Gemini LLM: Useful Tool or Interesting Toy?

As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, AI is a tool that has come to the forefront of the national conversation over the last year or two with the release of ChatGPT and Bard among others. In recent months, Google has been rolling out its AI infused products that anyone can sign up for if they go to g.co/labs. On this page, using your personal Gmail account, you can sign up for access to features such as Generative AI in Search, Workspace and also entirely new products such as Music FX and NotebookLM. For our purposes today, I am going to focus on Search and Google Workspace but I encourage you to go and look at these other tools as they are fascinating and, for the most part, free to use. 

Google Search, first launched in 1998, has been constantly evolving over the last quarter century into the global search juggernaut that it is today. As it stands, Google has over 90% market share of all global internet traffic which means hundreds of thousands of searches per second and billions per day and per month. With this titanic volume of searches and with hundreds of thousands of new websites coming online every day, Google needs to keep up and needs to keep providing the same fast and convenient search experience that has kept users coming back for so many years. This is where the capabilities of AI come into play and its ability to sort and understand our searches in the way traditional algorithms never could. 

While it is still a bit of an open question as to how AI in Google Search will affect AdWords marketers, the integration of Bard’s chat features with search results has been very helpful for me in recent months.

The image above is an example of this integration showing how to achieve a Ladder Mate in Chess. As you can see, this search will give you the immediate answer followed by videos, further links and even a step by step guide (not pictured). It will even give you links (circled in red) that will show you where it gets its information from if you want more information or to check its sources. This integration is seamless and makes it much faster and easier to find what you’re looking for on the results page. There even seems to be some light image generation capabilities being rolled out (pictured below) that is more entertaining than anything else right now but will get much more powerful overtime. 

For Google Workspace, my experience has been similarly positive but I don’t see these features as being quite as useful yet. For those who aren’t familiar, Google Workspace is Google’s suite of word processing tools such as Sheets, Docs, Slides, Forms and more. AI, at least so far, has been integrated into these tools as a pop up sidebar, called Duet AI, that you can input requests to in order to have something created on your screen. For me the usefulness of this tool specifically comes in the form of utility over creativity. For example, in Google Sheets, which is Google’s version of Microsoft Excel, you can explain to the bot a table you might be looking for and it will generate something for you. 

This example above is something I have used in the past and found quite useful as table creation can be time consuming. Conversely, on the creative side, you can give an input to Google Docs and it will generate bodies of text for you based on those inputs. The screenshot you see below is an example of such a prompt. In this example you can see a template generated for an interview thank you note. While this template is not implausible, and is an improvement compared to the last few months, it still lacks that more human quality to the writing that might make this feel a bit odd to send to someone. 

Personally, I am of the belief that the possibility of AI is endless. All of the tech giants are now heavily investing in this tool and I do believe that the next few years will see major breakthroughs that will impact all of our lives. For example, Google is even talking about medical use cases such as early diagnosis and treatment of well known diseases. It is definitely true that there are concerning aspects to AI that need to be heavily considered and discussed but, overall, this tool has enormous potential for good. In my own world, I see AI being hugely beneficial to both my personal and professional life. Personally, I find these tools useful and entertaining for completing tasks or solving problems that I might have in my everyday life. Professionally, I believe this will only serve to enhance and evolve our role as search marketers. 

I would encourage you to explore these tools to see how they can augment your day to day personal and professional life as the AI revolution is fully upon us now and it is here to stay.