If you wanted to use all of Google’s AI features inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, and the rest of the Workspace suite, you previously needed to pony up another $20 per user per month for the Gemini Business plan. As of Tuesday, it’s free. Google is bringing all its AI features to its Workspace app at no extra cost as it continues to race Microsoft, OpenAI, and others to build the AI-powered office suite of the future.
There is a catch, though: as it makes this change, Google is increasing the price of all Workspace plans. Jerry Dischler, Google’s president of cloud applications, tells me companies will pay roughly $2 more per month per user for the AI-enabled Workspace than they were paying before. (The numbers aren’t exact, because companies have complicated and varying contracts, but the base subscription price was $12 a month and now it will be $14.)
Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps. It also comes with access to the Gemini bot itself, which is maybe Google’s single most powerful AI tool; the bot can do standard chatbot thing but can also help you find information, search across all your stuff, and more.
Dischler points out that Google is the most vertically integrated AI product out there right now, but that only matters if people are using the whole system. Now, everyone can. “Most of the time, when we talk to companies who are using AI, their big impediment is cost reasons,” he says. “That’s why they go in so gingerly. Like, ‘wow, this is a lot of money, and let’s prove the value.’ All right, now you get the AI. You have the value.” He says the various app roadmaps are already changing, too, and that new features will begin to ship quickly.
Google’s not the only company walking back its AI up-charge: Microsoft announced in November that its own Copilot Pro AI features, which had also previously been a $20 monthly upgrade, would become part of the standard Microsoft 365 subscription. So far, that’s only for the Personal and Family subscriptions, and only in a few places. But these companies all understand that this is their moment to teach people new ways to use their products and win new customers in the process. They’re betting that the cost of rolling out all these AI features to everyone will be worth it in the long run.
