Google today hinted at a near future where its artificial intelligence capabilities underpin its collection of cloud-based applications aimed at the workplace, Google Apps. At an event in Tokyo, the Internet giant announced a new application and a revamp of another, with some AI smarts injected into both. The new product is called Springboard, and it's intended to let Google Apps customers search through the content of the documents they store in their Google Drive, along with their contacts and calendar entries, all in one place. It will also use AI, Google says, to proactively find information that may be relevant to what you're working on. Google also says it has rebuilt Google Sites, its lightweight tool for creating websites and intranet sites for use by work teams.

While Google Apps is making some big strides in selling to business customers, Microsoft Office is still the de facto standard in software for getting work done. But there's one thing that Google is, and has always been, better at than its rivals at Microsoft: Search. In fact, Google boasts, it's been providing search solutions to businesses for the last 15 years. "We're not new players by any means," says Google Director of Product Management Ryan Tabone. On Monday, Google is turning that expertise into a nifty new product with Springboard, a tool for its Google Apps for Works customers, that lets you search all your data across the whole suite of Google productivity tools.

Google isn't kidding when it says it's serious about the enterprise. The company announced a pair of new services on Monday that are aimed squarely at helping businesses access information and share it internally, similar to what Microsoft's SharePoint product offers. A new Springboard app gives employees at companies subscribed to Google Apps for Work a unified search box for finding just about anything, including files in Google Drive, emails in Gmail and contacts. The company also unveiled the beta version of a revamped Google Sites, which is aimed at letting less sophisticated users inside a business build websites that can be used to share information internally. The new Sites gives users templates and an easy to use editor.