If your workplace uses the Google Workspace productivity suite, you may soon have a new teammate—that is, an AI teammate.
In its mission to improve our real-life collaboration, Google has created a tool to group shared documents, conversations, comments, chats, emails and more into a unique generative AI virtual chatbot: the AI Teammate.
Powered by Google's Gemini generative AI model, AI Teammate is designed to help you focus more on your role within your organization and leave the tracking and resolution of collective assignments and tasks in the hands of the AI tool.
This virtual colleague will have their own identity, their own Workspace account, and a specifically defined role and objective to fulfill.
When AI Teammate is set up, it can be given a custom name, as well as other modifications, including its job role, a description of how it is expected to help your team, and the specific tasks it is supposed to perform.
In an example AI teammate demo at I/O 2024, Google showed off a virtual teammate named 'Chip' who had access to a group chat of those involved in presenting the I/O 2024 demo. Host Tony Vincent explained that Chip was aware of a multitude of chat rooms that had been created in the build-up to the big event.
Vincent then asks Chip if the I/O storyboards had been approved (the kind of question he would probably ask his colleagues) and Chip was able to answer, since he can analyze all of these conversations that he had been included in.
As AI Teammate is added to more threads, files, chats, emails, and other shared items, a collective memory of shared work is created in your organization.
In a second example, Vincent shows another chat room for an upcoming product launch and asks the room if the team is on track for the product launch. In response, AI Teammate searches everything it has access to, like Drive, chat messages, and Gmail, and synthesizes all the relevant information it finds to form its response.
When it's ready (which seems to take about a second or a little less), AI Teammate offers a digestible summary of its findings. He pointed out a potential problem to raise awareness among the team and then provided a timeline summary showing the stages of product development.
As the demo takes place in a group space, Vincent said anyone can follow along and participate at any time, for example by asking a question about the summary or having the AI Teammate transfer its findings to a Doc file, which it does as soon as as the Doc file is ready.
AI Teammate becomes as useful as it is customized, and Google promises that it can make your collaborative work seamless, integrating into the host of existing Google products that many of us are already used to.
