445,000 Public Officers in Malaysia to Benefit from Generative AI Under the ‘AI at Work 2.0’ Initiative by the Ministry of Digital and Google Cloud

Google Workspace with Gemini suite of tools and training made available to government agencies under the newly enhanced and scaled iteration of ‘AI at Work’

The Ministry of Digital and Google Cloud announced in early February the launch of “AI at Work 2.0”, a joint initiative to equip public officers with Google Workspace’s latest generative AI (gen AI) capabilities, empowering them to transform public service delivery.

“AI at Work,” the first iteration of this initiative, was unveiled as a pilot program at the launch of Malaysia’s National AI Office (NAIO) in December 2024. Following the successful pilot, the enhanced and scaled iteration of this program (i.e., 2.0) is providing the Government of Malaysia with an expanded Google Workspace with Gemini suite of tools and making them accessible to up to 445,000 public officers.

YB Tuan Gobind Singh Deo, Minister of Digital, was the guest of honor at the launch of AI at Work 2.0. Delivering officiating remarks to highlight the significance of this initiative, he said: “The ability of public and private sector organizations – which touch the lives of virtually all Malaysians – to improve service delivery using next-generation technologies, will play an essential role in establishing Malaysia as a digitally-driven, high-income economy. Through AI at Work 2.0 by NAIO and Google Cloud, the government is taking the lead in harnessing gen AI, with the right guardrails built in, to better serve the rakyat under our five-year AI technology action plan. We are swiftly progressing beyond the pilot, which reinforced our belief that AI can uplift the productivity and efficacy of a workforce. In the coming months, we look forward to highlighting the tangible value generated by our public-private AI partnerships, as we drive further AI adoption momentum across government agencies and our broader business ecosystem.”

YBhg. Tuan Fabian Bigar, Secretary General, Ministry of Digital, said: “We are accelerating our efforts to ensure all government employees have access to gen AI assistants. Many government employees are already on Google Workspace through integration between MyGovUC and Google Workspace. We appreciate Google Cloud going a step further to provide its expanded set of gen AI tools and conducting bespoke training to help our government employees take full advantage of these tools. This partnership will help us streamline routine tasks across agencies, departments, and functions, freeing employees up to focus on more complex and strategic work that translates to improved public services delivery and citizen engagement.”

Google Workspace with Gemini benefits public officers in four main ways:

• Contextually relevant content generation and richer meetings: Gemini in Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet, and Chat will assist public officers with summarizing, analyzing, and drafting content based on insights from their emails and documents – without them having to leave the app they are in. This helps them more effectively create documents, slides, and spreadsheets, and have gen AI take notes during meetings, enhance the quality of meeting audio and video, and catch them up on conversations if they join meetings late.

• More engaging employee and citizen communications: Google Vids, a gen AI-powered video creation app that is integrated with Drive and Photos, will enable government agencies to more easily produce explainer videos on various topics, communicate organization-wide updates in a more personalized way, and scalably deliver employee training and education. It helps public officers with no professional video production background map out a narrative using suggested visuals, scripts, and background music; use a built-in teleprompter to more confidently land their message when recording a video; and finalize videos with an intuitive, scene-based editor.

• Creative support while streamlining repetitive tasks: The Gemini Advanced app on public officers’ work laptops or mobile devices will help them tackle complex tasks like coding and data extraction and analysis, or brainstorm new ideas for projects. To help them with repeatable or specialized tasks, such as analyzing citizen feedback to reveal sentiment trends over time, public officers can also build Gems, their own customized team of AI “experts.”

• Synthesize and extract insights from multiple information sources: NotebookLM Plus, a gen AI-powered research assistant, will allow public officers to simultaneously interact with up to 250 trusted sources, including their legislative and policy documents, to get grounded insights for quicker decision-making and improved responsiveness to citizen needs. They can upload sources (e.g., documents, web pages, or multimedia content) into a notebook and share it with team members, who can then ask questions about the information in those sources and receive answers with inline citations, or generate briefing documents, FAQs, and AI podcast summaries.

AI at Work 2.0 will provide dedicated training and consultation to help public officers effectively use Google Workspace with Gemini. This includes hands-on workshops to help users write effective prompts and identify where these tools can deliver the most value.

Google Workspace with Gemini is one of the first gen AI productivity solutions to attain a comprehensive set of safety, privacy, and security certifications, including SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001/17/18, and ISO 42001. It automatically applies Google Workspace’s enterprise-grade data security and privacy controls, ensuring that Gemini only retrieves relevant data that the user has permission to access.

Rahul Sharma, Managing Director, Public Sector, Asia Pacific, Google Cloud, said: “The Ministry of Digital and NAIO are applying a comprehensive approach to enhance workforce proficiency and productivity, from deploying employee agents through Google Workspace with Gemini, to appointing and training gen AI champions to help accelerate adoption across agencies, to implementing before-and-after measurement to quantify value. Our partnership is establishing the Government of Malaysia as a leader in reimagining how work gets done and serving as the blueprint for governments and enterprises in the region looking to derive measurable value from AI adoption at scale. We look forward to continuing to advance Malaysia’s national AI agenda through AI at Work 2.0, as well as other joint initiatives.”

The AI at Work pilot was conducted with 270 public officers from various government agencies, including Jabatan Digital Negara (JDN). These officers leveraged Google Workspace’s gen AI capabilities to accomplish day-to-day tasks quicker, such as drafting policy papers and written communications. User feedback and usage analytics revealed that 97% of pilot participants experienced time savings of 3.25 hours per individual per week, with 91% indicating that gen AI has helped enhance their quality of work.

AI at Work 2.0 builds upon Google's ongoing commitment to Malaysia, which includes a US$2 billion investment in a new Google data center and Google Cloud region, and AI skilling initiatives like Gemini Academy and the Google AI Essentials course, offered via the Gemilang training program.