On May 10, 2023, at Google I/O, Google announced Duet AI for Google Workspace, embedding generative AI across its productivity apps. The launch was Google’s direct answer to Microsoft 365 Copilot, announced two months earlier, in the contest to put an AI assistant inside the office suites businesses use daily.
Duet AI spread across the Workspace lineup. In Gmail and Docs it helped users write and refine text, including a “Help me write” capability and mobile draft generation. In Slides it generated original images from text prompts for presentations; in Sheets it offered automated data classification and a “help me organize” feature to build plans; and in Meet it generated custom video-call backgrounds. The product was later rebranded as Gemini for Google Workspace once Google consolidated its consumer and enterprise AI under the Gemini name.
Why business readers should care: Duet AI marked the moment the two dominant office-software vendors were both shipping generative assistants into their suites, turning AI from a differentiator into table stakes for productivity software and reframing the competition around how well each vendor could ground the model in a customer’s own files.