New Way Now: Gordon Food Service reimagines data-driven decisions & problem-solving with Agentspace
22Featured in this video: Matt Jansen, IT Manager of Emerging Technology at Gordon Food Service
Executive summary: Gordon Food Service, a major North American full-service food distributor, is embracing generative AI on its mission to turn using AI into second nature. To remove development bottlenecks and supercharge AI adoption, Gordon Food Service is implementing Agentspace, which securely connects enterprise apps to Google’s Gemini models, Google-quality multimodal search, and AI agents. Agentspace simplifies agent adoption and creation, providing pre-built expert agents for idea generation and deep research, along with a no-code designer for creating custom agents. Now, anyone — even those with limited technical expertise — can build AI agents for their specific needs, allowing Gordon Food Service to quickly scale “digital coworkers” across its operations. In addition, the ability to access and make sense of enterprise data using simple, conversational queries is transforming knowledge discovery for its employees, translating to less legwork and driving faster and more informed decision-making across the board.
Challenge: As part of its vision to make using AI an automatic reflex for employees, Gordon Food Service took early and decisive action to adopt AI agents. However, with data scattered across numerous disparate systems and sources, building and integrating AI agents created a bottleneck as it required extensive custom development and a dedicated team.
Solution: To supercharge AI adoption, Gordon Food Service is implementing Agentspace, which brings together Gemini's advanced reasoning, Google-quality search, and enterprise data, regardless of where it's hosted. Agentspace helped simplify agent adoption and creation, providing pre-built Google agents for idea generation and deep research, along with its Agent Designer — a no-code solution for creating custom agents tailored to specific workflows. In addition, Agentspace comes with connectors for the most common enterprise apps — including Workspace, ServiceNow, Confluence, Jira, SAP, and more — enabling employees to apply Google-quality multimodal search to surface enterprise data and gain actionable insights faster.
Results: Now, anyone — even those with limited technical expertise — can build agents to meet their needs, allowing Gordon Food Service to quickly scale “digital coworkers” across its operations. Already, Gordon Food Service is actively testing an agent to automate incident creation in ServiceNow and using Google’s pre-built agents to brainstorm and generate new ideas for improving its brand reach and recruitment and retention strategies. Agentspace has also transformed knowledge discovery by allowing employees to easily search and make sense of enterprise data using simple, conversational queries, reducing legwork and driving more informed decisions across the board.
Key takeaways and highlights from our interview with Matt Jansen, IT Manager of Emerging Technology at Gordon Food Service:
→ “What we are looking forward to with the agentic era is transforming from providing knowledge and information based on questions you ask to combine that with taking actions on behalf of a user. With Agentspace, it's bringing it all together in a way that is collaborative and allows more people in the organization to build agents. You don't need to have as much technical knowledge, and you can still create or leverage those digital coworkers.”
→ “We have data that's scattered across a lot of different systems. Before, you had to go into each system and figure out how to work within that system. Agentspace comes to the table with all of that as connectors that Google is facilitating, and that's a huge value proposition because otherwise it's all custom development. That changes the game because you can have just conversational knowledge that comes from enterprise data sources for any problem that you're trying to solve.”
→ “We're very excited about [the] Idea Generation agent — this concept of bringing a problem to Agentspace. We've experimented with how to improve our brand penetration with customers and different ways we could both recruit and retain people, and seeing a score of the most effective best ideas has been pretty gratifying. That's a whole new way of thinking about problem solving. In the same vein, we're looking at the Deep Research agent and actually how to collaborate between those two agents. The vision we see is agents increasingly understanding when it's applicable to collaborate with other agents and doing so on their own while looping us in — that future is very within reach inside Agentspace.”
Google Cloud products used: Google Agentspace
Learn more:
→ Scale enterprise search and agent adoption with Google Agentspace: https://goo.gle/43HaThi
→ Learn more about Google Agentspace: https://goo.gle/3HDWDxq