After more than a year of remote collaboration, many people are showing signs of digital fatigue. Throughout the pandemic, millions of employees bridged the physical distances with their colleagues by making themselves more available, joining a deluge of virtual meetings, and leaning into a dizzying array of tools and applications. As part of our mission to build the future of work, we’re addressing these challenges in Google Workspace.

As we announced today at I/O, we’re launching smart canvas—a new product experience that delivers the next evolution of collaboration for Google Workspace. Between now and the end of the year, we’re rolling out innovations that make it easier for people to stay connected, focus their time and attention, and transform their ideas into impact.

Specifically, we’re enhancing the apps that hundreds of millions of people use every day—like Docs, Sheets, and Slides—to make them even more flexible, interactive, and intelligent. With smart canvas, we’re bringing the content and connections that transform collaboration into a richer, better experience in Google Workspace.

When we launched Google Docs and Sheets 15 years ago, these apps introduced the world to a new way of working. They enabled anytime, anywhere teamwork—a stark contrast to the legacy tools that were designed for an era of individual work on office desktops. For over a decade now, we’ve been pushing documents away from being just digital pieces of paper and toward collaborative, linked content inspired by the web. Smart canvas is our next big step.https://www.youtube.com/embed/SDBbFETGiA4?enablejsapi=1&

Making collaboration more flexible and helpful

The evolving hybrid work model gives new urgency to existing collaboration challenges. How do teams stay focused and connected as they work together, regardless of where people are located? With smart canvas, we’re building deeper connections across Google Workspace to transform collaboration anywhere it happens. 

For example, we’re taking something that people already use every day—@-mentions—to open up new, powerful collaboration capabilities. New interactive building blocks—smart chips, templates, and checklists—will connect people, content, and events into one seamless experience.

Already available, when you @ mention a person in a document, a smart chip shows you additional information like the person’s location, job title, and contact information. And starting today, we’re introducing new smart chips in Docs for recommended files and meetings. To insert smart chips into your work, simply type “@” to see a list of recommended people, files, and meetings. From web or mobile, your collaborators can then quickly skim associated meetings and people or preview linked documents, all without changing tabs or contexts. Smart chips will come to Sheets in the coming months.

Additionally, we’re making it easier to drive projects forward by streamlining common team workflows. Starting today in Docs, checklists are available on web and mobile, and you’ll soon be able to assign checklist action items to other people. These action items will show up in Google Tasks, making it easier for everyone to manage a project’s To Do list. 

We’re also introducing table templates in Docs. Topic-voting tables will allow you to easily gather team feedback while project-tracker tables will help you capture milestones and statuses on the fly. And a new document template for capturing meeting notes will automatically import any relevant information from a Calendar meeting invite, including smart chips for attendees and attached files.

With our new pageless format in Docs, you’ll be able to remove the boundaries of a page to create a surface that expands to whatever device or screen you’re using, making it easier to work with wide tables, large images, or detailed feedback in comments. And if you want to print or convert to PDF, you’ll be able to easily switch back to a paginated view.

Meanwhile, you’ll be able to toggle between new views in Sheets to better manage and interact with your data. Our first launch will be a timeline view that makes tracking tasks easier and faster. This flexible view allows you to organize your data by owner, category, campaign, or whichever attribute fits best. Using a dynamic, interactive timeline strengthens your ability to manage things like marketing campaigns, project milestones, schedules, and cross-team collaborations.

Fostering human connection—wherever people work

With smart canvas and innovations in Google Meet, we’re making it easy to bring the voices and faces of your team directly into the collaboration experience, to help people share ideas and solve problems together from anywhere. As part of that, we’re building tighter integrations between our communication and collaboration tools so you can pull content into conversations and conversations into content. 

Starting today, we’re rolling out the ability to present your content to a Google Meet call on the web directly from the Doc, Sheet, or Slide where you’re already working with your team. Jumping between collaborating in a document and a live conversation without skipping a beat helps the project—and the team—stay focused. And in the fall, we’re bringing Meet directly to Docs, Sheets, and Slides on the web, so people can actually see and hear each other while they’re collaborating.

Live captions and translations in Google Meet will also play a crucial role in keeping people connected as they work together in distributed teams. We currently offer live captions in five languages, with more on the way. And we’re introducing live translations of captions later this year, starting with English-language live captions translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, or German, with many more languages to follow.

With recent enhancements to Google Meet, we’re also giving people more control and flexibility over the meeting experience, including more space to see people and content, plus the ability to pin and unpin content and video feeds. And to help with meeting fatigue, you can now turn off your self-feed entirely.

Because we know that collaboration is fluid and fast-moving, we’re making it easier for teams to give feedback on the fly and to move seamlessly between conversations and building content together. Teams can now jump from a discussion in Google Chat directly to building content together. Creating and editing Sheets and Docs from Google Chat rooms is already live in our web experience, and we’ll enable it for Slides in the coming weeks. And to gauge the team’s reactions along the way, we’re introducing emoji reactions in Docs in the next few months.

Working smarter and safer

Google Workspace is already infused with powerful intelligence that enables people to make the best use of their time and attention. Whether it’s with the two billion grammar suggestions we surface in Docs every month, or the intelligent file suggestions in Drive’s Priority and Quick Access features that cut file finding time by 50%.

To help everyone work smarter, in the next few months we’re introducing additional assisted writing features in Docs on the web. This includes warnings about offensive words and language, as well as other stylistic suggestions that can speed up editing and help make your writing more impactful. We’re also adding more assisted analysis functionality in our Sheets web experience, with formula suggestions that make it easier for everyone, not just analysts, to derive insights from data. Sheets intelligence helps you build and troubleshoot formulas, making data analysis faster and reducing errors.

As smart canvas evolves, we’re making it easy for businesses to connect the apps and tools they rely on to Google Workspace. This builds on our history of supporting a variety of add-on features that take the friction out of collaboration—from adding e-signatures directly in Google Workspace with DocuSign to the Salesforce connector that integrates with Sheets. To help people work even smarter, we recently announced that AppSheet Automation is generally available, so that you can automate time-consuming tasks—like approving invoices and onboarding new hires—without having to write a single line of code.

Looking ahead, we’re planning to build additional APIs so you can bring the information and actions you need from third-party tools directly into smart canvas elements like smart chips, checklists, and table templates.

And because trust is at the center of all collaboration within Google Workspace, today we’re also launching advanced capabilities that help protect users against security threats and abuse as they work together.

Transforming how people work to deliver real-world innovation

While there’s no one way to collaborate, we know from our customers that transforming how people work results in real-world innovation.

Google Workspace fuels a new way of working together. It lets our teams around the world—whether they’re in the office, at home, or in the grocery store aisle—work more flexibly and translate their ideas into new ways of delighting customers.
—Thibaud Cainne, Global Head of Tech Infra and Digital Workplace, Carrefour

Transformation happens at all levels, and often in every tool. We were able to get 17,000 of our people to make the shift from Excel to Google Sheets in just six months by demonstrating how we could optimize, automate, and connect spreadsheets and their data. That kind of collaboration leads to real-world innovation for our clients.
—Monica Andrea Diaz Pinzon, Chief of Digital Transformation (Special Projects), Banco Davivienda

We built a digital hub on Google Workspace to transform the way we connect with employees and partners across multiple locations and organizations. It allowed us to spin up major research projects in days instead of months, including delivery of major COVID-19 vaccine studies.
—Justin Riordan-Jones, Head of System and Information (Research), Department of Health & Social Care, National Institute for Health Research (UK)

As smart canvas drives the next era of collaboration in Google Workspace, we remain committed to providing a solution that’s flexible, helpful, and that fuels innovation for organizations in every industry. On the frontlines, in corporate offices, and across the countless workspaces in between, Google Workspace will continue to transform how work gets done.

Our collective understanding of work—where it takes place and how it gets done—has been transformed over the last year. As companies and organizations across the globe reimagine work, new challenges and opportunities are emerging. How do people working “somewhere else” stay connected and part of the same conversations as those in the office? And if hybrid work is the sum of all the places and ways that work happens, how do employees create a shared experience, better manage their time and attention, and build stronger connections along the way?

For well over a decade, we’ve been building the future of work with products and experiences that transform how teams of all sizes connect, create, and collaborate together—on any device, from any location. Last October, we launched Google Workspace as an integrated solution with a singular promise: everything you need to get anything done, now in one place. In March, we introduced a series of innovations to help people better manage their time and build deeper connections with each other as the future of work continues to evolve. And at Google I/O last month, we took our next big step in transforming collaboration with smart canvas, a new product experience in Google Workspace. And today, we’re delivering additional innovations that address the specific challenges and opportunities of the hybrid work world.

A dedicated space for teamwork and collaboration

Chat and video meetings have been an essential part of work during the last year, serving as a bridge for separated colleagues to collaborate in real time. As we reflect on the lessons of a year where many people were working remotely, we know that distributed teams need a new type of dedicated, shared space. A place in Google Workspace to bring projects to life by connecting the right content, people, and conversations in new and powerful ways. 

With the introduction of Spaces, we’re evolving the Rooms experience in Google Chat into a dedicated place for organizing people, topics, and projects in Google Workspace. Over the summer, we’ll evolve Rooms to become Spaces and launch a streamlined and flexible user interface that helps teams and individuals stay on top of everything that’s important. Powered by new features like in-line topic threading, presence indicators, custom statuses, expressive reactions, and a collapsible view, Spaces will seamlessly integrate with files and tasks, becoming a new home in Google Workspace for getting more done—together.

Spaces can provide a place to fuel knowledge sharing and community building for teams of all sizes, where all the relevant information, conversations, and files for a project can be organized, and where topics—even at the organization level—can be intelligently moderated. With the ability to pin messages where everyone can see them, Spaces will play a crucial role in helping people stay connected and informed as hybrid work evolves.

As we transition from Rooms to Spaces in Google Chat this summer we’ll be delivering new features on a rolling basis. Customers can have their admins turn on Google Chat in Gmail so their organizations can start using Rooms today, ensuring a seamless path to Spaces when it becomes available.

Keeping everyone in the conversation during hybrid meetings

Collaboration equity—the ability to contribute equally, regardless of location, role, experience level, language, and device preference—is a cornerstone of Google Workspace. When teammates were fully remote during the last year, everyone experienced meetings in much the same way and had access to the same communication features. But what happens when some colleagues are in a conference room together while others are joining from living rooms, home offices, or a remote co-working space? How do they all participate equally in the same conversation?

At Google I/O, we previewed Companion Mode in Google Meet as a way of fostering collaboration equity in a hybrid work world. Companion Mode is designed to seamlessly connect those in the room with their remote teammates, giving everyone advanced features to participate, while leveraging the best of in-room audio and video conferencing capabilities.

Companion Mode gives every meeting participant, no matter where they are, access to interactive features and controls like screen sharing, polls, in-meeting chat, hand raise, Q&A, live captions, and more. Colleagues who are in the same meeting room together will enable Companion Mode on their personal devices, giving them their own video tile in Meet and helping them to stay connected with their remote teammates. Companion Mode will be available on the web and our upcoming progressive web app in September, and it will be coming soon to mobile.

To allow meeting organizers to better plan for hybrid meetings, invitees will soon be able to RSVP with their join location, indicating whether they’ll be joining in a meeting room or remotely.

Updates to improve the in-room experience are also coming to Google Meet hardware in September, including the ability to see and use the hand-raise feature and receive notifications from polls and Q&As. The modular design of Meet’s Series One room kits can easily accommodate a variety of space layouts and be paired with an AV cart for optimum flexibility. 

We’re also continually launching new controls to make meetings more safe and secure, including the ability for admins to set policies for who can join meetings, and how participants can engage within meetings. To help everyone stay focused in meetings without interruption, in the next few months we’ll introduce moderation controls for hosts, giving them the ability to prevent the use of in-meeting chat and prohibit presenting during meetings, as well as allowing them full control to mute and prevent participants from unmuting.

Together, these changes will make meetings a safer, more connected, and inclusive experience across all hybrid environments. Register today for our free webinar on how Google Workspace is enabling hybrid work and helping foster collaboration equity. 

Trusted hybrid collaboration in Google Workspace

Security, data privacy, and trust continue to be the foundation that make anywhere, anytime collaboration possible. As organizations explore new ways for their teams to collaborate securely in a hybrid work world, we’re introducing several ways that we’re strengthening this foundation in Google Workspace. 

Today, we’re announcing new security and privacy capabilities to help Google Workspace customers realize the full power of trusted, cloud-native collaboration. Google Workspace Client-side encryption will help customers strengthen the confidentiality of their data while addressing a range of data sovereignty and compliance needs. It will also strengthen meeting security when it comes to Google Meet this fall. Additionally, we’re rolling out a number of security enhancements for Google Drive, including trust rules for Drive that help control how files can be shared within and outside your organization; Drive labels that classify files and apply controls based on their sensitivity levels; and enhanced phishing and malware protections to help safeguard against insider threats and user error. For full details, please visit our security blog post. 

A single, connected experience

As businesses move to a hybrid work environment, the importance of creating secure collaboration spaces and fostering human connection has never been more important. Because Google Workspace was designed to fuel anywhere, anytime collaboration, we’re now helping millions of organizations navigate the challenges and opportunities of the newly emerging work model. Our customers are using Google Workspace to rethink virtual meetings, provide people with modern tools to stay connected and manage their time and attention, and double down on security and privacy. In countless ways, Google Workspace was built for this moment.

See how we’re bringing Google Workspace to everyone. With this change, all of our 3 billion existing users across consumer, enterprise, and education now have access to the full Google Workspace experience, including Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet and more.

There are many inspiring stories of businesses reacting swiftly to the global pandemic. Some companies have enabled their teams to re-imagine not only how they communicate and collaborate with each other remotely, but also how they continue to serve their own customers and support the communities they belong to. From doctors consulting with patients, to financial institutions providing critical advice to customers, to teachers delivering distance learning, to car dealerships creating virtual showrooms with G Suite—it’s clear that these new ways of working are here to stay.

Here are some of the inspirational stories.

Keeping teams connected and productive 

Activision Blizzard King (ABK), a leading interactive entertainment company, is going all in with G Suite*. Working with SADA, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, Activision Blizzard was looking for an innovative and scalable solution to transform the way their teams work together. As their developers around the world build the next generation of innovation in gaming, they rely on the power of collaboration in G Suite to create, connect, and share with each other. G Suite helps them successfully meet critical deadlines for game launches and updates.

“The safety of our teams is paramount during these disruptive times, and our workforce is already widely distributed across multiple locations internationally. G Suite has brought our teams together as we continue to collaborate while we’re apart,” says Jacques Erasmus, Chief Information Officer, Activision Blizzard.

PwC, a global professional services organization, enabled over 275,000 people to work from home in response to COVID-19. G Suite enables PwC to not only collaborate and stay connected with each other, but to continue to serve their clients in a timely and efficient manner. As a global organization with most of its people around the world needing to work from home, PwC reached nearly 10 million hours of video conferencing in Google Meet in a single month.  

“G Suite allows us to stay connected—it’s the single place where we can collaborate, discuss, and share work, in the current situation,” says Hilda Clune, Technology and Transformation Leader at PwC. “G Suite provides enough resilience and security, and the ability to scale at the speed we need to.” Learn about how PwC works remotely with G Suite:https://www.youtube.com/embed/rlgyiRoBGhk

Kärcher, a global manufacturer of cleaning equipment, accelerated its plans to move its 14,000 workers to G Suite in response to COVID-19. They accomplished the transition in only five days, enabling employees to collaborate effectively without being physically present in a Kärcher office. G Suite plays a critical role as Kaercher resumes business globally in the post-COVID phase, user adoption of various G Suite apps continues to grow, and management is using tools like Jamboards and Google Meet hardware to help them collaborate better and stay connected with their teams.

“With G Suite, Kaercher has transformed its global collaboration, allowing for faster business decisions during the COVID-19 crisis,” says Dr. Daniel Heubach, Chief Information Officer of Kaercher.

To face the current health crisis, De’Longhi, an appliance manufacturer based in Italy, created a local and international taskforce to ensure all their employees have everything they need to work from home safely and effectively. G Suite is playing a critical role in helping them achieve this goal. The De’Longhi taskforce uses Google Sheets to help them collect up-to-date information from each of their regions, and connect with local teams via Google Meet to better understand the unique circumstances and challenges they’re facing. As teams began to work from home with G Suite, De’Longhi has seen a 500% increase in Meet usage and a 200% growth in the number of shared files in Google Drive.

Helping to provide communities with critical services 

St. Louis-based Schnucks evolved from a neighborhood grocery chain to essential workers—virtually overnight. They supported both corporate and frontline workers in stores with an information hotline and created a virtual dispatch center for their transportation team, all through Google Meet. See how Schnucks was able to keep providing groceries to the communities it serves:https://www.youtube.com/embed/uTuOGwotfGk

As Boston was one of the first areas to be hit by COVID, patients at Cambridge Health Alliance’s (CHA) Department of Psychiatry had to manage a whole new set of challenges, including anxiety about the pandemic and new financial insecurity. Thanks to Google Meet, CHA was able to continue serving these patients in a timely manner. Outpatient Psychiatry was an early adopter of video visits, which are more appropriate for behavioral health care than phone consultations. Between March and June 2020, CHA was able to maintain 90% of its expected patient visit volume in Psychiatry, a huge win for patients, families, and the communities CHA serves. 

Southern Cross Care (SA, NT & VIC) Inc has begun using Google Meet to help residents across their 17 Residential Aged Care homes stay connected to their loved ones, despite lockdown measures associated with COVID-19. Residents can now also see their doctor virtually via Google Meet, keeping them safe from any potential exposure to the virus while still experiencing a high level of care through these virtual consultations.

Enabling business services for customers, no matter where they are

Italian bank Credem (Credito Emiliano S.p.A), relies on G Suite to help their staff adapt to a collaborative work-from-home environment leveraging tools like Google Meet, Drive and Docs. G Suite enables their teams across its banking and insurance businesses to collaborate and stay connected while working remotely. Credem has also created a “virtual branch” by moving its customer support to video conferencing using Google Meet. This enables customers to continue to get access to critical financial services, remotely and safely.

KIA Motors, a multinational automotive manufacturer, is using G Suite to provide “virtual viewings” for its customers, enabling them to continue to engage in an immersive and engaging car-buying experience. With Google Meet, KIA’s sellers can interact with customers, provide them with a virtual demonstration of a car, and answer any questions that come up.

“Live Stream Showroom demonstrates our continued commitment to tailor the car-buying journey to the demands of our customers with virtual viewings,” says JT Hong, Head of Global Channel & Service department at Kia Motors. “By launching this new platform testing in the Middle East & Africa region, we aim to stay ahead of the curve in digital sales and marketing in this time of transition.”

These are just a few recent examples of how G Suite helps customers not only adapt to the current situation but also reimagine how to get things done. We’ve been working hard to make G Suite a better home for your work by providing an integrated workspace that brings together the core elements of work—like chat, email, voice, video, and tasks—and making them better together. Our goal is to help teams to stay productive and connected, no matter where they’re working from, and enable businesses to serve their customers safely and more efficiently.


(*G Suite is now Google Workspace)