Grupo Paolini is an Argentine family-owned corporate group with more than 60 years of history and 950 employees across four business lines: road construction, mining services, architecture, and agribusiness. Francisco Paolini, third-generation CEO and architect by training, took over a group that had no website and depended on a physical server that went down whenever the power did.

"The next cultural transformation of the group will no longer be led by Human Resources," says Paolini. "It will be led by Communication and Systems. Early alignment with Google is one of our fundamental pillars to make that happen the right way."

The challenge wasn’t just technological. Around 75% of the group's workforce operates in the field: on construction sites, in mines, on agricultural land spread across Argentina. Reaching those people with digital tools, and making those tools genuinely useful to them, required a strategy built around adoption first and technology second.

An earlier attempt to deploy an AI chatbot on the group's intranet failed because it was too hard to find and too complex to use. "It ended up adding complexity rather than facilitating communication," Paolini explains.

The group also faced a deeper structural risk. Senior employees who built the business over decades, many of them now over 65, carried critical operational knowledge that lived nowhere but in their heads. Preserving that knowledge while scaling the business pointed clearly toward Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise as the next frontier, as Google Workspace had already proven itself.

Now the group needed data infrastructure, advanced AI, and a platform that could connect four different business lines into one coherent operation. "Google is a pioneering company that always competes to be the most technological," says Eduardo Gargevcich, chief technology officer. "That gives us the confidence that we will always stay current."

Partner Zenta Group supported the implementation and brought the technical depth the group needed.

With Google Cloud in place, Grupo Paolini is building an AI-powered infrastructure that connects data from every corner of the business for the first time.

At the center of this effort is Paolini IA (PIA), a customized AI assistant integrated into Google Workspace and deliberately designed as a grandmother figure to give employees a familiar, trustworthy entry point into AI.

"PIA comes as a human, soft tool so that people do not find it hard to adopt," says Paolini. "At the end of the road, we imagine PIA having all the know-how of the company, so that knowledge stays in the organization and does not leave with the people who built it."

Gemini Enterprise gives every employee with a corporate account an always-available AI assistant embedded directly in the tools they already use daily. Managers now use a custom Gemini gem to calculate the ROI of improvement initiatives, asking the right questions, identifying hidden costs, and producing richer and more consistent reports. That gem already informed a software selection decision and is being scaled to the full management team.

On the data side, Google Cloud now hosts a unified data warehouse that consolidates previously isolated legacy databases and operational systems from across the group. A quality control application built on AppSheet captures daily construction material data and feeds into this central environment alongside Gemini, allowing managers to query thousands of records in natural language to detect entry errors and surface operational patterns instantly.

Heavy machinery across Argentina is now tracked in real time through IoT telemetry feeding into Google Cloud, giving the operations team visibility they never had before. More than 20 analytics dashboards consolidated in Data Studio shortened leadership meetings by replacing data debates with a single source of truth.

"On the data, there is no discussion," notes Gargevcich. "We discuss the objective, not the number."

The results are already visible. ROI report generation time dropped to 10% of what it previously required. More than 20 dashboards now give leadership teams across the four business lines instant access to reliable data. Between 30 and 40 pioneer users are actively using Gemini Enterprise daily, supported by 240 Google Cloud Skills Boost licenses to train the wider workforce, establishing a clear path to scale advanced usage across all 120 Gemini Enterprise seats by end of 2027 and deploy 20 autonomous agents across the group by end of 2028.

One result stands out beyond the numbers. When Grupo Paolini wanted to transform a construction site camp into a sustainable facility with solar panels, a vegetable garden, sports facilities, and social programs for workers who sleep there, he used the Gemini ROI gem to build the business case.

"These tools give clarity around returns on investment," Paolini reflects. "They end up unblocking many discussions by letting the data do the talking, and also by understanding that some things have a social return that is just as real."

The camp now operates with 30% solar energy and has become a hub where startups test their products.

Looking ahead, the group sees AI reshaping construction, mining, and agribusiness in profound ways. "AI puts the human being back at the center," Paolini says. "It forces us to ask: what is the purpose of people inside the company? That is an important question in sectors as traditional as ours."

For other family businesses considering a similar move, his advice is clear: understand that this is an investment, not a cost, and find the right people to help. "Building with Google tech is complex, thrilling and game-changing," adds Gargevcich. "Knowing we are doing it alongside a company as pioneering as Google gives us confidence at every step."