India overtakes the US to become the largest Google Workspace userbase globally

On Wednesday, Google Workspace Media Summit themed “Bring AI to Work” was held in Bengaluru, India. There, Google announced that India has surpassed the United States of America as the world’s biggest Workspace user base with the highest monthly active users. Although the company didn’t share exact numbers, it was mentioned that there are over 3 billion active Workspace users in the world, 10 million of them being paid customers.

“At Google Workspace, we remain committed to advancing innovation while prioritising robust security and privacy measures. Our custom LLMs are blocking more spam and responding to threats faster than ever before, reaffirming our commitment to innovation, productivity, and security,” said Sumedha Chakraborty, country head, Google Workspace, India and South Asia.

Over 170 million students and teachers around the world actively use Google Workspace. On top of that, Google also claimed that 68 per cent of the Workspace users in large companies said they enjoy their work more since adopting it versus 30 per cent of Microsoft 365 users.

According to Google, Google Workspace, its cloud-first collaboration and productivity suite, helps users save approximately 21 days per year, and it is also said to improve collaboration by 30 per cent. It is also the only productivity suite that allows up to 100 users to collaborate in real-time on a single document, indicating its strong collaborative approach.

Google Workspace has now incorporated Gemini, where custom large language models (LLMs) will not only help with productivity but also security. This has resulted in products like more secure Gmail, which now automatically blocks 20 per cent more spam, while Google Drive gets 90 per cent better protection against phishing attacks.

Google also demonstrated some of the new capabilities of Docs, NotebookLM, and Gemini, and how these new tools can help users improve their productivity and also save time. The company also showcased a demo, enabling users to create a beautiful presentation on Google Vids using a simple text prompt.

Google Workspace has become more popular since COVID-19 and the advent of remote work, where it became a platform for professionals and students to remotely collaborate and work due to its cloud-native nature, which allows customers to work from anywhere, anytime, without worrying about security.

Google Workspace can be accessed for free of cost by anyone with a Gmail account. However, to unlock the full potential of Workspace, an individual user has to subscribe to Google One, which offers additional Google Drive storage, access to the latest tools, and Gemini Advanced, while corporates can get a customised Workspace subscription as required.