence is in almost every application we open. I’m more surprised to meet someone who doesn’t use AI on a daily basis.
The more meaningful opportunity is the ability to incorporate AI assistance into established workflows without creating additional technological complexity. In an era where businesses are trying to do much more with fewer resources, AI helps on every vertical.
Effective marketing still depends on understanding customers, the culture of your brand, developing meaningful strategies, creating persuasive messages rooted in sales psychology, and measuring outcomes. Marketing is both a profession and a science rooted in human psychology, purchasing decisions, and engagement behavior—nuances that AI cannot fully replicate. Yet.
I find the possibilities exciting. Ultimately, the objective is not to replace marketing experience. It’s to utilize tools that do more of the rudimentary heavy lifting, so marketing minds can have more time to spend on ideation and creative strategy.
