Kota Kinabalu: Sabah was the first State Government to use Google Workspace Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications with Gemini suite of tools in its administration.
This was disclosed at the Sabah NGO Sabah Social Entrepreneurs & Eco Development (SEED), organised special programme on “Entrepreneurship Reimagined: AI, Markets & Sabah’s Next Leap” recently.
Fireside chat session participant Faezrah Rizalman, moderated by Adelina Adna, dispelled the misconception that AI makes people lazy.
She said that, “AI makes you more efficient at work, from writing a letter with just one draft and to reply professionally.”
Faezrah urged AI users to “always challenge AI output.” She is the Elevate Academy’s principal trainer and technologist director.
Today, even big corporations use AI to generate videos at a fraction of the high costs charged by other professional firms.
The Federal Government is also expanding its use of artificial intelligence (AI) across the civil service through the adoption of Google Workspace.
The initiative has yielded significant results, with data showing that 97 per cent of participating civil servants save an average of 3.25 hours per week. Furthermore, 91 per cent reported that generative and agentic AI tools have improved their work quality.
According to Federal Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo, Google AI is not the sole provider for the civil service. The government remains committed to collaborating with other local and international AI entities to position Malaysia as a leading AI hub in the Asean region.
The integration of Gemini AI into Google Workspace heralds a significant leap in public sector productivity, offering a suite of tools designed to augment the capabilities of civil servants.
By embedding artificial intelligence directly into applications like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet, Gemini provides seamless assistance with summarising, analysing and drafting content.
This allows public officers to enhance the quality of their documents, presentations, and data analyses without disrupting their workflow.
Furthermore, the AI enriches collaborative efforts by generating meeting notes, improving audio and video clarity, and providing concise recaps for those joining discussions late, thereby fostering more substantive and inclusive meetings.
Hence, Google Workspace with Gemini AI benefits public officers in that Gemini in Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet and Chat will assist public officers with summarising, analysing, 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 generative AI take notes during meetings, enhance the quality of meeting audio and video, and catch them up on conversations if they join meetings late. This creates richer meetings.
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 organisation-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 finalise videos with an intuitive, scene-based editor.
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 analysing citizen feedback to reveal sentiment trends over time, public officers can also build Gems, their own customized team of AI “experts.”
NotebookLM Plus, a generative 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.
This capability ensures that governmental responsiveness is both swift and firmly rooted in a comprehensive understanding of the available information, ultimately leading to more effective public service.
In the event’s sharing of views with Sabah Net Sdn. Bhd.’s subsidiary Digital Heritage Sdn. Bhd. senior project consultant Arthur Kent Raymond, discussions also touched on Generative AI and Grounded AI.
Civil servants can also make use of Google workspace with Gemini AI to access Google’s A1 tool nicknamed “Nano Banana”. The official tool name is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image that can convert any photo to a detailed 3D mode in just a few seconds.
Google has made it free to use and has democratized the functions of a 3d printer. This means, with few prompts users can have their very own customized figurines instantly without needing any special skills. The results are remarkably sharp and realistic, with the ability to render detailed and impressive features. The tool has preserved many important elements including facial expression, clothing and even some background features.
Ultimately for Sabah with electricity outages or connectivity gaps in some rural areas, cost and needed availability of internet connectivity in Sabah to access online AI tools 24/7 remains a challenge.
