Client story BlackLine Hits 99% Adoption of Gemini Enterprise With Insight

Activating intelligence: How BlackLine is leading the future of work with Gemini Enterprise

BlackLine, a market leader in financial automation solutions, is at the forefront of the artificial intelligence (AI) era. As their customers look to them for guidance on leveraging AI in finance securely, the company is setting the standard for responsible and effective implementation.

To ensure widespread adoption of their new internal agentic AI solution, BlackLine enlisted Insight to accelerate the cultural shift required. Insight partnered with BlackLine to deliver professional change management and training, resulting in a highly successful engagement. Today, 99% of employees use the tool, achieving significant time savings and cost reductions across all departments.

The challenge: activating a wealth of internal knowledge

BlackLine’s leaders saw a significant opportunity to use AI to amplify their strategic goals and accelerate their roadmap. The company identified two key areas for advancement:

• Distributed information: BlackLine sought to create a more seamless experience, empowering employees to instantly access internal policies and customer data. The goal was to move beyond traditional tools and enhance productivity by making information retrieval effortless.
• Untapped data potential: With approximately 70% of company data being unstructured — including PDFs, audio recordings, and video transcripts — BlackLine identified an opportunity to activate this vast resource. The objective was to transform this data into a strategic asset for rapidly building new automation features.

The solution

To solve these challenges and fuel BlackLine’s evolution as an AI-first company, the team ran a successful internal experiment with a self-hosted AI tool called Buckie AI. This tool served as a secure, internal version of a public chatbot, leveraging corporate knowledge not available outside the company. While the Buckie AI experiment clearly demonstrated AI's potential, the tool was not designed to scale across the enterprise.

BlackLine then decided to adopt Gemini Enterprise, which was ideal for the company’s long-term, multi-year AI roadmap.

Taking a technology-neutral approach

BlackLine relies on a number of technologies from different solution providers, and they recognized the value of Google Cloud’s technology-agnostic approach with its agentic AI tools. This was a key reason BlackLine chose Gemini Enterprise for their AI information integration needs.

“I really like Google Cloud’s approach to agentic AI, with them putting themselves in a technology-neutral position and their willingness to connect to any data source,” says Sumit Johar, CIO at BlackLine. “They’ll connect to any application or build connectors to anything. They don’t care whether you are a Google Cloud shop or not.”

This approach enabled BlackLine to quickly connect Gemini Enterprise to everyday applications such as Outlook^®, Jira, SharePoint^®, and others. This internal connectivity made a major difference, elevating the tool from a simple chatbot to a powerful work asset.

Choosing a change management partner

BlackLine recognized that empowering their people was as critical as implementing the technology itself. To drive a culture of activation and innovation, BlackLine needed a change management provider to excite, energize, and train their 2,000 employees.

BlackLine looked for a partner who could offer professional training for all levels of the organization and who understood the crucial need for cultural evolution. Insight fit this description perfectly. “We chose Insight because of their partnership with Google Cloud and their experience with Gemini Enterprise,” says Shalini Mayor, Head of AI & Automation at BlackLine.

Adopting AI with a multi-level strategy

Insight helped BlackLine drive adoption through a multi-level strategy:

• Company-wide introduction session: This initial session focused on universal use cases and aimed to excite everyone about the new tool.
• Department-based training: This involved creating specific use cases that would directly relate to each function — a time-consuming but essential process for demonstrating immediate value.
• Executive workshops: Training for leaders focused on high-impact use cases where the need for accurate, correct answers was paramount.
• Individual and small-group coaching: Insight offered 40 individual and small-group coaching sessions, which were immediately overenrolled, helping people prepare for an internal competition.
• Prompt engineering and enterprise search: This training transformed how BlackLiners interrogate data. By mastering prompt engineering, they uncover deeper, more specific insights from both internal and external sources, ensuring that their outcomes are driven by highly relevant and accurate information.

The goal of the training was to empower employees to integrate AI into their daily work. “We wanted a provider who could help us with professional training from top to bottom and stand in front of our 2,000 employees to excite, energize, and impress them about what’s possible with Gemini Enterprise,” says Johar.

Focusing on key features

The training highlighted core features of Gemini Enterprise, making them key to day-to-day work.

• NotebookLM: This feature lets any employee quickly create a personal agent by providing it with specific, private data and instructing it to only answer questions based on that data. This was a very different and appealing feature compared to public models. BlackLiners can chat with NotebookLM to get grounded information based on their sources, with clear in-line citations for accuracy, transparency, and trust.
• Deep Research: This tool was highly valued for its ability to conduct complex research based on careful user instructions

The outcomes

The Gemini Enterprise rollout, supported by Insight’s change management, quickly became a major success story at BlackLine. The move to an open, secure internal AI tool empowered employees, sparking a wave of innovation across the company.

Quantifiable benefits

The impact was seen immediately in employee engagement and time savings:

• Universal adoption: 99% of BlackLiners adopted Gemini Enterprise.
• High engagement: BlackLine averages 7,500 interactions with Gemini Enterprise every day, making it the second most used application after the CRM system.
• Time savings: A survey of the top 900 users revealed that 45% felt the tool saved them almost one day per week. Other examples include customer support agents saving 15 minutes per ticket and one employee distilling a week’s worth of conference notes into summaries in minutes.
• Cost savings: Gemini Enterprise saved BlackLine $200,000 on product documentation translations and $200,000 yearly on content creation, while enabling them to double their output.

Qualitative improvements

Success went beyond numbers, igniting a cultural shift and boosting employee morale.

• Accelerating innovation: To boost adoption, BlackLine held a prompt-a-thon for employees to create agents aligned with company goals to increase revenue, reduce churn, and improve profitability. It proved to be a major accelerator, drawing 87 submissions from 131 BlackLiners. “The prompt-a-thon gave the company new, creative solutions that the IT team wouldn’t have thought of,” says Mayor. “The event got people excited, making it a turning point for employees to see what the tool could do.”
• Focus on high-value tasks: By automating tasks like drafting proposals, reviewing complex documents, and answering simple customer questions, Gemini Enterprise frees up 15-20% of work time for every employee. This allows them to focus on work that truly matters, like sales, customer satisfaction, and growth.

Future outlook

The success of the Gemini Enterprise rollout has positioned BlackLine for continued innovation:

• Democratized agent creation: BlackLine plans to soon release a new feature that will let all employees build their own agents. This step makes employees, not just the IT team, the drivers of innovation.
• Tool consolidation: An unexpected benefit is the ability to consolidate other tools. BlackLine found that some teams no longer need costly, off-the-shelf software because Gemini Enterprise can perform the same functions, such as a tool used by the marketing team for content generation.
• An ongoing journey: BlackLine continues to hold training sessions and events like quarterly innovation sessions, understanding that widespread AI enablement is a journey that never ends.