As the lead for the Global Customer Programs team at Google Workspace, my core mission is to amplify the innovation stories of our customers and seamlessly integrate their voices into all marketing initiatives. Given Google’s pioneering role in AI, our team embraces this leadership with utmost seriousness. We are daily immersed in sharing how our customers leverage our products, including Gemini, Google Workspace with Gemini, and NotebookLM, to drive their own innovation. It is therefore paramount that we exemplify power usage of these tools ourselves. We occupy a unique position, utilizing the precise products our customers employ, often in identical ways. This symbiotic relationship fosters mutual learning. Consequently, embedding generative AI into every facet of our operations is not merely strategic, but essential—not only to optimize time and budget, but fundamentally to transform our work processes as the technological landscape evolves around us.

We are applying for the AI Innovator award to showcase a new, programmatic approach to customer advocacy and reference marketing that is fundamentally powered by generative AI. Our program integrates AI at every stage of the customer lifecycle, from initial recruitment to content creation and ongoing program management. This isn’t about using AI as a one-off tool; it’s about embedding it into the core of our operations to scale customer storytelling, enhance efficiency, and create a richer experience for both our team and our customers.

Our approach transforms the traditional customer advocacy model, turning it into a seamless, AI-accelerated engine for demonstrating real-world product value. We are redefining what’s possible in this field by moving beyond manual processes and embracing a comprehensive, end-to-end AI-driven workflow.

Our program strategically leverages generative AI to create a streamlined, powerful workflow across the entire customer advocacy lifecycle. This ensures that every element of our program, from initial customer engagement to final content amplification, is optimized by AI.

Customer Journey, Accelerated by Gen AI:

Recruitment & Onboarding: We use Gemini to draft personalized recruitment emails for sales and customers, ensuring our outreach is tailored and efficient.

Discovery & Research: Before any call, we leverage deep research to understand a customer’s business, then use AI to summarize that information, allowing for more insightful and strategic discovery conversations.

Story Capture: Our team utilizes Gemini in Google Meet to automatically generate transcripts and ‘take notes for me’ summaries. We then feed these into a custom-built Gem in Gemini to create a high-level overview of the customer’s story.

Content Creation:

• Questionnaires: The AI-generated summary from our discovery calls is used to draft targeted questionnaires for on-camera or remote interviews.
• Video & Written Content: We use a Gem in Gemini to analyze interview transcripts, helping us to quickly pull out key soundbites for video paper edits and storyboards. For written content, we can feed a transcript into a custom Gem that generates a high-quality first draft, reducing the time needed for a final editorial review by approximately 90%.

Activation & Amplification:

• Social & Sales: We have developed a Gem in Gemini to craft social media copy for content amplification and to create pre-formatted slides for sales enablement. This ensures our customer stories are easily shareable and can be integrated into pitch decks and presentations, accelerating the sales cycle.

Reporting & Knowledge Management:

• Program Health: We use Gemini in Google Sheets to analyze our customer reference tracking data, allowing us to quickly query and generate reports on program health.
• Customer Story Knowledge Base: We have developed a NotebookLM instance pre-loaded with all our public customer assets. This acts as a personalized AI expert on our customer stories, allowing anyone on the team to use natural language queries to explore connections between different references, summarize key themes, and quickly find information. This is a crucial tool for both internal and external stakeholders seeking insights into our customer base.

By embedding AI into every stage of our program, we are not only increasing our operational efficiency but also scaling our ability to tell compelling, data-driven customer stories. This strategic implementation of AI not only yields substantial time savings for individual team members each week but also optimizes budgetary allocation and resource utilization, thereby freeing up capacity for the development of novel ideas and impactful programs. This comprehensive, programmatic approach represents a new standard for customer advocacy and a clear example of innovative and effective AI utilization.