Podcast Ep 360: Google AI specialist Maaike Terwindt explains how SMEs can use Gemini, Gems and AI agents to automate tasks, save time and boost productivity.
Businesses everywhere are trying to make sense of the sudden digital firepower at their finger tips thanks to the onset of generative AI. Most people are still working on their prompts but if you are evolving in your use of the technology, you’ll have already moved on to AI agents. Think of them as your own personal employees who can complete specific tasks for you.
A new upskilling partnership between Bank of Ireland and Google gives small businesses across Ireland no-cost access to Google’s AI Professional Certificate.
“AI agents do not replace people. They are more of a highly capable intern or employee. They are really smart, but they still need a manager, and you are that manager”
Google’s Gemini platform not only includes AI agents but digital entities called gems. Terwindt, AI specialist for Google EMEA, describes a gem as a dedicated expert in a box – a customised version of Gemini built on specific instructions such as a marketing specialist that knows your brand voice perfectly.
“I’ve personally used it to craft LinkedIn messages. I’ve given it a few examples of my tone of voice, the way I speak, my role, and if I want to post something and I have specific information, I’ll drop it into the gem and say write a LinkedIn message on this topic, and it will craft that for me. So it’s really a helper to make your daily tasks easier.”
👉 Ready to reclaim an extra day a week? Secure your scholarship to complete the certification at no cost. Apply now and get started!
An agent, she said, operates on a different level. The gem can help you to think and write; an agent can actually take actions on your behalf like checking your calendar, looking up a file or even creating or writing a file.
She drew a further distinction between chat agents, which work conversationally in real time, and workflow agents which run in the background on a trigger – for example every morning at 8am performing a multi-step process across different apps when you are not sitting in front of your computer.
“So gems and chat agents are really in conversation with you, while workflow agents can work completely autonomously. You set those up, and they just do the job for you.”
Where businesses can start
-
Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who is being interviewed? | Maikke Terwindt, AI Specialist for Google EMEA. |
| What is the main message of the interview? | SMEs should start their AI journey by automating a single repetitive task rather than attempting a company-wide transformation. |
| What is an AI agent? | An AI agent can perform actions on a user’s behalf, such as checking calendars, finding files, creating documents, or executing workflows. |
| What is a Gemini Gem? | A Gem is a customised version of Google Gemini designed for a specific purpose, such as marketing, customer service or content creation, based on tailored instructions. |
| What is the difference between a Gem and an AI agent? | A Gem helps users think, write and generate content, while an AI agent can take actions and complete tasks on behalf of the user. |
| What are workflow agents? | Workflow agents operate autonomously based on triggers, carrying out multi-step processes across applications without requiring direct user interaction. |
| What advice does Terwindt give SMEs starting with AI? | Identify one repetitive task, create a Gem or agent around it, and gradually expand AI usage based on measurable productivity gains. |
| What repetitive business tasks are suitable for AI? | Responding to customer enquiries, drafting schedules, creating updates, writing content and managing recurring administrative tasks. |
| How does Terwindt use AI personally? | She uses a custom AI agent to deliver a weekly Monday morning summary of AI news gathered from selected media and technology sources. |
| How can AI help marketing teams? | AI agents can repurpose blog content into social posts, email newsletters and tracking updates, helping businesses maximise content output. |
| How can AI help sales teams? | AI agents can qualify leads, create CRM records and draft follow-up emails for review by sales representatives. |
| What is meant by ‘human in the loop’? | AI drafts recommendations or communications, but a person reviews and approves them before they are sent or acted upon. |
| What business activities are often overlooked for AI productivity gains? | Data synthesis, identifying trends, rewriting content for different audiences, analysing information and adapting tone and style. |
| What is Terwindt’s key quote about AI adoption? | “If you can write an email, you can create an agent.” |
| Do AI agents replace people? | No. Terwindt describes AI agents as highly capable interns that still require human oversight and management. |
| What role do business owners play when using AI agents? | They act as managers who set goals, provide data, monitor outputs and ensure agents are performing correctly. |
| Why is data quality important for AI? | AI systems perform better when they have access to relevant, organised business data and clear context. |
| What does Gemini use for external information? | Gemini is connected to Google Search and can retrieve information from the web when appropriate. |
| What industries or functions can benefit most from AI agents? | Marketing, sales, customer service, administration, reporting and data analysis functions. |
| What is the overall takeaway for SMEs? | AI adoption does not require advanced technical skills. Businesses can begin with simple use cases and scale gradually while maintaining human oversight. |
For business owners overwhelmed by the pace of AI change, Terwindt’s advice is to resist the urge to transform everything at once.
“Take small steps. Pick one repetitive task that you do every day or every week, an easy one could be a writing task, responding to customer inquiries, or drafting a weekly schedule or update. Create a gem or an agent, inform it that you are my customer success assistant, this is how we speak, this is how we handle our clients, these are our standard policies. Once that’s set, and a customer reaches out, you can just drop that question in there. The gem or the agent will give you the perfect draft in seconds, and immediately you have time saved on that task that you previously would have spent minutes or hours on. So find that specific task that you’ve noticed you’re doing repetitively yourself, and see if you can create a gem or an agent for that.”
Terwindt practices what she preaches. She built her own AI agent to deliver a Monday morning briefing on AI news, pulled from newspapers and tech blogs that she has selected herself. “Every Monday morning at 8am this agent delivers me a perfect overview of what has happened, what have I missed.”
Asked how small businesses are using tools like Gemini’s gems to automate workloads, Terwindt pointed to marketing and sales.
“Within marketing, with regards to campaign orchestration: whenever you publish a new blog post or product announcement, you can use an agent to break that content down into social posts, potentially schedule them, draft an email newsletter update, and log it into a tracking sheet. So from one blog post that you’ve only written once, you get a lot more, content for social, for X [Twitter], for LinkedIn.
“For sales, we see a lot of customers using it for lead qualification. Say a customer leaves information because they filled out an inquiry form on your website, the AI agent can qualify that lead based on prerequisites you’ve set of what is a good lead and what is a bad lead. It can create a profile within your CRM system and draft a follow-up email immediately within Gmail for your sales rep to review and send with a single click. In this case, we’d always recommend starting with what we call a human in the loop. It will draft an email, but the person will still send it, so you can double check whether it’s drafting something you’d be happy to send out.”
I asked Terwindt if there are areas/tasks that SMEs are constantly underestimating when it comes to AI-driven productivity gains.
“What I’ve noticed myself, and in customers, I’d call it the cognitive heavy lifting. It’s where you spend a lot of energy that you might not realise, if you are synthesising data, or shifting tone in a document, or having to rewrite something completely for a different audience.
“Say you’re taking a technical report and rewriting it for a client, and it has to sound exciting and a little more simple, less jargon, less internal, and maybe has your tone of voice. That can take a long time to craft, rewrite and redo. It’s the same when you’re looking at several spreadsheets and going, what’s the trend that I’m missing, what am I looking at, what are the changes?
“AI is really good at spotting patterns and changing styles. These tasks would take a human an hour or more, depending on how productive you are or how complex the task is, a lot of deep work and deep focus, and that can be done very easily in seconds by AI. Those are areas where I think people tend to underestimate how well an AI could work.”
Build your own army of agents
The technical bar to get started, she says, is low. “I think if you can write an email, you can create an agent.
“What I also tend to do, whenever I create an agent, and specifically a gem, because a gem really focuses on those instructions, is use Gemini to prompt the instructions that you are then going to put into your gem. So if you want to create a customer service gem, you’d go to Gemini and say, I want to tell my gem to do this, what should I say, what should I ask it, and it’ll come back with the necessary prompts or instructions.”
For all the automation on offer, Terwindt was clear that responsibility does not shift away from the business owner.
AI agents do not replace people, she stressed, they are more like a highly capable intern. “They are really smart, but they still need a manager, and you are that manager. It’s not a set it and forget it, build the agent once and let it go. You need to check, are they doing it the way they’re supposed to, is the output the way I want it to be, do they still have the right resources to perform the task I’m asking of this agent. You’re becoming a manager of the agents, or the army of agents, that you’ve built. And the other thing is, they are not magic, they don’t know everything, they know as much as you tell them.
“Gemini is tied to Google Search, so it will be able to search the web for you. But when it comes to your enterprise or business data, that shouldn’t be on the web, so the agent or the AI will only know what you give it access to. Again, that comes back to context and using Gemini for Enterprise: the more data you give it, the better it’s going to be able to respond to your questions and queries, and the more organised your data is, the better the answers are going to be.
“In the end, see an agent as another employee that you need to give the right data, you need to set goals for, and you need to check the work,” she concluded.
👉 No tech background needed to bring your business into the AI age! Secure your Google AI Professional Certificate to complete the certification at no cost. Apply now and get started!
-
Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day – funding investments, working capital and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, click here
-
For support in challenging times, click here
-
Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
