MOST small Filipino businesses do not have anyone whose job is marketing. The owner does it. Writes the captions, answers the messages, figures out what to post next, usually after closing up for the day. Two Google tools have been changing what that owner can get done in an hour. One is Pomelli, an experimental artificial intelligence (AI) tool Google Labs has just expanded access to. The other is Gemini, which has been around long enough that some mompreneurs are now teaching each other how to use it.
Here is how Pomelli works. You paste in your business website, and the tool reads it, picks up your colors and typography and the way you write, and stitches all of that into what Google calls your Business DNA. Out comes a set of campaign ideas, plus ready-to-post content for Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, with captions and visuals included, in under a minute. Developed with Google DeepMind, Pomelli is free to try at labs.google/pomelli while it remains experimental.
The first test was on our coffee farm site, benguetarabica.coffee. The Business DNA feature got my attention, because consistency is the hardest thing to hold on to when you are the farmer, the processor, the packer, the bookkeeper and the person answering messages at ten in the evening. Drift creeps in. A tool that anchors your visual identity solves a problem I actually have.
The Photoshoot feature was next. One image of our beans came back as four usable variations. One of its Earth Day campaign ideas read: "This Earth Day, choose coffee that protects the biodiversity of our mountains." Not bad for a machine that met our farm sixty seconds earlier.
One caveat: it is experimental, and free for now. Anything it generates from a sixty-second scan still needs a human eye before it goes live. Mine flagged the Earth Day line as usable. The next one might not be.
Why this matters for MSMEs
The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) reports that micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) make up more than 99 percent of all business establishments in the Philippines and account for over 60 percent of total employment. That is the backbone of the economy. The barrier has never been ambition. It is time and money small operations do not have to spare.
Pomelli is the newcomer. Gemini is the one I have leaned on the longest. Back in 2024, a new product was launching on the farm and the caption would not come. Selling is not where my creative writing lives. Gemini helped, and the caption it suggested went up almost as written. Orders came in so quickly that the batch had to close early. That was the first time I understood, in my own pesos, what these tools can do for someone good at growing coffee but not at writing about it.
What other women are finding
The same pattern is showing up in the Madiskarte Moms PH community, where the group has been running a Gemini Academy with Google Philippines and PLDT Home. Princess Alvarez, who runs ISLA Everything Accessories, used Gemini to build a custom pricing calculator in Google Sheets without any technical background and now gives the formulas away to other handmade-goods makers for free. "Most of the questions I get from my fellow handmade-goods makers is: how do I price my items? So I asked Gemini for help on how to do it," Alvarez said. "If I am going to help my fellow entrepreneurs with this, I want to go the full length of helping out."
Over at MP Nieva's Flower Company, Jenielyn Sicabalo-Nieva tells a story I recognized in my own bones. Her team handles the creative work; she handles the business. When her shop was tapped to provide flowers for a movie premiere, she asked Gemini to research each cast member's favorite colors and blooms, and the bouquets landed exactly right. "I'm really not creative — my team are the creative ones. But Gemini feels like an extra creative hand that helps me think," Sicabalo-Nieva said.
The clearest answer to who these tools are for came from Mercedita Madrona, the 64-year-old owner of Kusinanay's Food Products and a Gawad Madiskarte finalist this year. Madrona describes herself as "not a techie," and she is technically a senior citizen. So am I. She also closed a major property sale using AI inside her messaging apps. For Madrona, it came down to this: "Even though you don't know something, there's always a way to learn." That is the line I want every Filipina running a business from her kitchen table to read this Sunday. The tools are here. The learning curve is shorter than the one most of us have already climbed.