If your company runs on Google Workspace, you already have Gemini. The question is whether it’s doing anything for you.
A new Total Economic Impact™ study by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Google, measured what Google Workspace with Gemini delivered at five organizations in financial services, consumer goods, technology, and telecommunications. The headline result: a 416% return on investment over three years for a composite organization built from their experience.
Many companies have exactly the same tools and see far less. The difference wasn’t the tools. It was how these companies rolled them out.
There’s also a catch. The organizations in the study had between 15,000 and 35,000 employees. So what does any of this mean for a company of 50, 200, or 1,000 people? More than you might think, because the most useful findings are measured per person, not per enterprise.
Interviewees put the range at 3 to 5 hours per Gemini user per week. These figures come from large-scale employee surveys across nearly every role, from HR and finance to sales and frontline staff.
None of that depends on company size. A finance manager in a 200-person company summarizes contracts and prepares reports the same way a finance manager in a 20,000-person company does. In a smaller company, those hours often matter more, because the same people wear several hats.
Time savings are the easy metric. The more interesting finding is quality. Interviewees reported that employees produced better work with Gemini and took on tasks they previously avoided: building presentations, analyzing data, writing code, and generating ideas.
As one director of AI products put it, Gemini is “not replacing people; it’s empowering people to be more productive.”
The study also highlights Gems, reusable specialized assistants for tasks like budgeting analysis, HR processes, or sales coaching. For teams that need more, some organizations moved on to the Gemini Enterprise app to build multi-step agents that automate everyday manual work.
One finding runs against the usual story about AI and risk. In these organizations, security was what enabled a fast rollout.
Because Gemini and Gemini Notebook sit under the same enterprise-grade security and privacy controls as the rest of Workspace, IT teams could approve the tools quickly and tell employees, without caveats, which AI tools were safe to use. That also helped prevent shadow IT: employees turning to personal AI accounts and leaking company data along the way.
The composite organization also saw 50% less IT effort spent on managing and maintaining its environment compared with legacy systems.
Cost wasn’t a blocker either. Several interviewees pointed out that Gemini and Gemini Notebook are included in the Workspace subscription, which removed the usual barriers to company-wide AI: separate licenses, procurement cycles, and yet another tool to integrate and govern.
Here’s the detail that matters most. Across the organizations in the study, around 80% of employees used Gemini regularly. That didn’t happen by itself. These companies had dedicated people running AI adoption. They surveyed thousands of employees, tracked usage, and built AI into how teams work.
A company of a few hundred people rarely has a head of AI adoption. IT is usually a small team already stretched across everything else. So Gemini gets switched on, a few enthusiasts try it, and usage quietly plateaus.
What closes that gap:
The good news is that smaller companies can move faster here. Fewer departments, shorter decision chains, and closer teams mean a well-run rollout can reach most of the company in weeks, not quarters.
Think of us as the AI adoption team you don’t have to hire. We run Google AI adoption in three phases:
Want the details? Forrester’s spotlight covers the findings in more depth, including the security and Gemini Notebook use cases.
Source: “Google Workspace With Gemini Enhances Employee Productivity, Improves Work Quality, And Enables Secure AI Adoption At Scale,” a Total Economic Impact™ spotlight commissioned by Google and delivered by Forrester Consulting, July 2026. Results are for a composite organization based on interviews with five organizations, which had between 15,000 and 35,000 employees. Forrester advises readers to use their own estimates to assess potential ROI.