Questrade Financial Group transforms productivity using Google Workspace with Gemini

“Our two- to three-year goals now feel more like six-month goals, because Gemini helps us work smarter, compress timelines, and bring our objectives nearer.”

Snapshot: Questrade Financial Group, a Canadian group of companies, adopted Gemini to increase productivity and improve our competitive edge. With it, we are:

• Increasing efficiency, enabling employees to focus on strategic initiatives

• Democratizing content creation and coding

• Saving hours of time enabling business users to build solutions in AppSheet, with the help of Gemini

• Saving two days of writing time per blog with Gems

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The mission and challenge

Questrade Financial Group provides securities and foreign currency investment, professionally managed investment portfolios, mortgages, insurance, real estate services, financial services, and more, in pursuit of our mission to help Canadians become more financially successful. Our innovative, customer-centric approach allows us to offer better, simpler, and more cost-effective ways for our customers to take control of their money. 

We’re innovative with our technology, too, both to provide better services to our customers and to improve how we work, which is why we adopted Google Workspace as our productivity and collaboration platform in 2019. When the pandemic hit, Workspace put us ahead of the curve. The platform empowered our employees to communicate, collaborate, and work effectively to continue delivering the financial services our customers expect. 

Having established a strong collaborative foundation in Workspace, we continued to explore new technologies to give us a competitive edge. We soon realized that embedding generative AI into our operations was the logical next step. As a financial services organization, we take the security of our data incredibly seriously, so we needed a solution that would keep our data private and secure. The fact that Gemini wouldn’t use our data to train its models gave us the confidence that we could use it securely and our data would remain our own. 

The switch to Gemini

We implemented Gemini for its potential to transform how our teams work and deliver even more effective services for our customers. By working with cloud solutions consultancy and Google Premier Partner SADA, An Insight company, we were able to speed up the launch of our pilot. We joined the Gemini early adopter program and gave access to a select group of tech-forward pioneers from across the organization, who became our Questrade AI Innovators. To ensure a smooth and successful trial experience for these Gemini early adopters, SADA implemented a comprehensive change management program. This program included multiple training sessions, answering our users’ questions during office hours, weekly tips and videos, engaging trial participants in a dedicated Google Chat space, and collecting responses from surveys to let us measure our progress in Gemini adoption. This helped prove the value of the tool, enabling us to roll out Gemini with confidence across the company.

Our internal AI enablement and change team provided invaluable support as we did so. We also leveraged the expertise of our AI Innovators to guide our new Gemini users. To ensure relevance for all, we developed custom training tailored to each department. These sessions covered essential topics like prompt engineering, included role-play scenarios specifically for our mortgage team, and demonstrated how our executive team could utilize Gemini to extract instant insights from complex financial statements.

Employees now use Gemini to streamline time-consuming and repetitive tasks, giving them more time to focus on strategic initiatives. For example, teams use Gemini to generate speaker notes for Google Slides presentations, brainstorm ideas, conduct comprehensive research, and summarize lengthy documents. They also use it to synthesize information from various files on Google Drive, saving them considerable time when searching  for relevant material. Meanwhile, when employees need to consume lengthy reports, they can use NotebookLM to generate an engaging audio version of the material, which they can listen to while performing other tasks, boosting their productivity.

Gemini has also helped us  enhance how we communicate. Employees use Gems to write content—a blog post, for example, that might have previously taken two days to research and write can now be drafted in a couple of hours. Meanwhile, users with English as a second language use Gemini to quickly draft English-language emails without worrying about making mistakes, which puts them on an equal footing with native English speakers. Gemini democratizes coding too, enabling less technical users to easily create intelligent applications with AppSheet, helping build solutions and workflows that would previously have taken hours in a matter of minutes.

Looking ahead

As we expand and explore our use of Gemini, we continue to offer customized training sessions to our teams to ensure every department can make the most of this technology’s potential. We’re building on existing use cases, such as our generation of audio content with NotebookLM, and creating more Gems to increase our creativity and productivity. At the same time, we’re excited to discover new and exciting use cases to increase productivity and efficiency and enable our staff to focus more time on strategic and client-facing initiatives. 

While we’re still early in our adoption of Gemini, as we look to the future, it’s rapidly changing our sense of what’s possible. Our two- to three-year goals now feel more like six-month goals, because Gemini helps us work smarter, compress timelines, and bring our objectives nearer. Ultimately, Gemini empowers us to dream bigger as an organization, making it a very exciting time for Questrade.