Equifax embraces secure generative AI with Gemini

“Gemini is not a quick fix — it’s a collaborative partner that can support our objectives, and it’s up to us to learn how to communicate with it.”

Snapshot: Global credit bureau Equifax adopted Gemini to enhance productivity while strengthening its security posture. As a result of its Gemini trial, Equifax found that:

• 97% of participants wanted to keep their Gemini licenses

• 90% of participants experienced an increase in work quality and quantity

• Employees from nearly all business units saved more than one hour per day

The mission and the challenge

Equifax delivers insights to its customers that power decisions to move people forward. Over the past seven years, the organization has invested $3 billion in The Equifax Cloud™, a top-tier global technology and security infrastructure that has changed nearly every facet of its infrastructure and continues to set Equifax apart in the industry. 

During this transformation, we knew we needed a partner who could help enhance enterprise communication and collaboration across its teams, from anywhere around the world, in a secure, cloud-native environment, which we were able to do with the adoption of Google Workspace

Security was at the forefront of our enterprise’s most critical needs as we looked to implement a generative AI solution. During our search, we ran a platform “bake-off” and found that Gemini met all our security needs. The solution inherits all our existing Workspace security settings to keep our data, prompts, and work within the tenant, giving us peace of mind to deploy generative AI across our enterprise safely

Here’s how we use Gemini today to foster innovation across teams while improving our security posture.

The switch to Gemini

Our goal for using Gemini was to increase efficiency and productivity, freeing up time for end users to work on more impactful initiatives and projects. To better understand the tool’s ROI, Equifax worked with Google Workspace and SADA, an Insight company and Google Premier Partner, to run a six-month trial with more than 1,500 participants and a waitlist of over 300 people. SADA created custom Gemini training agendas to dive into specific use cases for Equifax. The SADA team also ran demos to show how Gemini integrates across the Workspace suite. This made it easy to understand how Gemini can enhance every step of our workflows.

The journey of integrating Gemini wasn't just about adoption — it was about discovery. With the support of our Google Workspace Customer Success team, we built a value-driven framework to help with audience selection, survey design, and measurement so that Equifax could effectively evaluate the value of Gemini. By providing a structured way to assess the tool’s business impact, we unlocked a wealth of insights into the specific tasks where it was truly making a difference. This allowed us to understand how our team was experiencing the power of Gemini on a daily basis.

After the trial, 97% of users asked to keep their Gemini licenses, 90% saw an increase in work quality and quantity, and employees from almost every business unit saved more than one hour per day by using the tool. That’s valuable time back in their schedules to focus on more important work. For example, our help desk representatives use Gemini to look deeper at the data to determine how to improve the service they provide our end users. Other teams use the “take notes for me” feature to create transcripts, summaries, and action items from Google Meet calls, putting all the details in one place so we can share with anyone who misses a meeting.

Looking ahead

As we prepare for phase two of our Gemini deployment with Google Workspace and SADA, we’re taking what we learned from the trial to deliver the best possible resources to our teams. We are rolling out Gemini to our nearly 22,000 employees and contractors, focusing on the most requested training topics, like prompting and use of the side panel, and team-specific use cases, such as those in marketing and finance. SADA will facilitate open office hours, creating an open forum where employees can drop in and ask questions if they feel stuck.

We’re also excited to evaluate new Gemini-enabled tools as we look to expand our generative AI usage in creative ways. NotebookLM has the ability to upscale our collaboration with Gemini and allow us to do more with our data, while Google Vids can empower us to generate engaging video content at scale. In our experience, once people start using Gemini, they simply don’t want to stop using it — and we’re confident that Gemini will continue to support our efficiency, productivity, and security goals.