What Is Google Gemini? A Business Leader's Overview

Gemini refers both to a family of AI models and to an AI assistant product. The models are tiered by capability: Gemini Ultra (the most capable, equivalent to GPT-4 class), Gemini Pro (balanced capability and cost), and Gemini Nano (optimised for on-device, lower-power use).

Gemini is natively multimodal, designed from the ground up to understand text, images, audio, video, and code within a single model architecture. This multimodal capability is more deeply integrated in Gemini than in earlier versions of competing models, and is a genuine technical distinction.

Gemini Ultra and Pro power the enterprise AI services Google sells through Google Cloud and Google Workspace. Gemini Nano powers on-device features in Android and selected enterprise mobile applications.

For organisations using Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet), Gemini is the AI layer that provides AI-assisted capabilities analogous to what Microsoft Copilot provides for Microsoft 365 users.

In practice, this means: AI-assisted drafting and editing in Docs, automated email drafting and summarisation in Gmail, AI-generated analysis and formula assistance in Sheets, automatic meeting summaries and action item extraction in Meet, and an AI assistant available across Workspace applications.

Gemini for Workspace is licensed as an add-on to existing Workspace plans. The positioning is directly parallel to Microsoft Copilot: a subscription that unlocks AI capabilities across productivity tools you already use.

Organisations that have standardised on Google Workspace often find that Gemini is the natural AI assistant for their teams, in the same way that Microsoft 365 organisations find Copilot the natural choice.

Beyond Workspace, Google offers enterprise AI through Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform. Vertex AI provides access to Gemini models via API, with enterprise data security controls, model fine-tuning capabilities, and integration with Google Cloud infrastructure.

Google's specific advantages in enterprise AI include: search quality leadership, which informs Gemini's ability to retrieve and synthesise information; data and analytics integration with BigQuery and other Google Cloud services; and genuinely strong multimodal capability for use cases involving image, video, or audio processing.

Google has been investing heavily in AI features across its advertising, search, and cloud businesses, and Gemini models are at the centre of this investment. The enterprise AI market is one where Google, Microsoft, and AWS are competing directly, and each is investing substantially.

For most UK enterprises, the relevant choice is between Gemini for Google Workspace organisations and Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 organisations. The switching costs of changing productivity suites are high enough that most organisations will use the AI layer integrated into their existing suite.

Claude and direct ChatGPT access are supplements rather than replacements for the productivity suite AI assistants; they provide additional capabilities (larger context windows, different writing styles, reasoning optimisation) that can be used alongside, not instead of, the core workspace AI.

Organisations running mixed environments (some teams on Google Workspace, others on Microsoft 365) face a more complex AI strategy, but the principle is the same: start with the AI capabilities integrated into the tools teams already use, then add specialist AI tools for specific high-value use cases.