• 51.4% boost in daily usage of Gemini for Google Workspace 

• 73.5% of users agreed or strongly agreed that Gemini saved them time

• 42.9% said that Gemini saved them 1-2 hours per day on average

As a trusted supplier of branded promotional products for a global audience, Gold Bond, Inc. strives to create connections with customers to produce lasting brands. The company also knows the value of building bonds between employees through effective communication and collaboration — that’s why CIO Matt Price focuses on leveraging the right technology to bring teams together.

"Our company has been around since 1947, and our previous tech stack represented that," Price says. "As technology and our customers’ needs evolved, we recognized that our legacy on-premise solution, Microsoft, was a costly nightmare to manage, and it limited our ability to collaborate efficiently."

In 2011, Price and his team began to explore other solutions and quickly determined that Google Workspace provided the comprehensive, agile tools it needed to support its 185 employees. Since switching to Workspace, Gold Bond has fully embraced the platform and adopted emerging technologies such as Gemini for Google Workspace to further drive productivity.

Since many of Gold Bond’s employees (including Price) already used Gmail in their personal lives, and younger cohorts used additional Workspace tools throughout their education careers, adopting the platform at Gold Bond was a seamless transition. The biggest challenge was the shift in mindset away from traditional email systems and file sharing methods toward a unified, cloud-based collaboration platform.

To support people through the change, Price’s team held weekly training sessions and identified key users within the organization that could act as Workspace champions to help others learn best practices. They also took an all-or-nothing approach: "Once we switched to Google Workspace, we shut off access to all other tools," Price explains. "This helped reduce IT costs and support desk tickets, mitigate the security risks of siloed tools, and support quick adoption."

Embracing Workspace enabled Gold Bond to go entirely paperless, and empowered employees to collaborate in real time across teams and projects to meet customer demand. For example, the company sells promotional products to distributors who then sell to the public — and they expect Gold Bond to fulfill orders within three to five business days with products fully customized to their customers’ branding. Gold Bond’s previous setup would’ve made this turnaround impossible, but with Workspace, teams can work faster to deliver products on time, which has helped the company maintain its 99% customer satisfaction score.

Gold Bond also uses built-in security features in Workspace to keep company data secure and mitigate concerns like phishing campaigns and ransomware attacks. As part of its security strategy, the company deployed Chromebooks across the organization, bolstering its security posture and lowering its total cost of ownership for devices. 

"We can implement security policies and access controls in the Google Workspace Admin panel and then apply those policies across all our Chromebooks," Price says. "This ensures everyone is following best practices for security."

As long-time Workspace customers, Gold Bond was quick to try Gemini for Google Workspace when it was released. But as CIO, Price did his due diligence and experimented with other generative AI solutions to determine which would bring the most value to the company.

Then Promevo, a Google Premier Partner that helps businesses harness the power of Google solutions, reached out and asked if Gold Bond wanted to participate in a Gemini for Google Workspace pilot. "Since Gemini was included in our Google Workspace license, we were excited to see how it would enhance our workflows and boost productivity," Price says.

Price’s team sent out a Google Form to encourage employees to sign up and attracted a group of 25 participants, 15 of whom had never used generative AI before. Over the next four weeks, Promevo provided hands-on training, workshops, and change management services to drive engagement and help teams get the most out of the tool. This included a comprehensive walkthrough of Gemini and the pilot program; demos and office hours with participants; surveys to measure impact, time savings, and challenges; and a summary of pilot and survey results to demonstrate the program’s success.

Now, Gold Bond uses Gemini across Workspace applications to automate workflows and speed up processes. For example, Gemini in Google Docs helps accelerate contract reviews, summarize content, or tweak language to be more or less formal, while Gemini in Google Sheets helps write complex formulas. Gemini Advanced supports content creation for product descriptions, blog posts, promotional emails, and helps with writing code and workflow automations.

By the end of the pilot, the survey results showed that daily Gemini usage rose by 51.4%, 73.5% of users said they agree or strongly agree that Gemini saves them time, and 42.9% said that Gemini saved them one to two hours per day on average.

"I received really positive feedback from pilot participants on Promevo’s precise, professional, and prompt support," Price says. "We’re excited to roll Gemini out to more employees and explore the many ways it can augment our workflows."