EXPLORING GOOGLE WORKSPACE STUDIO: A DEMO OF AI-DRIVEN WORKFLOWS

E97 EXPLORING GOOGLE WORKSPACE STUDIO_ A DEMO OF AI-DRIVEN WORKFLOWS

Transcript

Dalton Anderson (00:01.358) Welcome to Bitch Step podcast, where we discuss entrepreneurship, trends, and the occasional book review. In this episode, we're going to be discussing Google Workspace Studio. It was a sneaky release in December, and Google Gemini 3.0, which was released in November, mid-November, was very good and has put additional pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic, which is great, as I've mentioned many times on the show.

Competition creates better products for customers. So more competition, you get a better product. Everybody's happy. And it also prevents you from getting a price gouged. Like if there's only one offering on the whole world, then they can charge whatever they want. But now there's many companies. So overall, better situation for everyone. Okay, so this episode is not about Gemini 3.0, although...

I think the models are great. Really good stuff. Always been a big believer in Google long-term and would get a lot of heat from people about it. And speaking of heat, I got absolutely roasted on YouTube. Somebody commented something super funny and it might be good and interesting to share what they said. Let me pull it up.

so funny. I was like, wow, that's pretty funny. And you know what else is funny when I'm pulling this up is I accidentally I was sharing my screen. I've actually already recorded this episode one time and I was sharing my screen and then I wanted to share a different screen and the recording button is stop. And then when you're sharing, it also says stop. And so I

clicked stop, but I clicked stop recording. And so I lost the show. I just lost the recording. So I could have just done another episode like I'm doing now, or I could split the two and have it edited and put together. But I thought, hey, you know why you're doing this again? It's your own fault. So we're going to do it again. But. So funny. OK, so it says, bro.

Dalton Anderson (02:27.509) I know your vids don't get a lot of views right now. And to be honest, I don't have time to watch a full one at the moment, but wow, what a trove of useful research and analysis. Thank you. This is meaningful, meaningful work. You may perform better with a more appealing light job and haircut or something, but the value is this info is there. And I thought it was so funny when I was like,

Okay, okay, this is all good. And then it was like, your haircut sucks. They said it in a really nice way, but really appreciate username handle and their comment on the show. And I did mention I got a lighting setup. So now I have this light key over here. And I think the lighting for this episode works very well. And then I have this bad boy.

I've got this camera. If you can't see it is the ZV-E10 4K Sony compact camera. And this is a classic that came out some time ago. They've come out with a different version, but since I'm just doing talking head videos, this is the best one. I did an episode about this and my reasoning, but I thought that was funny. I want to share it and let's get back to the episode and we are back.

And so my name is Dalton Anderson. I'm the host of interest of podcasts. I like to do many things like talk about random stuff on the internet, AI, technical stuff, insurance. My background is data science and insurance and my free time. like to run, read books, et cetera, et cetera. But please, please, please, please, if you have an interest in the show or interest in supporting me, like and subscribe.

follow depending on what platform you're on. I'm still getting roasted by Spotify consistently and I'm trying to stop underperforming my peers when it comes to views to followers. Okay. So this episode, as I mentioned, is about Google Workspace Studio and Google Workspace Studio previously was a program or suite called Maker Suite.

Dalton Anderson (04:49.481) And so it's transitioned from Maker Suite, which was like more technical in nature, to this rebrand of Workspace Studio, which to me is as Google as it gets because Google always has these products that they launch. They do OK or they do well. And then they just kill the product. And then a couple of years later, they come back and they're like, let's make the product again. But hey, let's not have the same features as before.

let's do different things. so Maker Suite was more technical. And then there was this transition or this flow into the Google Workspace Studio, which I think is the equivalent of Power Automate, but AI native, an AI native version of Power Automate. And if you're not familiar with Power Automate, Power Automate is a Microsoft tool that is used to, if you guessed it.

automate things. And Power Automate is powerful. It's just, you have to be very targeted in what you're trying to do. And it requires quite a bit of testing and little nuances. And yeah, I think if you were a beginner in Power Automate and a beginner in Google workspace, you would get more done in Google workspace, but Power Automate could take you further. And they're not an Apple's comparison when it comes to the product suite and what it's trying to do.

Google workspace is more of an equivalent to Microsoft Copilot Studio, but I don't necessarily like Microsoft Copilot. And I swear, I just had this conversation. There's just so many things that Microsoft could do better. And that's what frustrates me. It's like, why aren't you doing these things? They're just so clear. Like one of my favorite examples is meetings, like Microsoft.

used to allow you to download and copy out the transcripts. And then you could use your own AI or your own template to create your AI notes. And then they made it a change to where only the owner can download the transcript. And then they also made the change that you and this might be an organizational change. Like I know that my org is not concerned about

Dalton Anderson (07:15.417) who can download the meeting transcript. I don't necessarily know what happened there. I mean, I can't say for sure that Microsoft was the one who made the change, but I know at my company, we're worried about bigger things and like, you're not the owner of the meeting. You can't download the transcript. Like no one, no one's going to the security team and like, man, Joseph downloaded the transcript. He's not the, he's not the host though.

We've got to look into that. That's a problem. Like nothing like that. So we're worried about more important things, which is good because if they're worried about that, then what are we worried about?

But regardless, they made it, they like gig keeping the transcript and they make it harder to download now unless you're the owner and this whole thing used to be a copy out the transcript. Now you can't do that. And so they want you to use their product, the copilot product, which is by the way, $30 a month per user. And it doesn't do that much. Like it's not that good. I think the most useful thing it does is it takes notes on your

meetings and then the meeting AI notes get put together and then at the top right of your screen, you can right click the ellipse menu and then send to recipients and it sends out the AI notes to everybody who was at the meeting, which is great. I like that a lot, but it should be storing the meeting. It should be reading through the meeting notes and the recipients and the subjects of the meeting and then combining

all of that information into like a folder, creating a folder, a project folder of all your stuff. If somebody new at the meeting or a new recipient on the meeting thread gets added, then the AI system should recognize that, this is a new person. Would you like us to forward over the prior meetings, the subjects, and the summary of those meetings so they understand what's going on? And you just click, yep, that's fine.

Dalton Anderson (09:25.685) And then it sends out this thing, this blob of information to this person and they consume it.

And then you don't spend 15, 20 minutes talking about what's going on in prior meetings and like the action items and what we're doing and what we're trying to do and the purpose and the why and all of that. You don't need to do that anymore. You have all of the summary sent of each meeting, the action items and boom, then they come to the meeting and they should be on pretty good footing on where we're at, where we're going. And if not, that's on them and the expectation.

would be for them to read it going forward. So we're not wasting time. And so just makes more efficient meetings. Everybody's got meetings. There's no company that doesn't have meetings.

This podcast is not about my harping and my dislikes of Microsoft Copilot. This podcast is about Google Workspace. So Google Workspace, as I said, is like low code and it's the first go at it. And I think it is good for its first attempt of trying to provide a product that is AI native-ish.

to users for the Google Workspace. Google Workspace is many apps. So it's Gmail, it's Sheets, it's Forms, everything. But most of the actions that I have and I experimented were making use out of my emails. Okay, so I think it's time to check it out. And I'm gonna be very careful not to stop the show.

Dalton Anderson (11:14.605) when I need to stop sharing, I am going to share the right thing. So I don't have to do this again. That was sad, very sad. Okay, so this is email. I'm sharing my email on the internet, which is crazy. But as you can see, I already have this open. But if you're coming in here and didn't re-record this episode, there is a studio right here. And this studio will show you what flows around.

running. So this discoverer is some stuff that they've already built. And then the flows are flows that I have active. I have quite a few different ones active. Some stuff I stole from the discoverer and then changed a little bit, but kept the same name. Or it's just stuff that I straight up took off a discoverer. So.

If you go to activities, you can see what activities are ran from these flows. And activities are pretty cool because you can go, you can click in, you can see what steps were run. And this one, it says draft email replies to questions using a doc and Geminite. Step one, it receives this invoice, invoice from this urgent care company. And then,

Jim and I response the prompt saying false. This email contains only informational statements regarding a new invoice and outstanding balance and does not include any questions. OK. And then it just doesn't do anything. But there are some stuff that it does take action. So I like I like this one. This is probably my favorite flow. And this is straight up off of something that Google already created for you plug and play. And this is.

automatically adding email attachments to my Google Drive, which I think is quite nice. So if somebody sends me something important, then I don't have to be careful about accidentally archiving and deleting an email. I just I know I have it and I've got that insurance that it's there. And I hate emails. I don't like emails. Hate's a really strong word. I just think emails are inefficient in a lot of ways and they're definitely not good at managing tasks or follow ups. So

Dalton Anderson (13:30.6) I've created flows from the discoverer or for myself that helps me manage that. And especially when I'm trying to schedule guests on the show and or manage my work life as well, it does get a little chaotic. So this flow, I really like. I think it'd be easier to search for stuff when you have it in Google Drive. Like Google Drive is meant for.

AI to search through your files and discover what those files mean and archives them. And then you can ask questions about them with Gmail. Gmail is made to search your emails, not the emails with the files in them and what's within those files. So it's just more optimal. So let's let's check this flow out and let's demo it. So we will send an email. And this is this is the scary part. So.

I'm going to press stop, share something else. And then I'm going to share.

this other window over here.

Dalton Anderson (14:41.548) Yeah, let's do it. Let's try it

Dalton Anderson (14:45.804) Cool. Okay, so this is me. So let's do this.

Let's do.

name, interesting. Live test.

file.

Dalton Anderson (15:05.74) So we'll just say, hey.

Alton.

Dalton Anderson (15:18.847) you please

Dalton Anderson (15:26.028) attached file.

Dalton Anderson (15:30.815) Explanation point, explanation point.

Alright, so then I'm just going to attach some files.

So I've got the Accord 125, 126, 140, and if you're in insurance, you know what I'm talking about.

So I'll add that. And this is a file I actually want in my Google Drive. I haven't updated it, uploaded it yet. So this is perfect. So we've got this accord live test of file dump. Okay, so send. So I sent that. So I'm gonna stop sharing. I'm not gonna, I keep saying this because I don't wanna do it. I'm scared. So I'm gonna share something else. I'm not gonna cancel the episode. And here

Dalton Anderson (16:22.198) So I should be getting an email here soon.

And when this email hits my inbox, it's probably still getting scanned. But when it hits my inbox, then it will run a...

Hello, where is this email?

Dalton Anderson (16:49.406) sent yeah we sent

Dalton Anderson (16:56.21) That's my email.

here it is. Boom. Let's go. Okay, so it made it.

Attach file and.

Dalton Anderson (17:14.848) I just got a notification, a flow just kicked off. Notify me about emails from key people. You got an email from Dalton Anderson. Remember to review and respond quickly. Email requests the recipient to review the attached file immediately regarding a live test of a file dump. Here's what I think you need to respond. Please take, what needs your response? Please take a look at the attached file. FYI, the subject of this email is live test of file dump.

Email sent December 30th. The sender provided contact information, including their cell. man, I just shared my cell. Whatever. It is what it is at this point. my goodness. All right. The sender included the email address. That's fine. Whatever. That's pretty cool. Okay. That was just one of the flows that I created earlier. It's nice to see it working, but the main thing that we're testing over here is this ad.

Email response. Once this podcast gets like famous, famous, I'm going to have to I'm going to have to get like a fake number and these different things so that it's not a problem. OK. So once we go back, I got a little distracted about showing my number. Once we go back, it shows that there is a flow that ran. should have ran refresh. Let's see.

Dalton Anderson (18:43.661) Why didn't I go?

Maybe it doesn't tell me. All right. Let me just check the drive and see if it's there. OK, cool. So let's do that. So let me stop sharing. my gosh. I must did it. I almost did it. I almost clicked the wrong button. man, that's scary. OK. So this email file, this email dump, I created a folder called Email Dump because I don't want

my Google Drive all messed up with files. I want it to be in a centralized location that is very clear what it's doing. I don't need it to be super nested. I want to be able to get to it easily. And then you can search. I should be able to search like inside a file.

Pretty sure you can do that.

Dalton Anderson (19:43.757) Okay, so this is a chord file. we just, let me see if I can search. Copy and paste.

Dalton Anderson (19:58.062) Ask about your files.

see, this is exactly what I was talking about. So if we go back and ask information.

Dalton Anderson (20:12.781) Like it comes up, which is pretty cool. OK, so we go back to my drive and then we go to email dump. He saw I try to do something. I was experimenting, trying to figure out a way how I could do the same thing with Gemini, because all these things are from Gemini and I don't like that Gemini just dumps when it creates a drive or doesn't create drive creates a dock or a sheet for you. It just dumps it in your Google Drive.

And I've got this perfected Google Drive. My Google Drive is so neat. It's got where the media recordings go. It's got all this other stuff. It's got everything is organized and it goes to a folder. The folders are nested. It's great. But if you're going to dump stuff in my drive, at least put it in a folder so it's not this mess. Anyways. OK, so the email dump, it puts the file here and I think it's pretty cool. I think that's great.

This is something that took me not too long to create and we'll go over the workflow in a second. Overall, very happy with how it worked and how easy it was to understand what to do. So if I go to my flows here and these are all the flows that are running and then you can go to auto add email attachments to drive. And this is one that's directly from Google workspace studio. And so if I go to edit,

and look at it and so you can click on it and this is what it will show you. It says I have it set to all emails, but if you wanted to change it and say, I want it from six emails, I want it from this person or has these keywords. But what if you don't know the keywords and you don't know what you want? Well, you can do this where you can say, OK, if it's to me and some other person or whoever.

You could take that off and you can have it so where it doesn't say like me, I think it's like from.

Dalton Anderson (22:17.389) from me. And that would keep it from sending it if you sent it yourself. if you want to just do certain labels like important or personal, personal was kind of confusing and I had to figure that out on my own. But personal is the same as your primary email box if you're using the email labels. And so

You can have all these different labels and it does add in an extra bit of color when you can use these email labels, but you can also use your own email labels, which is not shown here, you can use it because I don't have any email labels on my account set up.

But you can use your own email labels from what I read. I haven't tested myself, but from my experience, the personal worked fine for what I was trying to do. Like I wanted action items to get created from emails that I created, and then I tasks to be created from emails that were sent to me that had questions or actions I needed to follow up on. All of that stuff, when I tested it, worked. It doesn't work on prior stuff, it only works on new stuff. So if you have a lot of things that you need to catch up on, well, you gotta catch up on those on your own time because it doesn't...

go back in time and look at all your prior information and create all the tasks and all the follow-ups and the email drafts. It does it for new emails. So I haven't gotten that many emails from random people. I got that invoice, I sent my own email and I two tests to myself. So that part I'm less experienced in, but the emails that it has picked up, it has worked correctly. So that I'm happy about.

Okay, so this email label, you can use the personal. Once again, personal is the same as primary. And these other labels, they're self-explanatory, like important is the important label, it's the stars, the promotional is promotional stuff. And the stuff that I wanna do with promotional and with travel and or social or these purchases labels, I wanna create a summary. Like I wanna create a summary of all my purchases and stuff that's inbound. And I'll show you something that I created that was pretty neat.

Dalton Anderson (24:36.588) that I took from the template and then I changed it for myself. So I am going to not save this. I'll just make sure that it didn't mess it up.

Dalton Anderson (24:57.998) It did save it. OK, so auto saves. All right. All right. Understood. So that's not that's something I know. It's weird that it has a save button. But then when you make changes up here, auto saves. Does it make any sense? OK. But there is insurance news headlines summarized daily. And so I took this. And right now it's only set up to look at.

my and this whole prompt thing that's created but

It does a schedule, does it every day, weekdays at 8 a.m. and it runs and you can test it out. I'll show you how to test stuff in here. I created this prompt and this prompt uses this information, but you can add different variables like you. If you had this extract information, re-emails, you could add that as a variable, but you'd have to do that up top and you could like, I guess, extract and then

You could ask Jim and I to do something, cetera, et cetera, what to extract. And then you can find different things from your email address. What I plan on doing is taking all my promotional stuff plus this Jim and I search that search the internet and my promotional stuff. Let me delete this. The promotional stuff will have, well, I guess it's not promotional.

Is it called forms? It's called forms. Yeah. So take the forms information related to insurance, compile that. So newsletters that I'm part of plus the internet, boom, mash it together. I think that'd be very useful for updates, the updates, like any shipping updates or like, you know, what if you got a message every morning, show you all the stuff that's going to get delivered in the next couple of days or the stuff that needs action. Like you need to sign for this or whatever.

Dalton Anderson (27:04.852) Same thing could be said about promotions. Like you don't need to read your promotional emails. You could set them all to red and then you just get a summary of the promotional emails that you need to look at.

Or like that invoice thing, the invoice was mistakenly sent to my updates section when it was caught by like two workflows saying like, hey, this is an important email and classifying this is important. And then also providing the file and putting it in the the drop. But let's test this.

OK, so one thing to note is that these it does say the test take real actions. It will send messages, update files and set up meetings. And so when you run this and you're testing it, say to like take action on your behalf, make sure that you're taking action with somebody that isn't in a professional. Like relationship, you can test it with your burn or email or a friend. But don't test these flows.

in the external environment because they do get sent out and they do take action. like they're legitimate tests. So if I press start. And so this is going to run tomorrow. But it's running right now.

So the prompt runs, and I reads the prompt, and then it's going to just provide the information. And then it will show me the actions it took. Here we go. Look. So it took the prompt, and then it found all the things that it needed to do. And then it put it in a chat. So here we go. And then we open up the chat, school chat. And here we go.

Dalton Anderson (28:54.111) And it's like this little newsletter. And you can do this for via email or in chat. The chat seems to be easier, I would say, to read. I think the readability of the chat is better. And the links seem to be working more consistently in the chat versus email. And I think that's why default, a lot of these things are sent to chat or they don't want everything to be a massive

email and individual emails and then in the chat, like I tested this earlier today at four o'clock.

that you can see the prior chat, what was sent prior, and then you could read it. I think the chat for certain things makes more sense, and then certain things, the email makes more sense. It just kind of depends on what you're doing. But overall, really like this flow and the potential to automate some of the things that are on the promotion side. Like I like signing up for these companies, but I don't read their emails.

But if they do have something important like a really good sale or some kind of special, I would like to at least know about it, but I don't want to read their email. Their emails suck for the most part. And if I am really interested in the company, then I'll read their stuff just to see their branding. But for the most part, I'm not doing that. This gives you the ability to automate some of these things. I know this is for a professional standpoint, like this is for workspace.

Do you think it would be valuable? It's valuable for me on a personal level because I'm a mixed bag where I have both the Google Workspace subscription and I'm using it for the podcast and for my personal life. So I'm in both worlds at the same time. But if you're not thinking about that, then you're probably on the less promotional stuff and more on the competitive. Like your competitors are in your promotional section. So you could see what kind of stuff they're sending out, if they're doing any deals. So you could set up alerts saying like,

Dalton Anderson (30:58.807) So and so's competitor, our competitor, so and so did this and they've got a deal. We've got to match them. And it like sends out an immediate alert email, email blast, chat blast, letting everybody know that there's a deal going on. All that stuff. Or if they do a lot of shipments, international shipments to get supplies, a clothing and there's weird stuff going on in the area of which they're getting their clothes from the country of origin and.

they're aware of it because they give you weather updates all the time. You could set this up to give you weather updates or whatever you'd like. And it sends the link, it's decent. I don't know what else you could ask for. I think there's plenty of practical applications on a personal level and on a business level that make this very useful. And I'm already excited about it. And I enjoyed fiddling with it today. And I'm sure that a couple more weeks of experimentation.

I'll get some really optimized results, but at the moment I'm still in the infancy phase of just discovering what this product is capable of on top of what it currently is. Like where are the limits? I don't know where the limits are, but I am impressed with how quickly you're able to get started and to actually have a good outcome pretty quickly. So overall, very excited.

about Google Workspace and what it's going to be, Workspace Studio and what it's going to be in the future. can't wait for them to create the agencies or agencies like the agentic workflows. These are somewhat agentic, but I would love to set up an agent. This is the way backtrack. getting them. I'm wording it in a confusing way. So long term, Google wants to set up and other companies want to set up.

agentic workflows where you set up an agent that agent has permissions. It is able to do certain things and is able to do things on your behalf without your consent. For them to do that, they have to have a studio in place and they've got to make it easy for the most part. The first step to get there is to integrate and automate workflows.

Dalton Anderson (33:26.675) using Gemini in a light touch manner. So the nice stuff about the files or the email summaries or the drafts that are created, that stuff. And then eventually it's like, okay, like I'm looking at your schedule, this person requested these times, I'm gonna book this meeting for you. And just doing stuff that you no longer have to do anymore. And then you can focus on the stuff that's more important and less administrative. And there's some administrative stuff that's really important and needs human touch.

but there's a lot of stuff that doesn't necessarily need your utmost attention. Like it might take like 10 % or 5 % of your headspace where it takes more time than it does headspace and you don't want to spend more time on the stuff that takes up more headspace. All right, maybe it clogs your mind and fogs it and it takes up headspace when it shouldn't and taking up headspace takes up time. And the best way to do that

To get rid of it is to offload it. And so this is really cool. I really enjoy it. And I think the one thing that I didn't talk about in this episode, and I don't have time to discuss because we're running out of time, is is your company a product or is it a feature? Because this offering that Google has now and how easy it is, there's a lot of other companies that are offering something else.

that are more technical or it does similar things, but it's not integrated with Google. That's a problem. You're a feature at this point now. You were no longer a product. And I think the dangerous thing about having company is confusing the difference between a product and a feature. You can start out as a product, but if you continue to be a product and you can start out as a feature, but if you continue to be a feature and never become a product, then you can be

eliminate pretty easily. You can just be erased and then you'll have to hard pivot or you will have to get acquired quickly because every month goes by that you're competing against somebody like Google or these other companies is another month that you're less likely to survive. And it's good to compete, but if

Dalton Anderson (35:49.903) a feature offering of a large company is added and then it completely wipes out the value that your company provides, then you are never a product in the first place. And that's a good place to end. So just think about that and think about that and you can think about that in a different level, a different perspective and think about that as your relationships with other people or your partner or your family. What are you?

providing to them as a friend or as a partner, as a family member? Are you providing the laughter, the love, the care, the food? I love these food, but are, what are you doing to provide value to others? And then what are others providing to you that provides value? And if you're not thinking about those things and you're taking up time on things or people

that aren't adding enough value to you, which is a problem because you're important as well. Okay. Wherever you are in this world, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you for listening to the show and listen in next week. Goodbye.