From brainstorming to building teams: FinQuery innovates with Gemini for Google Workspace

When your company’s mission is focused on simplifying people’s lives with technology, you have to be sure your employees are reaping the same benefits you promise your customers. At FinQuery, we've created a platform that gives organizations total visibility into financial accounting, contracts, and software subscriptions to see where they’re spending their money. As an organization, cost management and efficiency are in our DNA, and we want to help our people do their best work. Our company is also remote-first, so effective digital collaboration is critical for our success and an invaluable tool for attracting top tech talent. 

We initially adopted Google Workspace because it's a best-in-class, all-in-one solution for email management, content development, collaboration, and video conferencing. Having an all-inclusive and easy-to-use collaboration solution makes us more attractive to quality talent looking to us as a potential employer. Plus, most of our employees are already proficient with it on day one. 

At the end of 2023, we enabled Gemini for Google Workspace and started to casually experiment with its features. Gemini did everything from providing the framework for playful internal emails that read like Shakespearean poems to generating fun backdrops for Google Meet. It also helped us create internal team logos, based on inside jokes, to help liven up weekly sprint demos for our engineering teams. All this lightweight experimentation was great, but we were ready to apply Gemini’s power to our day-to-day work.

Looking for “the sparkle” in everyday workflows

As an early adopter of Gemini, we understood that AI was quickly becoming a cornerstone  for successful companies, so we were excited to fully implement the tool in our processes for next-level productivity. Today, everyone at FinQuery knows to look for the Gemini sparkle when we’re drafting a document or composing an email. 

We frequently have group brainstorming sessions, and it’s 20 times harder to start with a blank page than to start with something on it. Gemini helps us generate ideas to kick off the process, and then it builds on our ideas by highlighting additional information relevant to the topic. When we’re not in meetings, many of us spend a lot of our day in our Gmail inboxes, where Gemini is giving us time back by helping to draft responses faster. As the VP of Infrastructure, Amanda Taylor estimates that she’s getting back 20% of the time spent writing emails.

Amanda also uses Gemini as a coach or personal assistant. She can tell it about a business problem she’s facing, and it helps to brainstorm solutions. These can be as simple as helping to reframe the tone or refine the language in an email, or as complex as helping the business enablement team develop massive cross-organizational project plans. These project plans typically take months of work and hours of individual effort to consolidate, but with Gemini, the team now manages to complete a draft in just a matter of minutes, using previous plans as inputs. After 15 minutes of refining the content and formatting, an idea could be ready to share across the company. 

Solving complex problems for technical teams with Gemini

While all of our daily tasks in Workspace have become more efficient with Gemini, we’ve also found applications for generative AI to be of assistance in the more complex areas of our business. Our engineering teams are able to utilize Gemini to debug and troubleshoot their code. Teams can ask onboarding questions as they’re learning new systems, integrations, or tools; it’s like having an engineering mentor built into their computer.

Recently, we were tasked with evaluating new monitoring and observability tools that help us keep closer tabs on the health and security of our engineering infrastructure. A task like this should have taken us days of research and careful comparison, but we faced urgency. The team called in Gemini, and with a quick prompt, it sifted through the most popular tools on the market along with pros, cons, and key features to consider. With this blueprint, we were able to craft a clear, succinct one-pager that was practically ready to share with our CTO. Once we selected our tool, we were able to launch directly into system designs with Gemini’s assistance. 

Gemini is now front and center for all of our work, and it helps everyone at FinQuery to be more productive, collaborative, and responsive. It’s only going to increase our efficiency  as we use it, so we’re excited to continue as a  leader of the generative AI charge in fintech.