Large tech businesses are competing with one another to out-innovate one another in the generative AI boom by introducing new features and platforms that capitalize on the most popular tech trend in years. Wall Street is also curious about how all those AI programs will turn a profit.

As a result, companies like Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), and others are searching more and more for methods to make money off of their AI initiatives. One such example is the new premium generative AI service that Google unveiled this week at its annual Cloud Next developers conference: AI categorization for its Workspace productivity suite, which is intended to increase user security.

The AI categorization is an additional $10 per user per month for Google Workspace Business and Workspace Enterprise, which cost $20 and $30 per user per month, respectively.

Yulie Kwon Kim, vice president of product management at Google Workspace, claims that the function is made to automatically categorize critical documents inside businesses to stop them from being shared, duplicated, or exposed in any other way to the outside world.

Kim said, “We use this feature here at Google, and it helps us identify and classify 900 million internal files.” “So, this has boosted … our data protection capabilities, improving accuracy, dramatically increasing coverage, and saving team members a lot of time, and this solves a problem that every organization has out there.”

Kim also made sure to point out that Google’s Workspace hasn’t experienced any security hiccups, in contrast to rival Microsoft, which has been dealing with issues with its Exchange service, including one from 2023 that a recent Department of Homeland Security report attributed to a “cascade of security failures at the Windows maker.”

“One in three of the most exploited vulnerabilities in 2022 were in Microsoft Exchange, so that’s hitting a lot of businesses out there. And this number was zero for Google workspace,” the speaker stated.

Google claims that in addition to its AI categorization add-on, it is reducing spam in Gmail by utilizing huge language models, which are the basis of contemporary generative AI platforms. In order to give itself time to implement the service on its own platform, the business delayed announcing it until its Next conference, which took place in late 2023. Kim called the product AI anti-threat security software.

“We block 20% more spam in Gmail [with the new tool]. We are able to review 1,000 times more user reported spam in Gmail every day,” according to Kim. “So that’s basically like adding 1,000 cyber defenders to our team.”

Kim claims that Google is attempting to fight fire with fire. Applications that use generative AI can be used to construct phishing emails, but they can also detect emails that were generated with the technology since they can identify the messages that were written with it.

Not just Google is making money off of its generative AI applications. Additionally, Microsoft is charging $30 a month for enterprise users to use its Copilot for Microsoft 365 platform. Additionally, it offers a number of Azure features driven by generative AI in addition to its Copilot for Security service.

Businesses will need to make sure that as they continue to release generative AI programs and services, they generate enormous profits in addition to covering their costs.