Join host Brandon Carter and experts Pete Nevin, a Partner Success Engineer at Google, and Natera Bean, a Chrome Sales Specialist at Promevo, as they dive into the latest Chromebook Plus devices and Google's groundbreaking AI integration.

Learn about the new hardware specifications, AI features, and how these enhancements can improve productivity, collaboration, and device management. Discover the advantages of working with Promevo, a dedicated Google partner, and get insights into special deals on Chromebook Plus devices.

Don't miss this in-depth look at how Google is making technology more accessible and powerful through its latest innovations.

Timeline & Topics

00:00 Introduction and Agenda

00:43 Meet the Experts

02:27 Google's AI Strategy

05:04 Chromebook Plus Features

06:26 AI Integration in ChromeOS

09:37 Productivity and Collaboration Tools

18:55 Managing ChromeOS Devices

21:48 Q&A and Closing Remarks

Transcript 

Brandon Carter:

Good morning, everybody.

We're very happy that you joined us today, and we're really looking forward to digging into these new ChromeOS devices that Google is rolling out.

So my name is Brandon. I'm going to be your host today. And really the format is pretty straightforward. We're going to do a quick round of introductions. And then we are going to have Pete dive in. I'll introduce Pete in a second.

Pete will dive into these new Chromebook Plus devices. And Natera is going to talk through how, like how they work as far as like the purchasing, the management, things like that, and why you should work with a partner such as Promevo with these devices.

So today you're going to hear from Pete Nevin. He is a Partner Success Engineer at Google and really a master of all things, Chromebooks and ChromeOS.

And you're also going to hear from Natera Bean, who is one of our Chrome sales specialists here at Promevo. We work with hundreds of organizations including like schools, government agencies colleges, but also like tech companies, private big consumer brands, helping them manage not just their Chrome fleet, their Chromebook fleet but everything else that falls underneath that Google category.

So this is Promevo. We do all the things under the sun that have to do with Google, and that includes your Google Workspace, all of your Chromebooks and your ChromeOS devices like your Meet kits, Google Cloud Platform.

And of course, lately, we're all in on Gemini for Google Workspace, as well as Gemini for Google Cloud. All of the Google AI suite. We are in there helping companies build stuff.

And of course, right there in the middle, gPanel, which is our proprietary Google Workspace user management and reporting platform that helps you do all the things within your Google Workspace.

That's Promevo. Go to promevo.com. We'd love to, to chat with you. We're gonna talk a little bit more about like how a Google partner intersects with some of these purchases. But that's enough of me talking, and I think what people wanna hear now is from Pete.

Let's talk about these new Chromebook devices.

Pete Nevin:

Hey everybody, Pete Nevin. Partner Success Engineer here at Google. I help the Promevo team and other partners understand ChromeOS and help them with the technical know how and training and stuff to, to be able to sell and service ChromeOS devices.

But here we're today, we're talking about AI talking about AI on Chrome and just what Google's strategy is and then some of the plans we have and some of the features, I think people probably want to hear about some of the cool features, later on In the discussion.

Let me just go on and start by saying that, AI is central to everything Google does.

Our latest model, Gemini, it's the largest, most capable AI model that we've ever built. It's the culmination of multiple years of research and development in AI. And really what, What it's all about is Google has always had this unwavering belief that new technology should be accessible, right? That anybody should be able to access technology. It needs to be secure and it should be user friendly. And ultimately we want technology to help people, right?

The technology is not a business strategy. Technology is something that should be deployed with the goal of helping people learn, helping people get things done, and helping them have fun. And that's really what we're, that's really what our goal is.

And so with that mind, some of the things that Google focuses on when it's building AI, we want to build AI that's helpful. We're not just interested in delivering AI for AI's sake.

Yes, there, there's a great future out there where AI can do all sorts of fantastic things, but there's a lot of stuff it does now, maybe not super sexy, futuristic stuff, but, but it can really help you with simple tasks, right?

Doing tasks for you in the background. It can help make the specs of the device you have feel better. Feel faster feel more capable so it can fill in some of the gaps, maybe on older machines.

Fundamentally, we believe that AI should meet the user where that user is, right? It should be embedded in the existing user journeys that you do.

We have nine products that have over a billion customers. We have 16 other products that have over 500 million users. And so we're not trying to make you do something new. We're trying to meet you in those technologies, in those products, in those services where you, that you use today and just infuse it with AI, make it, make things work better, make the devices work better, make those products work better.

And then one of the, one of the other things that we'll keep in mind is, do you put the intelligence on the device? Do you have it in the cloud? And really the answer for Google is both, right? We want it to be the best of breed. We want to perform calculations on the device where that's practical. And we want to use the cloud to make it ever adaptive and to be able to do updates in, in real time.

Really where the AI is depends on what the use case is and depends on where it makes sense to have that happen.

On the Chrome side of the house, I work with Chromebooks as Brandon mentioned I'm on the ChromeOS, Chrome Enterprise team. The Chromebook Plus is a line of devices that we've worked with OEMs, work with manufacturers to build that are just more capable, right?

This is a new a new decision to, to emphasize devices that had more performance, twice as much CPU. Double the clarity on the video, twice as much storage, twice as much memory. And we're going to marry that up with this powerful AI software. We're going to build tools to try to enhance users' productivity and capability.

And Chromebook Plus is really our investment in AI. The features that you see coming to the Chromebook are coming to Chromebook Plus first.

We're excited about this. We're building access to Gemini directly into the device. And then it also has access to, to OS level features that contain Gemini and those AI features are built into the management of the devices as well.

If you're an enterprise or you're a school in managing your Chrome devices, that AI intelligence is built into the management layer as well.

So here's a little bit about, what you can expect when you purchase a Chromebook Plus: at least an Intel Core I3 or a Ryzen 3 from AMD, at least eight gigs of memory, at least 128 gigs of storage and 1080p webcam.

And these devices start at a very low price point. You can get these devices at under $350.

So let's talk a little bit about AI on Chrome.

With ChromeOS devices, we really are trying to provide simple workflows. We're trying to support a wide range of end user experiences and how Chromebook Plus and AI can meet you in those experiences.

So Chrome allows you to deploy modern, secure, easy to manage kiosks and digital displays that your businesses can rely on, whether that's you're using those to check customers in or deliver information to your employees in real time. You can display critical information to customers to help them understand what's in their cart and maybe increase that cart size.

For frontline workers, folks that are out meeting the public, you can give them the tools to be productive, whether they're stocking, stocking merchandise or they're engaging with customers in front of the house. ChromeOS devices give your frontline workers devices that are easy to log into, easy to share.

That's a big emphasis in the way that Chrome is architected is their devices, they're easy to share, so you don't so that you can get more life out of that device. And then when frontline workers finish their shift and log out, the device is wiped and everything's clean and you don't have to worry about data leakage.

And then many customers have employees that are working in the browser to access critical apps, things like Google Workspace and SaaS based cloud apps. And those users are familiar with and prefer cloud first web app experiences, whether they're emailing or providing customer service. And for what's more, employees that access legacy apps we've simplified virtualization, we've allowed you to ditch the old, virtual desktop and access the individual apps directly with our purchase of Cameyo.

And so this is a really great way to stream legacy apps over a Chrome device to employees that need them.

Gemini is the culmination of many years of research and, and product development in AI. 10 years, we've been putting AI into Chromebooks and all sorts of things.

Text to speech, adaptive charging, smart lock, detection intrusion detection, things like that.

AI is not new to Google. AI is something that Google has been doing for many years. Extending the life of battery on the device, improving the quality of the video. I'm in a well lit room here, but if not, the Chrome device has the ability to make that lighting better.

Here's an example of some of the things that we've got. Enhanced video conferencing, portrait relighting, noise cancellation.

I got used to these features on Google Meet because they were built into Google Meet software side. But then when I would transfer over to other video conferencing programs, I'd forget that if I'm sitting at my desk and there are a lot of people talking That noise cancellation that is in Meet is not built into other tools.

Now it's built into the Chrome device. So if you're using other video conferencing platforms, WebEx, Teams, that noise cancellation can happen on device. It doesn't have to be enabled in the software.

Blurring background, creating alternate backgrounds. I, I put this together and you see it's, this is not through Streamyard. The background is being provided by the by the device.

Intuitive search, so picking up where you left off. We've got the launcher, you've got task bar that's included in with, with your daily planner adaptive charging, things like that.

So a lot of AI is already built into ChromeOS today.

And constantly adding new features and these features are coming to the ChromeOS plus devices, Chromebook Plus devices we're talking about. Now we're going to dip into the kind of feature smorgasbord here, but we're going to talk about three different classifications and things that help you to be more productive. Working smarter with AI assisted features. Things that help you collaborate. So to inspire your creativity and team collaboration. And then finally features that help you manage and secure devices. So there's AI built in trying to detect, as I said, intrusion detection, things like that.

Google's putting those sorts of features in, into Chrome as well. So let's take a look at some of these things. First here's the latest devices. So as I was saying, these are These are devices, all this capability built in. Higher CPU specs, higher memory, higher storage better cameras, but you can see their devices that started pretty low price point, four or five, 600.

Our friends at Asus, our friends at Acer and Samsung are all putting together and releasing these higher capability devices.

I'll just put a plug in that Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus is was designed by my neighbor here at work in Austin. And it's super cool. So I'll show an extra shout out for that. It's brand new device and super light, super thin.

Great form factors are available. Great devices from a number of OEMs. Are Chromebook Plus devices.

So let's talk a little bit about how AI is built in. We are integrating AI into Google's AI models into every layer of the OS.

Chrome Enterprise is the most secure, most trusted enterprise, widest used enterprise browser in the market. It protects users from cyber attacks with AI powered malware, phishing, and malicious URL defenses. Safe browsing is powered by AI.

And you don't have to, you don't have to install anything new. You don't have to run some agent, anything like that. It's all just built into Chrome Chrome, the browser.

At the OS level as used to provide features like text prediction. If if you're using Gmail and you're typing an email, you can hit tab to, to insert words it's trying to figure out what you want to write. Translation, video optimization.

And then in the, within the cloud based management console. We're bringing AI functionality to help admins set up and provide policies across the fleet.

And then, of course, we're leveraging all the wonderful capabilities built into cloud applications today, right? Google Workspace has is rich with a number of different features that are AI capable.

And we continue to evaluate those models where they should live and looking at them through those lenses of security and cost. And it's really, it's commercial grade endpoint ready to help supercharge enterprises with all these additional AI features.

So let's dig in and talk in more detail. Gemini chat pre installed in the Chromebook Plus shelf. So you can get answers to questions right from the home screen. Having this packed into PWA gives access, fast access to Google AI and for even unmanaged Chromebook Pluses, have this built in so you can just fire it up and start asking questions.

I'm trying to infuse Gemini chat and email into everything I do, because it's just, it's really the future, the way to be way more way more productive.

And next slide, we'll get into Gemini for Workspace. Within Google Workspace, mentioned before, AI features sprinkled throughout generative to help you write, refine, and understand content. AI is a collaborative partner, right? Helps you save time, spark creativity, eliminate barriers, and communication.

Quick aside, I was having to evaluate some data a few weeks ago that I got from a partner and leveraging my old My old app sheets skills. I, and I don't code anymore, but let's just face it. I'm not there anymore, but I had to evaluate some data. So I was trying to break out my AppSheet skills.

And I spent about 20 minutes researching and looking how to strip characters out of this others formatted list of data, this massive list of data. And the next week, I literally had to do the same thing because they sent me another round of data. And before I launched into copying and pasting, I said let me just find out what Gemini can do.

And Gemini literally provided the exact same script within 30 seconds which made me feel great. And also really terrible at the same time, because it took me 20 minutes the week before but really it's such a time saver.

It can really bring, bring technicolor in all areas of your life. As I said, I created this this background here in a few seconds right before starting, right before logging onto the to the system. And I think it's, it was anime inspired swamp.

So let's talk about AI features that are built into the OS itself. As I said, there's three different categories here, helping me be more productive with AI assisted features to help you get your work done, inspiring creativity and collaboration with tools to help you communicate, and then finally, helping you manage and secure your devices. Got a sort of a smorgasbord of features to help you help you understand what's going on.

So let's talk about productivity. There's a list here. I've got some slides just to talk a little bit more in depth about some of these, but adaptive charging to help your battery last longer.

Google task shortcuts. So you've got quick access to your task list. You can tick things off and not have to go into another piece of software. There's a focus mode. Which I probably should have checked on when I got on this system.

So when you log in, log into your system it'll give you a, relevant content, windows and apps that you might need.

Help me write. I think everybody is really excited about that, taking advantage of that and be able to give it a quick quick prompt about what you need written and then have it right.

And then you can. Iterate on the fly, right? You tell it no. You want, I want more elaborate. No, I want it to be more formal, things like that. It can handle those sorts of tasks in seconds. And then summarizing a website or a PDF with just a click is great. Way better than buying the cliff notes, right?

Let's talk about a few of these things. Google task integration is really cool. If you use the Google task manager and Workspace, you get all those tasks added, you get your calendar, it'll tell you what meetings are coming up and that's all synced across all your devices.

So I've got a, I've got a Pixel phone and I've got a Chromebook and I can pull this up on any of those devices just right away.

Draft or find text on any apps any website or any app with Google AI. We talked about it built into Workspace, but here it is just built right into the device, right? So it's not just within your Docs or Sheets, but you can just ask it and plug that into an email or plug that into a, another document management system. And it's all just built right into ChromeOS accessible with a click.

Summarizing text is really great. The new, these, these new models take a tremendous amount of context. You can ask it to summarize a massive document or article or something like that. And, save yourself time and having to read that whole thing. And it gives you brilliant insight.

Summarization, and you can ask it again for elaborate more or ask, ask about specific pieces of it. Ask it to elaborate on that or simplify. And it does in seconds.

And then finally, with a lot of these devices, we've instituted, in fact, the Samsung Galaxy that I mentioned before is the first to have an actual key, but this idea of a quick insert key that you can have in your chat or in your email or in a document. And you just hit one button and boom, it pops up with that.

That prompt. And so it's just built into your existing workflows, right? You don't have to go over and find some other app or dig through your tabs to find that that thing that'll help you write, but it's just right there at the click of a button. It's accessible from anywhere and you could just insert that text into a chat, into an email or into a document.

Now I'll dig in a little bit into some of these features around collaboration. We talked about the, virtual conferencing background generation, generating wallpapers for your for your system.

Screencast, so you can record, edit. Chromebooks now come with built in GIF recording. So if there's something happening on your screen, you can just save it immediately into GIF. That's really saves time. Very cool.

Video call controls. What we talked about, you can control your video. I can mute, I can be from the software, but I also mute from the hardware and, or do noise cancellation, live translation.

If you're in a video call and I support our, all our partners down in Latin America for certain features of the system, like zero touch enrollment. And so I have to train partners down there. And it might, my, my ability to communicate with folks in Spanish and Portuguese has improved dramatically, because I don't understand any Spanish and Portuguese, but now I can because it's like literally live translation on the fly on the device in whatever video conferencing system that you use.

And then finally, Gemini, right? Gemini answering questions improving your writing and admins can just pin that app to the shelf of the Chromebook for quick access.

Let's dig in a little more on some of these. Generative Wallpapers, this is the tool I was talking about before.

You can just go in, click, ask for a wallpaper or for a video background, give it a couple of prompts, and it'll generate something brand new. Generate backgrounds stand out in a call, come up with something, come up with something quick, quickly, and it'll do it. Looks good and helps you stand out.

But the really, these are the cool features that really help again, this is built into the hardware. This is, this has nothing to do with the, virtual conferencing system that I'm used, but you can improve the lighting add captions, add noise cancellation to whatever device you have.

All with a video control panel, a video call control panel that just sits right on your desktop.

AI translated captions, I mentioned that before. Again, you can do this on your meeting platform, but if you're watching a, watching a live stream or watching a video, you can just have it generate those captions automatically. One click away, you can pin this to your taskbar. Admin can pin it to the taskbar and give your team the ability to use Gemini in real time.

All right. Now the last section is managing devices, let's see, help manage devices and talk about some of the features here within the admin console.

So this is the admin console where we manage our fleet, admins for enterprises and so on. and schools manage their fleet from from the admin console.

And we've added a new feature there called device hub. It centralizes all the information about a fleet, telemetry, fleet, health, OS levels, OS versions, all that kind of stuff, all in one place. And you can prompt it. You can ask it questions about your fleet. " Hey, can you show me the list of all the devices in this, in, in this geography that haven't gotten OS updates, boom."

It'll show you that list, right? Makes fleet management way easier. You can ask for devices that have CPU utilization over 80 percent because those are devices you might want to think about replacing or using it, giving to a different user or something like that, putting in a different use case.

And all this is proactive. It'll give you reports of this. It'll it's proactive and interactive, right? So you can go click a list of ready made reports of things that might be going on. It provides you some prompts at the top or it can be interactive, right? You can, it'll answer your questions answer the questions that you provide with with actual real data.

We've built in a bunch of filtering capabilities search and filtering capabilities into the policy manager, the ChromeOS, Chrome Enterprise upgrade supports something like 800 policies now.

When I joined the team 7 years ago, I think it was like 150. So it's grown quite a bit how much you can do and what you can control on these devices.

But, 800 versus 150 is a lot harder to hunt around and find it. And so we've built in a bunch of natural language processing. So you can say Hey, can you show me all the policies that might in fact impact OS updates or all the policies that will help me secure these devices and block URLs, things like that. And it'll just give you a list in the admin console.

So it's much easier for admins to go in there and, iteratively figure out what they can do to make the work experience better for their users. And then also for devices, same thing with the devices, right? You want to search for a single device, or you're looking for a group of devices that have some common characteristic you can do all that search now with the, with search results powered by this natural language processing built into, built into Gemini. With that, I think we're towards the end here, but just say that, AI, Not PC, the best a laptop is a Chromebook Plus with all these great built in features.

And I see Brandon is joining us again. So thank you, Brandon. Thanks for joining.

Brandon Carter:

Thank you, Pete. That's really interesting stuff.

Watching, listening to you talk through things there, this really is the integration of hardware and software together. And you mentioned, a button that you can do to for those quick inserts to push. That's where it's okay, now we're seeing hardware adapt itself to, the features, the cloud based features and functions that Google has around Gemini.

Really cool. I've got a ton of questions. I want to talk to you Natera. About about like why someone should go through Promevo the processes.

So my first question is like, how does someone buy this today? Like, how do they acquire one of these Chromebooks?

Natera Bean:

Yeah. So if someone wanted to buy a Chromebook today, it's pretty simple.

Honestly, they can easily just reach out to me through my email, shoot me an email and say, Hey, I'm interested in this. My email's right there below. Say, Hey, you're interested in a Chromebooks and shoot me any questions that they have, and we can work through that. I also want to mention that if you're looking to purchase a Chromebook Plus soon, you seen the AI features, you like it, you want to explore more.

We are offering $150 off of the Asus Chromebook Plus CX34 and additional discounts depending on the quantity. So I'm more than happy to discuss your needs and explore our various payment options with you. So just shoot me an email.

Brandon Carter:

That's awesome. And very convenient technology allows us to display your email to everyone right here on the screen.

Natera I'm curious, why would someone buy this from a company like Promevo? Like why buy from a Google partner?

Natera Bean:

Yeah, so you uh, hit that a little earlier when you introduced Promevo and you talked about how we're 100 percent Google focus partner. And so it's nice because since we are 100 percent Google focus partner, we have the capability to support your entire Google ecosystem.

So not just devices, but also Workspace, cloud services. gPanel et cetera. So we're a one stop shop for it all.

On top of that, all of our customers get access to free Google certified support and other in house resources. So at the end of the day, we really want to like make the transition to ChromeOS and to Promevo seamless and cost effective as possible.

Brandon Carter:

I think one really, one key point that you called out there besides, Promevo supports all the Google things, all the Google Cloud products, your Workspace, all of your devices. I think the main thing there is like, there is a person. When you work with Promevo, you get a person that you can talk to that you have their email address, and we have a form on our website where you can reach out and get support directly.

So I think maybe as much as anything. It's important to call out.

I'm curious. Natera, you work with like I mentioned, tons and tons of companies and schools and government agencies. What's the kind of, what's the demand like around AI? And AI functions and perhaps like the hardware that can support it.

Have you had it? Conversations with clients and prospects about that.

Natera Bean:

Yeah, I have specifically in the education space. A lot of schools are interested in it, but aren't fully embracing it yet. And so the beauty in having something like the Chromebook Plus is that all of those AI features like you mentioned help me write, draft and refine text, summarize text, things like that. Those are all now integrated into the Chromebook Plus.

So not even just in the education space, but also in the enterprise space, people are becoming more accustomed to those AI features, and there's starting to be a lot more questions around it, how they can get it into their organization.

Brandon Carter:

Maybe this is a question for either of you, but Is there like a student versus admin edition of Gemini or of maybe the device?

Natera Bean:

There are student Chromebooks, but for the Chromebook Plus, yet to my knowledge, there aren't any student devices. It's like Chromebook Plus in general, but what a lot of schools have done and a lot of places have done is Go through the admin console and use like organizational units to apply different policies and manage the devices.

So if you want to have like your teachers to have access to a certain website and your students not to have access to that, those are functions that they can do through the admin console to make the device into a student versus educator employee device.

Pete Nevin:

Yeah, I would say like our EDU marketing team just philosophically believes in like Chromebooks are for students, Chromebook Plus or for teachers.

Teachers are going to give teachers access to some of those generative AI tools to help them write lesson plans and things like that. And you want students to not necessarily have access to that stuff when they're writing their essays. Maybe you do, but but philosophically, that's the way they're being marketed.

Brandon Carter:

And I think I haven't personally seen the admin section that you showed there at the end of your portion there, Pete, that's pretty impressive. And that's where for someone viewing this I think that's where the idea of a Chromebook goes to the next level of that degree of, like using AI for administrative purposes.

Pete Nevin:

Yeah.

Brandon Carter:

And I will point out, whatever your perception of Chromebooks is probably needs to change because like companies like Promevo, we say that we are a Google partner through and through and we are wholly dedicated to Google Cloud, like servicing, supporting, and selling those services.

We also are almost entirely Chromebooks. So every function within the company, marketing, finance, product, sales, CS support: Chromebooks. And we're running like our company largely off of those devices.

There are, there's always needs for other devices. Like most organizations will find that yeah, if you have people doing like high powered graphics stuff, for example, yeah, you might need a Mac for that, but the other thing that we're noticing, which is maybe a topic for another day is the utilization of Chromebooks as a disaster recovery device and having them handy because they are very much plug and play, which is another question that I wanted to drop in for either of you here is, is this going to receive saying that Google is still at the beginning of this Gemini era, they've already added a bunch of cool stuff to it. And you can find a lot of that on by going to promevo.com and checking out our blog. We're posting lots of little, like, updates and tutorials.

Google's continuing to add a bunch of cool stuff to it, though. Is this going to continue to receive those updates?

Pete Nevin:

So you talk, you talk about disaster recovery and getting updates. Um, so it's sort of interesting because obviously, the classic sort of disaster recovery, they want to have a time capsule of devices that can quickly be brought to bear if something happened, right?

They want to be able to recover quickly and Chrome is a great way to do it because it's not dependent on a lot of those other technologies. They, they boot up quickly. They can receive updates super quickly. So we're trying to come up with best practices in that and working through that use case with this one customer.

Obviously if the devices are stored in a, in a container, in a closet somewhere, and they're not turned on, they're not getting updates, but they would get updates right away, right?

You turn them on, something happens as long as your wifi is still working, as long as you still plug that thing into the network and it can talk to Google servers, yeah within a couple of minutes, it'll be updated. It'll get all the new policies. It'll get all the new versions of the applications and everything and be ready to go within a couple of minutes.

Brandon Carter:

The beauty of cloud computing and cloud administration.

Pete Nevin:

Exactly.

Brandon Carter:

I'm curious Pete, I'm curious how this compares because other companies have rolled out their AI enabled devices. Can you speak as to how maybe this like this line the Chromebook Plus is different than say the Microsoft Copilot PCs?

Pete Nevin:

I mean I think we're... Microsoft is an awesome competitor and we're coming up from the same way, right?

We want to provide useful functionality to our users that's easy to use, very powerful, and. Uses the right resources to solve the problem. But I would say that those sort of founding principles and beliefs that I stated at the beginning are very true.

We're not just trying to put AI on it so that we can say we've got AI on it, but we're trying to you know, improve existing journeys, right? Existing workflows. As I said, Google has nine products with a billion users. We're not going to get them to change, where they're going to do, they're going to do it, the way they've been doing it. And so we've, we're trying to make the way it exists today work better without having to make people change their habits.

And so that's a real founding principle of a lot of this. That's why you've got the quick insert key, right? You're like, Whatever application you're using, I need to generate some text. We'll just hit this button and you just tell it what you want and it'll give it to you. And boom, it's right there.

And then this other principle, this other idea of is it better to have it in the cloud or on the device? It's, I think that's, the principle following is try to do it the best way with using the least resources. If it's something that can be calculated on the device, that's better than taking a bunch of data and tripping it out the cloud and getting it back.

But at the same time, the cloud is great because it has massive computing, unlimited computing capabilities. It updates in real time. It's, it has access to the latest information which is harder to do when you have a model that's located on a device. And walking that fine line trying to figure out where those things should be done is, is something that I would like to think Google's 10 years of experience with AI research and product development helps us have an edge.

Brandon Carter:

Yeah. And one other thing that I'll add there is it doesn't take much of a, of a Google search to discover. There is a pretty significant price difference between the Chromebook Plus devices and these Copilot uh... especially when you're talking with someone like Natera, who can give you a pretty good discount on certain models.

I do want to talk about specs for a second. Pete you had a slide in there where you talked about the different specs, how does that compare like the Chromebook Plus computing power wise, how does that compare to the typical Chromebook that is out already in the market?

Pete Nevin:

Yeah, it's interesting to ask, because it was just a little over a year ago that marketing came out with this, this push like Chromebook Plus, this is a step up in specs and really about just trying to change the conversation, yeah.

I'm out in the field trying to sell Chromebooks and you get the same, you get a similar response from a lot of potential customers and prospects.

Oh, I know Chromebooks. My kid brought one home from school and it's this plastic thing and it doesn't really do much. It's a browser. Yes. He can do his homework on it, but I've got a powered enterprise here. And yeah, I think a year ago. Marketing said, look, we've got to change the conversation.

We've been having Chromebook Plus for a long time. My Chromebook here is an HP Dragonfly. Again, shout out to another great OEM that manufactures great devices. It's, it was launched before this idea of Chromebook Plus, but it has all the specs of a Chromebook Plus, right?

The Chromebook Plus spec was announced a year ago. Are we going to change those specs as devices get faster and cheaper and all that? I suppose we will. So, you know, it was a point in time when people looked at here's what a Chromebook is. Marketing said Chromebook Plus has got to be twice as good as that. We got to make it twice as good.

So they said, all right, so it's got to be a minimum of an I3. It's got to be minimum of eight gig of Ram, because that's twice what we put in the education PC, and what I'd say is like Chromebook Plus will evolve, but the features, the software features and the AI features. Because my Chromebook, this Dragonfly supports it even though it doesn't have a little label that says Chromebook Plus in the back. When it boots up, it says Chromebook Plus and I have all the features built in, right?

So it's we're distinguishing it by a device that has the specs required to offer an awesome experience in AI on that device. Yes, the minimum specs right now is an I3 and 8 gig and, you know, 1080p camera. When those specs, when the market changes, those specs will probably, those floor specs will probably change.

Brandon Carter:

Sure. Uh, related to that, you may have, just answered this, but could I still I've got my Chromebook that I've had for maybe a year or two. Can I still run Gemini on that? Can I run Gemini functions on that one?

Pete Nevin:

Yeah, even a Chromebook that's not a Chromebook Plus, you can still run the applications that have Gemini and stuff.

It's not, you're not blocked from running the application. It just means that if it's not a Chromebook Plus, it doesn't have the Gemini model on the device, right? You can still use the web app and send the data to the cloud and get answers.

It just doesn't have the, it doesn't have the model on the device that does like some of those features I was talking about, where you've got the A. I. Generated background and you've got noise cancellation and adaptive charging stuff like that. Some of those things may not be on that device, but you can still run the software.

You could still use Gemini, the, the chat box functionality.

Brandon Carter:

Which, by the way, I want to put in a a note about the noise cancellation. Fantastic. Like maybe one of the best functions that Google has snuck into Workspace, especially this time of year when you get a lot of people sniffling and sneezing and coughing it cuts them out automatically and it's a wonderful.

One more question and then we'll call it a wrap. Do I need a Gemini license? When I get one of these devices or is Gemini included with the device?

Pete Nevin:

The on board stuff that I've talked about, the noise cancellation, Gemini insert key, all that doesn't require any Gemini license.

The Gemini licenses for this, when I brought the slide to talk about Google Workspace, right? All the auto correct, you know, auto fill and stuff in Docs and Sheets. That's Gemini with Workspace. That's something that requires a license.

But the stuff we're talking about the onboard quick insert key and that sort of stuff that doesn't require any additional license aside from just buying a Chromebook Plus.

Brandon Carter:

Gotcha. Awesome. To everyone out there. Thank you for attending.

If you registered, you'll get a recording of this in your email. So those of you in the future that are watching we appreciate it

Thank you, Pete. Thank you, Natera.

One quick reminder: Natera has deals on these things, Black Friday isn't just for consumers. We have deals on Chromebooks. You are welcome to reach out her email natera.bean@promevo.com. You can also go to promevo.com/ChromeOS and get a lot more information on these devices plus everything else underneath the ChromeOS world that we're happy to help you with.

So with that, we're going to call it a wrap. Have a great Thanksgiving and we will see you soon.