AI for Small Business
You are probably already paying for AI. Here is how to find out.
Google built its AI assistant into Google Workspace and raised the price of the plans. If you pay for Workspace, you are paying for AI right now — whether anyone in your business has ever opened it. And a lot of owners are paying for a plan that does not include the features they have been reading about.
This takes sixty seconds to check. I am going to show you how, and then tell you what to do with the answer.
What Google actually did
For a while, Gemini — Google’s AI assistant — was something you bought separately and bolted on. That is over. Google built it into the Workspace plans and raised the plan prices instead.
There is no Gemini bill to find. There is no line item to cancel. It is inside what you already pay, which is exactly why so few people realise they have it.
The two tiers, and why the difference matters
Here is the part that catches people out. Not every Workspace plan gets the same AI.
Business Starter — the entry plan. A limited Gemini assistant, in Gmail only. Nothing in Docs, Sheets, Slides or Meet. The smallest storage allowance of the four.
Business Standard — the step up, and the one most small businesses actually want. Gemini inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet, and a very large jump in storage.
Business Plus — everything in Standard, plus eDiscovery, larger meetings and more storage again.
Enterprise — everything, with the security controls larger organisations need.
Nearly everything you have seen in Google’s advertising — AI writing your documents, building your spreadsheets, making your slide images, taking your meeting notes — is Standard and above.
So there is a very common and very expensive middle position: paying for Starter, expecting Standard. You see the marketing, you assume you have it, you try it once, it is not there, and you quietly decide AI is overhyped.
You were not wrong about AI. You were on the wrong plan.
How to check, in sixty seconds
- Go to admin.google.com and sign in with your business account — the one that owns the domain, not a staff account.
- In the left menu, open Billing, then Subscriptions.
- Read the plan name at the top. It will say Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus or Enterprise.
- While you are there, note two more numbers: how many licences you are paying for, and your monthly bill.
That last number is worth sitting with. Your monthly bill × 12 is what Workspace costs you every year — and part of what you are buying, on most plans, is AI. For a small team it is usually a four-figure annual number, which is more than most owners expect when they finally look.
If nobody has used it, you are not saving money by ignoring it. You are paying for it either way.
What it actually does, in plain English
Forget the demos. Here is the honest version, app by app.
Gmail — drafts an email from a one-line description. Takes something you already wrote and makes it more formal, shorter, or longer. Genuinely useful for the email you have been putting off since Tuesday.
Docs — writes a first draft, summarises a long document, suggests changes, proofreads. Best used on the blank page problem, not on finished work.
Sheets — looks at your data and tells you what it sees. Builds a chart. Makes a tracker. This is the one most small businesses underrate, because most small businesses have a spreadsheet nobody has properly read in a year.
Slides — generates images in a style you ask for, so you are not paying for stock photography or settling for clip art.
Meet — takes notes for you, and translates captions. The notes feature is the quiet winner: you stay in the conversation instead of typing through it.
None of that is magic. All of it saves a real person real minutes, several times a day, on work they already do. For most small businesses, that is the whole return — and it is already bought and paid for.
If you are not sure, just ask us
I mean that literally. Open your admin console, look at the plan name, and if you cannot tell what you are looking at or whether it is the right one — send us a message and ask. We will tell you what you have and what it does. No charge, no pitch, no form with eleven fields.
That is the whole reason we are here. Most small business owners are not confused about AI because they are not clever enough. They are confused because four companies changed their pricing this year and nobody sent a letter explaining it.
Now the part nobody tells you
Everything above makes a person faster. That is real, and for a lot of businesses it is enough.
But it is worth being clear about where it stops, because this is the line where most owners get disappointed without quite knowing why.
Gemini in Workspace will draft the email. It will not decide who to send it to, follow up in three days when nobody replies, update your records, or escalate to you when something needs a human.
More precisely, it does not:
- Run when nobody is logged in. It is a helper inside an app. Close the laptop and it stops.
- Have an identity or permissions of its own. It works as you, with your access, on your screen.
- Reach anything outside Google. Your booking system, your accounting software, your phone, your property manager, your CRM — all invisible to it.
- Get monitored. Nothing tells you when it has stopped doing something useful, because nobody was relying on it to run unattended in the first place.
That is not a criticism. It is a feature doing exactly what a feature is supposed to do. Google built an excellent assistant for a person sitting at a desk.
The gap is everything that happens after that person stands up.
So what should you actually do?
1. Find out what you are on. Sixty seconds. Everything else depends on it.
2. If you are on Starter and nobody is using AI — that is fine. Stop expecting features you do not have, and stop blaming yourself for not getting value from them.
3. If you are on Starter and you want the rest — upgrading is a flexible change you can make and reverse at any time. Upgrade one person first, see whether it earns the difference, then decide.
4. If you are on Standard or above — you already own all of it. The only question left is whether anyone has been shown how to use it. That is a thirty-minute conversation, not a project.
5. Then, and only then, ask the bigger question: what in this business should be running without anyone touching it at all?
Step five is a different kind of work. It is where the repetitive thing that eats four hours a week stops being somebody’s job. It needs systems that talk to each other, permissions that are set deliberately, and monitoring so you find out when something breaks — before a customer does.
That is thirty years of IT, not a feature in a word processor. It is also, happily, not a decision you have to make this week.
Start with what you already own
Here is the advice I would give a friend over coffee, and it is the same advice whether you ever hire us or not:
Before you buy a single new AI tool, go and use the one you are already paying for. Spend a month on it. Find out what your team actually does with it and what they ignore. You will learn more about where AI fits your business from four weeks of real use than from any demo, including mine.
And when you hit the ceiling — when you find yourself thinking I wish this just happened by itself — that is the moment worth a conversation.
I am not competing with Google. I am the layer that starts where their feature ends.