Thoughtworks: Boosting productivity, professionalism, and collaboration with Gemini for Google Workspace

At Thoughtworks, we live and breathe strategic consulting, integrating design and technology into our services. Well-versed in leveraging the latest technologies to improve our customers’ offerings and operations, we’ve delivered success for some of the world’s most recognized brands, from introducing new ways of working at Spotify to helping New Zealand’s largest online marketplace, Trade Me, become an innovative, customer-led organization. We also embrace new technologies to streamline and improve our own internal processes, communications, and outputs.

To do this, we’ve established long-term relationships with technology providers that align with our culture and commitment to innovation. When Google Cloud announced the infusion of generative AI into Google Workspace through the Gemini for Workspace Enterprise add-on, we jumped at the chance to explore this offering.

Today, we use the full range of Google Workspace tools, including Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Chat, and Gmail, to collaborate and serve our customers. Over the 15 years since we first deployed the suite, we’ve been a trusted tester that has helped guide Workspace development, so working with Google Cloud on Gemini for Google Workspace Enterprise was a natural step. 

Piloting Gemini for Google Workspace Enterprise

We saw many ways this technology could support our business, including helping our consultants produce well-written and structured thought leadership pieces for external consumption. It would also further our strategic plan to infuse generative AI into everything we do. This includes the services we offer to our clients, such as customer experience, product development, and enterprise modernization, and our own corporate functions, such as matching staff with opportunities and client requirements.

Thoughtworks is a flat organization where trust is high and this trust extends to long-standing partners like Google Cloud. This meant we could quickly proceed with Gemini for Google Workspace once we completed our standard legal and security reviews.

We are now piloting Gemini for Google Workspace Enterprise with about 50 Thoughtworkers, with plans to extend its use further across our business. This would bring the power of Gemini to more than 10,000 employees across 19 countries supporting customers in industries such as financial services, healthcare, and retail.

Helping employees draft higher quality content faster

As a non-native English speaker, I’ve used the Help me write prompt in Gemini to deliver more polished written content, such as blogs and emails, faster. I create drafts in Docs and prompt Gemini to improve the grammar and phrasing, then make adjustments to shorten the text and customize the tone to be more formal or casual.

Previously, I would find it hard to begin composing something and it would take a few days to write once I got started. Now, I find it easier to start writing and I can finish a blog post on a familiar topic in just 30 minutes. I've also noticed that even my unassisted writing is improving. Gemini is teaching me through its recommendations.  

We’ve been collecting feedback from Thoughtworkers throughout the pilot and our people are  surprised by how good it is. Over the course of testing, we continue to get better responses from the product. Overall, Gemini for Google Workspace significantly improves the confidence of non-native English speakers in their writing, which improves the frequency, professionalism, and quality of their written communications. Our native English speakers benefit too. One team member, who is a strong writer, shared that Gemini has helped him polish his written English further, enabling him to draft even more compelling content.

Improving communication productivity with Gemini

From our work with Gemini to date, we’ve identified an extremely strong use case for a business like ours. With offices around the globe and many people communicating in non-native languages, the solution improves our internal and external communications.

Our teams can now work faster, more efficiently, and with greater confidence, and they are more inclined to document and share their great ideas. This helps enable us to generate insights quickly across projects and contribute to our internal knowledge base. And since Gemini is embedded in Google Workspace and included in our enterprise account, we also do not have to sanitize written generative AI outputs to remove confidential content. This removes all the speed bumps and allows us to get on with our work.  

Looking forward, we are extremely excited about the stronger integration of Gemini into Gmail. It can generate email messages in the author’s distinctive voice, avoiding the somewhat bland output generated by standard AI while also enhancing productivity.  

In the long term, we expect Gemini to help us leverage our knowledge base, thought leadership, and insights more effectively. Combined with client knowledge, this will help us provide better, more efficient consulting services to help our clients become more customer-centric, navigate digital transformation, modernize data platforms, and realize the benefits of generative AI. Ultimately, this will help us realize our vision of having an extraordinary impact on the world through our culture and technology excellence.