Enabled universal knowledge discovery from core business application data sources and supercharged productivity for 7,000 employees with Gemini for Workspace
Fast-tracked AI implementation with pre-built connectors to enterprise applications
Empowered technical staff to build AI agents, helping automate repetitive workflows
Improved and accelerated decision-making and content creation using tools integrated with Workspace, saving 20,000+ hours monthly
Expanded the power of agents through technologies such as Agent Development Kit (ADK) and Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol
Workers at Gordon Food Service foster an innovation-forward mindset by using AI-powered applications and tools from Google Cloud to boost productivity and elevate customer service.
Workers at Gordon Food Service foster an innovation-forward mindset by using AI-powered applications and tools from Google Cloud to boost productivity and elevate customer service.
Infusing AI into everyday work for 7,000 employees
The culture we're creating engrains using AI as a reflex so that the creativity of our people comes to life with richer context, helping our teams solve problems more effectively for our business, our partners, and for our customers.
Brendan Bonthuis
CIO, Gordon Food Service
In the food service industry, the recipe for success is simple: deliver high value that keeps customers coming back. That means finding ways to support greater employee productivity; more competitive pricing; efficient supply chains; well-stocked warehouse and store shelves; timely deliveries; and ever-better customer service.
Serving customers with the highest quality foodservice products and services has been the mission of Gordon Food Service, the largest family-operated food distributor in North America, for over 125 years. The company achieves its purpose through innovative systems and the spirit and integrity of its people.
In addition to delivering the high-quality brands that restaurants and customers love, Gordon Food Service has evolved to provide restaurant operators and chefs with a total restaurant management system that lets them oversee all aspects of their business from one platform.
With a legacy of more than a century of innovation as a core company value, it's no wonder Gordon Food Service became an early adopter of AI. When generative AI was introduced a few years ago, Gordon Food Service was ready to take it further, faster than most.
The company launched an initiative to integrate AI into every employee's workflow, giving them modern, powerful productivity tools and freeing them to focus on higher-value activities like strategy and innovation. Today about 7,000 employees actively use Workspace with Gemini to draft emails, analyze spreadsheets, generate summaries, and make the company's institutional knowledge more accessible.
To fully realize its vision of AI for the workplace and make AI more helpful for its employees, Gordon Food Service needed AI to understand business context, which means AI needs controlled access to business information and data residing in the applications and datastores the company uses. Doing so required integration with a myriad of systems, such as Google Workspace, ServiceNow, Concur, SAP S/4, JIRA, Confluence, and GitLab. However, custom-building those integrations would be no easy task. There was also the challenge of AI agent development: while a centralized team helped qualify AI workstreams, the backlog of generative and agentic use cases had grown faster than the teams expected.
Gemini Enterprise offered a game-changing solution to help Gordon Food Service integrate AI within employees' everyday work. A powerful agentic AI platform, Gemini Enterprise combines Google's most advanced Gemini models, a suite of pre-built Google agents, and a no-code workbench that allows employees to build their own agents, all grounded and connected to the company's internal data sources and key business applications. With Gemini Enterprise, Gordon Food Service employees can now chat with Gemini to quickly find and synthesize information; analyze data and generate content; and also use agents to automate tasks and workflows for greater productivity, enhanced collaboration, and new value.
Serving up innovation by empowering employees with AI agents
Gemini Enterprise is helping Gordon Food Service accelerate AI adoption across the company. With built-in connectors to many enterprise apps, Gemini Enterprise overcame the anticipated challenges of connecting to many of Gordon Food Services' apps, saving the company the time and work of custom builds.
Grounded in the business context from the data of the company's apps, Gemini Enterprise is able to provide Gordon Food Service employees much more helpful insights. By chatting with Gemini, employees can quickly search relevant information across the web and the company's data, gain actionable insights much faster—and in some cases, where previously impossible—for better, data-driven decision-making.
A concept we're embracing as an organization is having 'digital co-workers,' enabled by Gemini Enterprise. It makes sense as the next step in incorporating AI as an integral part of how we work.
Matt Jansen
IT Manager, Emerging Technology, Gordon Food Service
Gordon Food Service is already seeing more value with Gemini Enterprise as employees explore different agentic capabilities and grow their own skills. For example, human resources and marketing managers are using specialized, Google-built agents to brainstorm solutions for existing challenges, such as how to increase Gordon Food Service's brand awareness, and how to recruit and retain the company's truck drivers.
The agent provides ideas and scores the most effective ones, which team members can then explore further using a deep research agent. As Matt Jansen of Gordon Food Service's Emerging Technology group points out, it's a whole new approach to problem solving.
Creating digital co-workers as a recipe for success
With Gemini Enterprise, access to data and insights is as simple as a conversation for workers from a variety of roles. The real magic of Gemini Enterprise is in what it's unlocking from our people. It helps us strengthen our continued commitment to providing high levels of service.
Brendan Bonthuis
CIO, Gordon Food Service
Where employees once needed to queue up requests for custom-built agents with the dev team, Gordon Food Service is now working to enable the Gemini Enterprise no-code Agent Designer to streamline agent creation across technical and non-technical users. Even users without extensive technical knowledge will build their own workflows and agents, either visually or through basic configurations, leveraging their own data to unlock next-level productivity while reducing or eliminating previous development bottlenecks. And while this could result in further proliferation of agents, Gemini Enterprise reduces sprawl by offering a unifying platform for consolidating all agents in one place for greater access and employee collaboration.
As part of this human-agent collaboration, Jansen anticipates Gordon Food Service employees soon being able to simply talk to an agent to create ServiceNow incident tickets, with Gemini Enterprise using an inference layer to create a ticket and route it to the correct team. Agentic support will simplify and streamline reporting while improving data quality.
In the near future, the Emerging Technology team at Gordon Food Service sees a world where AI agents will be paired with automation to help streamline work both internally and across the company's suppliers. As one early example, Gordon Food Service partnered with one of its key suppliers, Tyson Foods, to showcase a cross-organization agentic capability for product searching and sales tracking. Using advanced tooling released by Google Cloud like Agent Development Kit (ADK) and the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, Gordon Food Service and Tyson Foods worked with Google's engineering teams to pilot this advanced supply chain use case.
The pilot showed how the agents from the two companies could interface safely, as black boxes, without exposing internal memory, tools, or proprietary logic. Recognizing the value in these real-time communications automations, Gordon Food Service is now making plans to bring this system to production in Gemini Enterprise and scale it across more vendors and use cases.
"Building agents with ADK has a simple learning curve for those with a solid developer background,and using the A2A protocol gives us confidence we'll be able to integrate with agents from many companies in the future. This approach streamlines our integration cycle times and enables our agents to securely interoperate with native support for asynchronous operations, streaming, and agent negotiations. It improves our flexibility and scalability for better reach as we expand agentic-based collaboration," says Jansen.
It's a collaboration between employees, vendors, partners, and AI that Brendan Bonthuis, CIO of Gordon Food Service suggests will continue to deepen, eventually with more code generation and the on-demand development of solution software. Says Bonthuis, "We're looking forward to that shift from the AI providing information based on questions users ask to the AI applying knowledge to take action on behalf of a user so that we can tackle new challenges and drive even greater value."
And the outcome of that human-AI collaboration? Not only is the company already seeing greater productivity, but its employees are using AI tools to find ways to price more competitively, identify potential supply chain efficiencies, ensure timely deliveries and well-stocked locations, and, at the end of the day, ensure that restaurants and their customers have the foods they love on their tables.
Gordon Food Service is the largest family-operated, broad-line food distribution company in North America. The company serves over 123,00 customers through its 9 distribution centers in Canada, 16 in the US, and over 180 Gordon Food Service stores.
Industry: Food and Beverage Distribution
Location: United States
Products: Google Cloud, Gemini Enterprise, Gemini, Workspace with Gemini
