Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace
188 comments
·January 15, 2025the_snooze
bambax
How is AI in email a good thing?!
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
mcastillon
I think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmail
energy123
It almost can't be a good thing. LLMs are only useful when given all the relevant context. When you write an email, the context is mostly in your head.
llm_trw
It isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened beforehand and all the documents around them.
The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened.
Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
throwaway287391
I like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...
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LtWorf
This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D
bambax
Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
hoyd
Do you happen to have a link for that comic?
ASalazarMX
Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics.
Craighead
[dead]
belval
Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.
I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
anon84873628
This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.
xnx
> we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
username223
Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.
behnamoh
I bet the reviews are evaluated by AI too—AI writes, AI evaluates, what could go wrong? :)
nharada
I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails and organize the info.
Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
rurp
That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.
jjnoakes
I take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do, instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much easier for me to verify the script does what I want and then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs verifying the AI output if it did the task directly.
I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
macNchz
I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.
shinycode
I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?
macNchz
It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found it...not terribly useful.
tomrod
Indeed.
CobrastanJorji
I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.
tomrod
I'm in this role for my company.
There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool.
There is value for concise drafts.
I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.
thumbnailsketch
What if there was something that communicated the company’s top priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos? Would that be something you’d try?
ape4
I can hardly wait to use it as an excuse. "Oh sorry I didn't do that because it wasn't in the AI summary" ;)
radarsat1
I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.
herewulf
So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the artificially intelligent fuck up.
These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less work.
hn_throwaway_99
I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff AI in everywhere".
Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
jakedata
We are doing a Gemini POC and this nugget dropped in my lap today. We were not entirely unprepared as a result. The default level of access is just the interactive chatbot thing. However if you enable the Google Workspace extension it will be able to search and process all the information stored in your workspace account and also any Google Drive files that are shared with you. This includes stuff you didn't know you had access to in Shared Drives so folks better make sure their permissions are locked down. Workspace admins might be advised to turn it off at the org level until they understand the ramifications.
simonw
Reminds me of an entertaining story about Microsoft Copilot last year, where companies were turning it off because it turned out it was TOO good at its job - if any accountant anywhere in the company had messed up their SharePoint permissions asking "what does everyone at this company earn?" would spit out all of the salaries: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/23/microsoft-copilot-data...
CobrastanJorji
That of course allows for a new internal seditious attack vector. Generate a handful of spreadsheets in your own folder, name it something like "executive payroll data" or "sales revenue by org," put whatever you want in there, mark it visible by all, and wait.
Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and put things like "Management plans to terminate this product in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."
canucker2016
You have to change the font colour of the trojan data to be the same as the background colour of the doc!
Then add some corporate lorem ipsum text elsewhere in the doc to throw the scent off the data bloodhounds.
Sit back and wait with an evil grin on your face.
TuringNYC
I recently got Gemini Advanced as an additional benefit by virtue of having Google One paid storage. I'm shocked this is being given away for free, because it is now a seriously major part of my work. I literally have an Open window all day long interacting with it. It does make me wonder how much they are losing (investing) on giving all this inference away for free. Also makes me wonder what they are getting back aside from loyalty/data/?
I always felt ripped off by the 5TB/10TB plans (https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=en&g1_landing_page=0) but now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.
seanvelasco
I pay for 3 Workspace orgs, and I have Gemini disabled (or still not enabled) on all 3 of them. I'm angry that I'll have to pay more for features I don't use. Gemini should be an add-on cost, not included in the base cost
If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
ra
I agree.
It feels like Google are shoving AI down our throats and making Workspace customers pay for it's development.
I don't want your half-baked LLM features.
bbarnett
With Amazon as an example for CxOs of the world, sadly, this likely won't happen.
Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom 10% not willing to spend.
Huh.
Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.
If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood, Prime's model will collapse.
makeitdouble
I was on Prime for years until it lapsed because of a card change, and I realized most of my shipping would still be free:
- my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold
- most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold
- if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.
- Prime day sales aren't great
Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)
add-sub-mul-div
I've never had Prime and I get free shipping 100% of the time.
You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for into impulse buys.
bombcar
Exactly this, and since Covid the 2-day has been about as fast as the “free with $35” option, and waiting encourages thrift anyway.
I only reactivate it when they give me a week free or for $1 and the additional cash back is worth it.
spaceguillotine
i cancelled prime over a year ago and i still get packages in the same time frame, i think once they nixed a lot of next day deliveries that it didnt matter anymore.
The downside is quality of products still keeps going downhill and not even mcmaster had the parts i needed.
navane
Loosing the people that actually care about the price/reward is a bonus for them, now they have an audience that buys superfluous stuff.
beretguy
Any idea where you'll move? I have a nonprofit I want to migrate away.
herewulf
If your mail is extremely low volume, you might like Migadu's low cost plans. They charge by number of messages in/out rather than per domain or something. It's been handy for me for a few lightly used domains including resurrecting one that the previous owner had let expire and then suddenly needed.
I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.
I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.
paradite
I'd rather Google fix the calender integration in Gmail first.
I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.
But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are missing return flight.
jkaplowitz
Does this apply to the legacy free edition? I suspect not, since that edition is now only available for personal use and they mostly focus on Business and Enterprise use cases, but their public guidance isn't very clear. If it does apply, would we legacy free edition users be receiving Gemini under the Google Workspace Terms of Service preventing them from using our data for general AI training, or under the regular Google Terms of Service which might allow this?
(Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)
kccqzy
There's no legacy free edition for personal use any more. That ship sailed in 2022. I do not believe there is a way to have it free after 2022. Free plans were converted to Business Starter.
jkaplowitz
Nope, I still have it, I know it wasn't abolished for existing users. You're right that they initially planned to get rid of it, but they backtracked. They set a deadline by which existing users had to confirm that they were using it for personal use if they wanted to keep it. Anyone who didn't click the confirmation button was indeed converted to a paid plan like you are saying, but those of us who did continue to have the legacy free edition.
kccqzy
Oh dear. Thank you stranger for telling me I missed my chance to milk more free stuff out of Google. I see plenty of other people on Reddit doing that successfully.
bombcar
They enabled a way to get a free plan of some sort, I still have it.
You can’t get new ones, but mine keeps existing. For now.
sirsinsalot
I saw a Google AI advert that said:
"Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make their wedding."
That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.
Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
What happens when social skills are delegated too?
grajaganDev
Workspace was $12/month, now it will be $14 with AI included. AI was $20/month.
Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
nashashmi
It was selling well enough. It just was not getting enough traction. By bundling AI, they are giving exposure to everyone who didn’t want to use it or didn’t see the need for it. If they pulled it away in 2 years, and then lowered the price and charged separately for AI, I think more people would see it as necessary.
AI is a better search engine. And a better grammar check for your emails. And a better writer for your reporting.
goatlover
Is it really though?
jsheard
Users will continue to be beaten with the AI cudgel until morale improves.
Macha
I do wonder if these kind of price cuts (see also Microsoft) will finally stop the demands from investors that everything be AI.
makeitdouble
When it's baked into the default price, more sales can be attributed to it (whether it's true or not), and more users will have used it (they're effectively paying for it, they'll at least try once)
On paper it will look good, as long as a trend of users vocally bailing out of Workspace doesn't happen. And given the enterprise nature of it, I don't see that happening.
Cthulhu_
Ah it's new tech, they just need to get used to it until they can't do without!
paxys
Pretty much. A small set of customers weren't willing to pay for AI? Now everyone has to pay for AI.
from-nibly
Bob need's that bonus.
grajaganDev
Collective punishment.
ra
I expect take up was in the low single-digit percentage points. So charging every single subscriber $2/user (even if they don't want it) probably yields significantly more revenue.
whalesalad
Shid. I made the mistake of getting my entire family onto my google apps 15+ years ago. Now I am paying for about 8 people every month and this will just make it worse.
yieldcrv
yes this particular seat price increase might be the one that breaks the camel’s back
an ignorable monthly credit card charge, to one that has to go
urbandw311er
I’m on paid Google Workspace for my one-man business : I paid for a month of the separate AI add-on but I stupidly agreed to an “annual commitment” which means that, even though I don’t use the AI stuff (it’s not particularly useful) I have to keep paying for it every month for a whole year! :-(
Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?
Cockbrand
> If you previously purchased Gemini for Google Workspace, you won't be charged for it after January 31, 2025.
See https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543#zippy=%2Cwhats-...
Atotalnoob
Ask support.
What’s the worst they can do? Say no?
kotaKat
Cool, great, fun. I have all of the “generative AI” features disabled in Workspace, and now I get to pay more for the privilege of keeping them disabled. Thanks, Google!
echelon
Same. This is bullshit.
Nobody on my team uses these features. They're actually quite distracting.
Google gets to raise prices under the guise that these are improving productivity.
I wish there was a fast and easy alternative. Google has its claws in deep.
est31
One thing I really loved is automated transcripts on youtube. I love watching youtube videos, but sometimes I want to remember where I heard some statement, so I can just copy paste the entire transcript and do ctrl+f on it.
So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning models).
dimitri-vs
I believe with the YouTube extension enabled for Gemini you could provide it a YouTube link and ask questions on the transcript
jsheard
What are the odds that they will tally that extra $2/user/month up as "AI revenue" regardless of how many subscribers actually use those features?
>Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps.
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."