The jury is still out on how much AI increases individual productivity, but companies are now trying to monetize it as they build more advanced AI features into their software. Last year's news surroung the announcement of Microsoft's Copilot add $30 per user per month to the cost of an Office 365 subscription. These features, however, are expensive to build and deploy, and customers will have to bear some of that cost.

At Google Cloud Next, Google followed Microsoft’s monetization lead, announcing a pair of $10/month/user add-on packages for the Google Workspace productivity suite.

For starters, the new AI meetings and messaging add-on takes notes for you, provides meeting summaries and translates content into 69 languages. "We're adding 52 new languages --- including Filipino, Korean, you name it --- to translate for Meet. Now this brings the total number of languages we support to 69," Aparna Pappu, VP & GM at Google Workspace said.

The company also announced an AI security package that helps admins keep Google Workspace content even more secure-by providing a capability to classify and protect files with certain sensitive characteristics. Additionally, the add-on will help protect information meant to be kept private while applying data loss prevention controls in ways that can be fine-tuned to individual organizations' specifications.

While $10 per user may sound a bit steep, especially considering the price of Workspace without these features, they do seem in line with what many other third-party services charge for similar add-ons. For customers who may not want these add-ons for every user, Google says that license types can be mixed and matched and advanced features applied where they'd be most useful to that customer.

Google said this is also worth noting because the meeting add-on is still planning additional enhancement, like generative AI custom backgrounds which lets the users describe a background, and the AI creates it for you, as well as studio quality lighting, video quality, and sound, which use AI to provide professional quality meetings, among other new features in the works. Those will be rolling out in the next couple of months, by the company's account.

The two add-ons have now been released for Workspace subscribers.