Why Google is killing it

Speaking as a CTO

It’s an old joke that first time founders focus on product, while second time founders focus on distribution.

Google is absolutely demonstrating the truth of that at the moment.

I’m not talking about flashy benchmarks or ridiculously named features (Nano Banana Pro - so bad it’s good?), I’m talking about simple cohesion.

Gemini is everywhere in Google Workspace.

When it was first released, and the models weren’t as good, this was annoying. Now though, it’s amazing - being able to ‘talk’ to my emails without having to search through them for relevant information probably only saves me minutes a day, but man those minutes feel good to have back.

Having note-taking on Google meet calls provided courtesy of Gemini is also neat - the summaries aren’t as good as other tools like Granola, but when it’s bundled in ‘for free’ it’s hard to justify the cost of those external tools.

Indeed, removing the need for external tools is a huge boon. One of the biggest headaches around AI tooling from a CTO perspective tasked with caring about data privacy and GDPR compliance is sensitive information ending up in applications where they’re at risk.

Business Workspace accounts ensure that all relevant documents and context can be shared with a powerful LLM (Gemini) with a single login, robust permissions, and guarantees that company data will not be used in training. This helps me sleep much easier at night.

And the advantages really compound. For a lot of businesses, a lot of the key context can live in Google, especially when you start relying on Gemini for meeting notes. It might not have the code, or the data, but it is likely to have the meaning and the strategy, which is vital, especially at Board level.

All this to say, from an executive perspective (which is where I spend a lot of my time at the moment), Google is killing it at the moment,. It’s making what would have been the worst bits of the job a few years ago, like writing reports and synthesising information from across disparate sources into coherent strategies some of the most fun and straightforward parts of the role.