SADA CEO On ‘Game-Changing’ Google AI And Workspace Gemini Momentum
'We have a thesis that Google is in the lead in this AI war. There are reasons for that, there’s a laundry list,’ says SADA CEO Dana Berg, who talks to CRN about Workspace Gemini momentum, Agentspace innovation and why Google Cloud is leading the AI revolution.
“Agentspace seemingly feels like the most game-changing capability and product because it makes AI creation and AI adoption even more accessible to various folks,” said SADA CEO Dana Berg in an interview with CRN. “It’s one of the fastest growing products that we’ve seen in Google’s history. We certainly have seen that over the last quarter or two in terms of it becoming mainstream.”
At Google Cloud Next 2025 this week in Las Vegas, Google unveiled a slew of new innovation for Agentspace, including integration with Chrome Enterprise to allow employees to search and access all their enterprise resources directly from the search box in Chrome.
[Related: Google Cloud Next: The 10 Biggest Google Product Launches]
Agentspace brings together Google’s enterprise search, conversational AI, Gemini and third-party agents to enable employees to find and synthesize information from within their organization, converse with AI agents, and take action within their enterprise applications.
SADA’s Huge Workspace Customer Momentum
As SADA doubles down on Agentspace, enterprise customers are also clamoring for SADA’s AI services surrounding Workspace with Gemini now automatically included in Google’s popular collaboration and productivity suite.
“When Google announced earlier this year of Gemini’s inclusion in Workspace, I’d say 95 percent of our customers immediately called us within the next two weeks,” said the SADA CEO. “There are reasons for that. Our customers are in great demand to show demonstrable evidence that their companies are embracing AI.”
This week, Los Angeles-based SADA, an Insight company, won the 2025 Global Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award for Google Workspace, in part, thanks to creating a Gemini Adoption program. The Gemini program saw SADA build a framework and governance process for AI that has resulted in a significant number of successful Gemini customer projects that helped clients successfully leverage all of the AI inside Google Workspace.
Berg takes a deep dive with CRN around SADA’s strategy of driving AI sales via Agentspace, Workspace and Gemini, as well as why he believes Google Cloud will win the “AI war.”
With Gemini now inside Workspace subscriptions, are you seeing more demand from clients for AI services for Workspace?
When Google announced earlier this year Gemini’s inclusion in Workspace, I’d say 95 percent of our customers immediately called us within the next two weeks. There are reasons for that.
Our customers are in great demand to show demonstrable evidence that their companies are embracing AI.
Almost every one of our customers are being asked by their executive team or their board, ‘What are you doing, and show me evidence, that we are building an AI-driven culture in our business?’
We have always thought that creating a framework, a governance process—we call it our Gemini Adoption program—but then also to build the set of IP or methodology around it, which is pre-built tutorials, communications, governance, etc. and ways to measure the success of those things [is important]. Those are the things that have been really the game changers for our customers that have asked us to help in their Gemini adoption.
How is SADA one of the most successful Google Workspace partners in the world? Why are customers picking SADA for their AI future?
We’ve always had a thesis that organizations cannot be widely successful in rolling out AI unless there is a culture for AI in that organization.
Now, how do you build a culture of AI in the organization if you don’t tackle your biggest cohort of customers, which is your knowledge workers—largely in the productivity suite.
So by allowing Gemini to be included in those SKUs, allowing customers to know and feel comfortable that they can leverage us to help them guide them with all of the IP and methodology that we have—we’re starting to now see that the light bulbs are going off in the knowledge workers and the customers that we serve.
Because they’re now feeling that they can freely use AI in a protected, safe, reliable way that their executives and their management want them to use it. And it’s giving them the license to use AI in a world where, I would say, sometimes they thought that it was almost a taboo thing.
We’re going to see more of that in 2025. We’re going to use the stuff that we built last year, enhance it, and continue to drive it.
Just like when some of these consumer products came out a year and a half ago, that opened the eyes of the consumer, I think we’re going to start seeing these eyes opened up inside of the enterprise. Then that will only help our executives and sponsors in these accounts prove that they are actually following through with the promises they’ve made to their board. At the end, you’re going to see an advocacy that comes that will help shift the culture in an organization and in a society at large. So that’s why I’m so excited about this year’s partner award.
What have you been most excited about regarding Google Cloud Next 2025 launches this week?
The one that we’re very excited about is seeing some of the incremental improvements and releases of Agentspace, which really is a control plane for AI agentic creation and execution.
Agentspace seemingly feels like the most game-changing capability and product that makes AI creation and AI adoption even more accessible to various folks. It’s one of the fastest growing products that we’ve seen in Google’s history. We certainly have seen that over the last quarter or two in terms of it becoming mainstream. We continue to get excited about further enhancements.
Our customers are going to love it. And it’s going to feed very well into incremental improvements of our Gemini Adoption program, which has been at the focal point of our motion in 2024. We think that these enhancements, and our inclusion of those enhancements into our Gemini Adoption program, is going to be game changing. So we’re very excited about that.
How does Agentspace with Gemini stack up against competitors like Microsoft? What’s unique about Google Cloud here?
What Google is really trying to do as a differentiator and what our enterprise customers want is that AI scale to be throughout all aspects of the stack—not just on the UI side, not just on the data side, but all the way down to the infrastructure and the chipset. And making sure that the AI capabilities are infused in all of those layers, not just from a capabilities perspective, but from a security and scale perspective.
As you start peeling back the layers of the onion across all different types of hyperscalers and others that are out there—you can’t really do that in an enterprise unless you feel comfortable that AI can scale as a holistic platform. That’s precisely what Google is angling to do here.
Google is implementing it at all various layers of the stack. And that’s a powerful combination, particularly if you’re a CIO or CTO, and you want to make sure that you have a long-standing investment profile that is protected.
What’s one major AI market differentiation Google Cloud has over the competition?
A lot of the announcements that are coming out with Agentspace is somewhat pre-built agents and pre-built connectors into other platforms that are not Google. You’re talking ServiceNow, Workday, Salesforce, and even Microsoft.
Many believe that Google is in a leading position to dominate in the AI wars, but sometimes [customers] have existing Microsoft investments as well. What I’m really eager, and I know many of my customers are eager, to see is how that interplay works. And how can they begin to and continue to make wholesale, large investments in the Google ecosystem, and to make sure that those investments can tightly align into a multi-cloud, multi-hyperscale, or multi-SaaS landscape.
