Google launches Gemini Enterprise to challenge Microsoft, OpenAI for AI dominance

Google’s cloud unit is launching an artificial intelligence platform called Gemini Enterprise that it hopes will reach everyday workers, setting up a deeper competition with Microsoft and OpenAI for business tools.

Unveiled on Thursday ahead of the Alphabet company’s Gemini at Work event, the aim is to provide an easy-to-use AI tool that will help employees across departments automate complex tasks and generate content. The platform will cost a monthly fee of US$30 per user, Google said.

Gemini Enterprise provides workers “a single front door through which they can chat with all of their enterprise data, search for information and use agents to do a variety of tasks on their behalf”, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a briefing before the announcement. “We’re democratising how people can access AI.”

With the launch of Gemini Enterprise, Google Cloud is directly challenging rivals such as Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, betting that a unified and open platform is the key to winning the battle for the AI-powered workplace. The announcement also plays into Google’s broader effort to show it’s gaining serious traction with business customers in the competitive enterprise AI market. The company recently said it was incorporating Gemini throughout the Chrome browser, pushing to weave its AI model into all of its products.

Kurian said nine of the top 10 AI labs in the world now get their computing power from Google Cloud, and the company recently revealed that it has as much as US$106 billion in commitments from existing customer contracts that it has yet to fill – of which US$58 billion is expected to turn into a revenue boost for the unit by 2027. In general, Google Cloud is viewed as one of Alphabet’s strongest sources of growth as the tech giant’s main search business matures.