AI has catalyzed a wave of rapid innovation — and the pace shows no sign of slowing. Its evolving capabilities will continue to drive a radical transformation in how organizations operate, compete, and innovate in 2025. (f your team is using Google Worspace, this is how the changes we’re seeing are going to impact you.
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SME on Google Workspace: A Distinctive Angle
According to the Google Cloud AI Business Trends 2025 report, AI has catalyzed a wave of rapid innovation — and the pace shows no sign of slowing. AI is no longer an emerging technology — it’s the driving force behind how the most competitive companies operate, innovate, and grow. The trends outlined are shaped largely by corporate players with significant resources, but their implications reach far beyond the enterprise.
At Zenphi, we’ve worked with over 200 SMB and mid-sized customers, most using Google Workspace as their primary productivity environment. Conversations we’ve been having with our partners and costumers, reveal a consistent truth: while the scale and budgets may differ, the same AI-driven shifts are opening opportunities for smaller organizations to compete more effectively, serve customers better, and streamline internal operations.
In this article, we’ll break down the key market dynamics and trends from the Google Cloud report — and add a mid-sized business perspective on how these developments can be leveraged for growth, agility, and efficiency without enterprise-level complexity or cost.
Our Experts
The insights in this article are based on the Google Cloud AI Trends in 2025 report and enriched with real-world perspectives from Zenphi. Thought leaders and experts who contributed to this content include:
In addition, Vahid Taslimi, CEO of Zenphi, and Zenphi’s Customer Success team contributed insights gathered from conversations with over 200 companies across various sectors — including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and education — most of which run their operations within Google Workspace.
How AI Has Shifted Global Market Dynamics — 4 Changes That Will Impact Everyone
1. AI Early Adopters Dominate the Market
AI has profoundly shifted the competitive landscape, and mid-sized companies that act early can punch far above their weight. Those that capitalize on AI now — especially with tools that integrate seamlessly into their existing Google Workspace environment — can quickly level the playing field with larger competitors. By adopting AI-driven customer experience solutions, these companies can capture market share and differentiate themselves in ways that traditional approaches simply can’t match.
2. AI Agents Go Mainstream
According to the Google Cloud report, AI agents are transforming operations across industries, taking on tasks that used to consume hours of human effort.
For mid-sized organizations, this means that as AI agents become more sophisticated, low-latency solutions will make even complex, multi-step workflows achievable without expensive infrastructure. Read more about successful real-life deployment of Google Workspace-based AI agents.
3. Businesses Have Embraced Multimodal LLMs to Automate Core Operations
Google Cloud Trends report stats that 2025 — is a year when a shift is from experimentation to measurable results is already clearly visible.
This impacts SME as well. Mid-sized companies can now access AI workflow automation once reserved only for enterprises, and are capable of applying horizontal AI tools for broad needs (like intelligent document processing, inbox automation or customer support triage) and vertical AI solutions tailored to their specific industry. For example, a retail company could automate product data updates in Docs and Sheets, while a healthcare provider could process compliance documents directly in Drive. Risk management, security, cost control, and governance are becoming standard — giving mid-sized organizations the confidence to adopt AI at scale without sacrificing compliance.
4. Hyperscalers help organizations remove barriers to enterprise AI adoption — but AI enablement platforms bring it to SMEs
“Hyperscalers,” or cloud service providers, are investing heavily in AI-optimized infrastructure — from Google’s custom-designed TPUs and NVIDIA GPUs to advanced networking, storage, and cooling technologies that maximize efficiency for AI workloads. This infrastructure and capital investment is critical, particularly for large enterprises with high computational demands.
For mid-sized companies, however, the real transformation happens at the last mile — where AI moves from infrastructure into daily operations. This is where AI enablement platforms like Zenphi come in. Operating natively within Google Workspace, Zenphi allows SMEs to turn that infrastructure into practical, AI-powered workflows: automating approvals, processing documents, orchestrating cross-team processes, and integrating AI directly where teams already work.
The #1 Google Workspace-Based AI Workflow Automation Platform
Zenphi is an AI enablement platforms for companies using Google products. Operating natively within Google Workspace, Zenphi allows SMEs to turn that infrastructure into practical, AI-powered workflows and integrate AI directly where teams already work. Book a call to see the platform in action.
AI In Business Trends 2025
Trend 1: Multimodal AI Unleashed The Power Of Content
Google believes that 2025 will be a pivotal year for AI adoption, driven largely by multimodal learning and the contextual awareness it enables.
For small and mid-sized businesses, especially those running on Google Workspace, this isn’t just a trend to watch — it’s a chance to leap ahead. Multimodal AI can now process not only text, but also images, videos, and audio together, producing richer, more accurate insights. For SMEs, this means better decision-making, faster processes, and more personal customer interactions — without the heavy IT overhead once required.
While large enterprises may invest in massive AI infrastructure, SMEs can tap into multimodal capabilities through cloud-based AI enablement platforms like Zenphi — integrated directly into their existing Google Workspace tools. This removes the need for big data teams or costly system overhauls while still delivering enterprise-grade AI outcomes.
The business benefits for SMEs on Google Workspace
- Greater grounding in your own data
By connecting Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Meet recordings into multimodal AI workflows, SMEs can unify data from multiple formats. For example, combining customer emails, meeting transcripts, and shared documents to produce accurate, context-rich outputs updated in real-time.
- Better decisions, faster
Multimodal AI can combine unstructured and structured data — such as form responses, sales figures, and support chat transcripts — to uncover patterns and opportunities. SMEs can use these insights to prioritize leads, resolve customer issues faster, and streamline back-office operations.
- Personalized customer interactions at scale
SMEs can use multimodal AI to create smarter, more responsive virtual assistants that combine visual, audio, and text-based inputs. For example, generating personalized onboarding guides from both written instructions and recorded customer calls, boosting satisfaction without adding headcount.
What’s possible today for SMEs on Google Workspace
A local clinic could analyze patient intake forms (text), X-rays (images), and voice memos from doctors (audio) to produce faster, more accurate reports.
A retail SME could process in-store video analytics, POS sales data, and customer feedback emails together to optimize staffing and promotions.
Challenges SMEs should prepare for
Multimodal AI needs high-quality training data — but you don’t need terabytes of it to see value. By using curated company data stored in Google Drive, structured Sheets, Gmail emails, and AI enablement platforms like Zenphi, SMEs can get impactful results while maintaining control.
Trend 2: AI agents evolve from chatbots to multi-agent systems
According to the Google Cloud, AI for Business Trends 2025 report, AI applications are evolving from chatbots into sophisticated AI agents capable of handling complex workflows. Autonomous AI agents can now reason, plan, and use memory, make decisions, learn, adapt, manage workflows, automate processes, and support employees.
Stanford, MIT, and NBER studies show: AI assistance increases worker productivity by 15% on average. Not surprisingly, the adoption of AI agents grows. According to the Capgemini survey of 1,100 enterprise executives, 10% of large companies already use AI agents and 82% plan to integrate them in the next 3 years.
How SMEs on Google Workspace can Benefit From it
Google indentifies 6 types of AI Agents that are being adopted by enterprises: customer agents, employee agents, creative agents, data engents, code agents and security agents. Most of them are highly applicable for SMEs as well. Let’s see how Zenphi customers are bulding all these agents types, using our powerful automation platform.
- Customer Agents
The purpose of this AI agent is to deliver better and more personalized customer experiences by understanding needs, answering questions, resolving issues, recommending products/services.
Great example — a retail company we work with that uses Zenphi to build an autonomous AI agent that helps customer success team with troubleshooting. Gemini is used to quickly analyse and categorise support tickets that come through Gmail, escalate the important ones to the logistics or procurement team, and drafts polite responses to the customers to keep them updated.
- Employee Agents
Purpose: boost productivity by streamlining processes, managing repetitive tasks, answering questions, editing/translating comms.
A great example — is a children camp that used Zenphi to build a Guests onboarding agent. It simplifies the team’s work by handling document validation — tracking all documents in the Gmail mailbox, extracts data, compares it to the list of necessary documents, crafts and sends out polite requests for missing documents. No coding for the team. No learning curve — all operations are performd within familiar tools like Gmail, Google Forms and Drive.
- Creative Agents
Purpose: augment design, artistic, and production skills; create content, images, ideas; assist with design, personalization, campaigns.
To be honest, not many teams use Zenphi for building creative agents, however, this is a video guide on how to build an agent that would handle your company’s LinkedIn content creation.
- Data Agents
Purpose of this agent is to support research & data analysis; find meaningful insights; ensure factual integrity; help ask and answer novel questions.
A great example — a school that uses Zenphi to analyse students’ feedback forms submissions and creates monthly reports for the management team.
Another one — a company using Zenphi for the pipeline review. This is a 2 min explainer of how it works.
- Security Agents
Security agents strengthen security by mitigating attacks, speeding investigations, detecting threats.
An example of this one — the Gordon Food Service’s team using Zenphi to build an agent for shadow IT detection.
- Code Agents
Code agents assist developers with code generation, ramp-up on new languages, coding assistance. One study of 4,867 developers shows that using a coding agent leads to a 26% increase in weekly tasks, 13.55% increase in code updates, 38.38% increase in compiles.
A relevant example of a code agent is Zenphi’s AI assistant that can build the whole workflow for you or generate a valid Typescript code within the Execute Script action.
Trend 3: Assistive search is the next frontier for knowledge discovery
AI has shifted search from retrieving information to creating knowledge. It might have been painful for Google to admit, however it is clear that in 2025 we see a move from keyword-only queries (which were performed mostly on Google) to multimodal search within AI chatbots — handling images, audio, video, and conversational prompts.
Why Assistive Search Matters for SMEs on Google Workspace
For an SME, time spent hunting for information is time not spent serving customers or growing the business.
Assistive search means employees don’t just get search results — they get answers in context, pulled from Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Drive, and even meeting transcripts in Google Meet.
Example: Instead of remembering the exact file name of a proposal, a sales rep could search “Q3 proposal for GreenTech Ltd” and instantly see the file, the last email about it, and even a summary of status — without opening multiple tabs.
Practical benefits for SMEs
- Faster onboarding
New team members can instantly find past projects, policies, and client history without tapping the shoulders of senior staff.
- Cross-functional clarity
New team members can instantly find past projects, policies, and client history without tapping the shoulders of senior staff.
- Decision-ready data
AI can surface patterns from spreadsheets, project updates, and support tickets, so decisions are based on facts, not “gut feel.”
Trend 4: AI-powered customer experience so seamless, it’s almost invisible
Just as text-based customer service chatbots were not the final frontier, the real-time conversational insights and speech-based support that exist today are a stepping stone, not the final destination of AI-powered CX. This will be reached when companies can provide customers with precisely what they want: experiences so seamless, personalized, and efficient that issues are resolved without a customer even noticing they have interacted with a company’s customer service or support technology.
AI solves common CX challenges
- Customer support
75% of customers use multiple channels in their ongoing experience. AI-powered virtual customer service agents enable consistent omnichannel experiences at every entry point.
- Customer sentiment
Companies with higher customer loyalty scores record 282% (vs 81%) cumulative 10-year shareholder returns. Positive customer sentiment leads to higher loyalty. AI-powered sentiment analysis gauges opinions by analyzing emails, social media posts, and chats in real time, helping brands respond better to needs.
- Personalization
71% of consumers expect personalized interactions. AI-powered insights analyze user behavior—purchase history, browsing, social media—to deliver personalized marketing and product recommendations, predicting needs and preferences.
Trend 5: Security gets tighter—and tougher—with AI
Google believes: 2025 is set to be a revolutionary year for AI’s adoption into security and privacy best practices. AI has the potential to become a powerful tool in every security professional’s toolkit — helping to bolster defenses, identify and combat threats, reduce manual work and speed up responses.
How exactly AI is used for security
The report shows that 21% of companies using AI for rule creation, 19% — for attack simulation. And 19% — for detecting compliance violations. Gartner also predicts that by 2028, 50% of enterprises will adopt products/services specifically to address disinformation use cases (up from <5% in 2024).
Why it matters for SMEs
Cyberattacks aren’t just an enterprise problem — small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly being targeted because attackers know many lack dedicated security teams and advanced defenses. AI-powered security tools can help SMEs bridge that gap, automating detection, reducing response times, and even predicting threats before they happen.
For SMEs, AI in security means:
- Affordable automation: Security monitoring without a 24/7 team.
- Faster incident response: AI can detect and flag suspicious activity instantly.
- Reduced shadow IT risks: Automatically identify and block unapproved apps, extensions, or data sharing.
- Proactive defense: Anticipate and prevent breaches instead of reacting to them.
Consider this use case: Gordon Food Service uses Zenphi’s AI-powered workflows for self-service app & extension approvals: When a user requests an app or Chrome extension, Zenphi’s AI checks if it’s approved. If it is, the request is automatically approved. If not, AI suggests a safe, pre-approved alternative — keeping productivity high while reducing risk. This approach combines security and efficiency, ensuring teams can get the tools they need without exposing the business to unnecessary vulnerabilities.
Leading the AI Shift — Without the Enterprise Price Tag
The Google Cloud AI Trends in 2025 report makes it clear: AI is redefining how businesses compete, operate, and innovate. While much of the conversation focuses on corporate giants, the same technologies — from AI agents to multimodal learning, assistive search, AI-powered customer experience, and advanced security — are now within reach for SMEs.
With Zenphi, mid-sized companies running on Google Workspace can embrace these trends today, not years from now. Whether it’s building autonomous AI agents, delivering invisible yet personalized customer experiences, finding information instantly, or strengthening security, Zenphi brings enterprise-grade AI capabilities into a code-free platform designed for smaller, agile teams.
By adopting Zenphi, your business doesn’t just keep pace with the AI revolution — it gains early access to capabilities once reserved for enterprise customers, positioning you to compete at the highest level in 2025 and beyond.
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