Google Workspace Intelligence turns Gemini into an agentic assistant for office automation

Google updates Workspace to make AI your new office intern | TechCrunch

At Google Cloud Next this week, the tech giant announced a bevy of new updates to Workspace, its subscription-based productivity suite aimed at professionals. As you might expect, the updates are heavy on AI, integrating new automation tools into various workflows -- everything from drafting emails to organizing Google Sheets. Overall, the changes are clearly designed to give office workers a leg up in their pursuit of less busy work. Here's some of what is new: Workspace Intelligence. Workspace Intelligence, a new AI system built into Google's office suite, is designed to automate assistance across various tasks. The system draws on a user's Workspace data, including their Gmail, Calendar, Chat, and Drive (Docs, Slides, and Sheets). Google has given users administrative control over what the AI system can see and access. Users can disable Workspace Intelligence's access to particular data sources at any time. The tradeoff: the more data the system has access to, the more it's able to assist in those particular areas. Build and fill out Google Sheets with Gemini. A number of new features allow users to both build and fill out Google Sheets, the company's spreadsheet tool. Users can construct sheets by prompting Gemini to construct them. Prompts can include things like formatting and data retrieval, allowing Google's AI system to do much of the work a human would've previously needed to do. At the same time, Gemini also helps with data entry, automatically filling out Sheets with "prompt-based" filling. Google claims that its new feature allows users to populate the spreadsheets "9x faster" than manual entry, because the system is designed to infer what you're going to enter. Another new Sheets feature allows users to convert unstructured data into organized tables. AI writing capabilities. Google has also brought new new AI writing tools to Google Docs. Users can now use Gemini to "generate, write, and refine" documents. The feature is powered by the company's Workspace Intelligence system, which draws on data from a user's Drive, Chat, and Gmail archives, as well as the internet, to assist with editorial tasks. Users merely prompt Gemini to help them write or edit their documents. Users can prompt Gemini to "help me write" or ask it to "match" their writing style so that it can effectively mimic their voice. Realizing that enterprise customers are where the money is, tech companies are racing to deploy the most convenient and efficient office tools -- applications that can make the average worker's life a matter of degrees easier. Google has a certain advantage; its office products are already deeply embedded in workplaces worldwide, giving it a built-in audience for these AI upgrades. But Microsoft, Apple, and a growing field of startups are all competing for the same turf.

Google's big Gemini-powered Workspace upgrades are out of beta and hitting Docs, Sheets, and more

In addition to Workspace accounts, users on Google AI Ultra and AI Pro plans can start using them. This week, Google's got big news for its enterprise clients as it shares a host of announcements at Cloud Next '26. We've already heard about the next-gen Tensor Processing Units coming to Google's data centers, and learned how Gemini Personal Intelligence is finding a home with businesses through Workplace Intelligence. But now we've got some news with a little more impact for all of us end users, as we get some updates on the latest features hitting Google's biggest productivity tools.

Google Workspace gets a new intelligence layer to make Gemini more of an agentic assistant

Workspace Intelligence is all about giving Gemini full context * Workspace Intelligence connects to your Google ecosystem and third parties * The entire Gemini experience feels more cohesive across the board * Google is still trying to convince you to migrate away from M365 Google Cloud has shared details of the brand new Workspace Intelligence layer which serves to combine organizational context with artificial intelligence. For the end user - in this case, business customers - it means the Gemini experience feels far more cohesive across the entire platform, moving beyond generic AI to unlock actual company data like documents, emails and meetings as well as organizational knowledge. With the huge contextual boost, it brings Gemini closer to being an agentic assistant that can take actions across multiple apps. Workspace Intelligence is the layer Gemini always needed Speaking at Google Cloud Next 2026, Product VP Yulie Kwon Kim said it now allows users to build reports and forecasts, draft presentations from multiple data sources and execute multi-step, multi-app workflows. Its core principle is to automate the process of finding relevant emails, files and web information to bridge apps and workflows, but there's also an always-learning personalization element that understands how each worker styles and formats content. Ultimately, it allows users to interact with Gemini in exactly the same way wherever they are, be it within a specific Workspace app or Google Chat, and all the same organisation-wide, Google Workspace-wide context remains accessible. Importantly, it also includes third-party connectors for external data sources, too, vastly improving the power of Gemini beyond just the Google environment. Early partners include HubSpot, Salesforce, Asana and Jira. To coincide with the new intelligence layer, AI Overviews and Ask Gemini have now been made generally available to help users interact with, and summarize, multiple documents and projects with simplicity. At the same time, the company is also announcing updates to its migration service that's now up to five times quicker for companies moving from Microsoft 365. Yulie positioned this as the perfect, low-friction way for companies to try out new Workspace AI features. Workspace Intelligence is now rolling out to eligible users across certain paid business plans - the finer details can be found on the company's web page. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button! And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

Workspace Intelligence turns Gemini into an all-knowing do-it-all AI agent for your work

A few weeks ago, Google announced a new feature called Personal Intelligence. Broadly, the idea is to let Gemini access the content saved in your Gmail inbox and Photos library. The next time you ask the AI about travel plans, projects, or anything relevant, it will seamlessly reference your stored information to offer helpful responses, without asking you for any context. It just knows you. Now, Google is doing the same for Workspace, the hub of your work tools such as Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive, among others. Of course, the name has to be fitting, so Google is calling it Workspace Intelligence. Broadly, it allows Gemini to dip into the pool of information stored across Workspace apps and offer personalized responses. Alright, so what's the big deal about Workspace Intelligence? Google says Workspace Intelligence saves you the hassle of dipping and bouncing between different files and folders. Instead, all you need to do is give it the right command -- in natural language, of course -- and it will get work done by using its knowledge of all your work data and picking the right context. Recommended Videos "Workspace Intelligence retrieves your relevant emails, chats, files, and information from the web to transform ideas into professionally formatted drafts that mimic your exact voice, brand, style, and company templates," says the company in a blog post. The idea is similar to what Anthropic's Claude can pull off, particularly in Microsoft PowerPoint using an extension system. So, how does it benefit me? Take, for example, Docs. When you summon Gemini in Google Docs, it will handle tasks based on its historical understanding of your workflow. For example, when you ask it to edit an image, it will automatically apply the suitable edits based on your past preferences, ensuring that you get consistent results without having to do manual work for each asset in the document. Gemini will also handle comments, and based on your instructions, it will autonomously make the necessary edits in the document. Google notes that you can one-shot slide decks by simply asking Gemini to create them. "Gemini uses context from Workspace Intelligence and strictly adheres to your company's templates and visual styles to build a ready-to-present deck," explains the company. AI Inbox and AI Overviews in Gmail are also a part of the Workspace Intelligence package. The former turns your Gmail inbox into a task-based overflow, letting you quickly catch up on conversations and the work at hand. The latter creates a brief summary of the email conversations, similar to AI Overviews for Google Search.

With Workspace Intelligence, Google's productivity suite gets more AI smarts - SiliconANGLE

With Workspace Intelligence, Google's productivity suite gets more AI smarts Google Cloud has long believed that one of most compelling benefits of artificial intelligence is that it helps people get more work done faster, and that's the main purpose behind a slate of new capabilities being added to Google Workspace. The main update is a new system called Workspace Intelligence, announced today at Google Cloud Next 2026, that helps transform simple applications into autonomous and collaborative AI agents. In a blog post, Google Workspace Vice President of Product Yulie Kwon Kim said the company is no longer content with AI serving as a passive assistant that just sits and waits for a prompt. Instead, it's pushing the idea of "agentic work," where AI understands the context behind the projects someone is working on, and possesses the organizational knowledge to start working on them autonomously. According to Kim, modern work remains extremely fragmented, with most business workers spending days stitching together "scattered info" that lives across multiple platforms. This means wasting hours jumping between tabs and apps, hunting through emails and digging through chat threads, rather than getting tasks done. Google's philosophy is that AI needs to help people get things done faster, and Workspace Intelligence is meant to power this shift. It's a secure, dynamic system that maps semantic relationships across Docs, Slides and Gmail in order to understand what users are trying to achieve and eliminate the bulk of this context switching that slows them down. "Workspace Intelligence does more than just connect to your apps and pull from your data to create an output," Kim said. "It is a secure, dynamic system that inherently understands complex semantic relationships within your Workspace apps (such as Docs, Slides, or Gmail) content, your active projects, your collaborators, and your organization's domain knowledge." One way in which Workspace Intelligence aims to make its presence felt is by bridging the gap between raw data and finished work, and it has several features that should enable this. For instance, there's a new, unified command line in Google Chat that aims to reposition the tool as a kind of central nervous system for enterprise work. This is powered by Gemini, and allows users to simply state what they're trying to accomplish, such as schedule a meeting for a particular project team, or dig up the latest budget file, and get it done instantly. Gemini handles all of the execution, Kim said. Another useful new capability aims to solve the headaches associated with manual preparatory work. Gemini in Docs and Slides can now retrieve all of the relevant emails, chats and web information to transform a vague idea into a professionally formatted draft that mimics a company's voice and branding. For each new idea, it will create a full, editable Slides presentation that follows corporate templates. Meanwhile, Google is extending its AI Overviews feature to Gmail and Drive. Rather than scrolling through dozens of threads or browsing through endless files trying to find the information they need, users can simply generate the insights they need to know by asking Gemini questions. In Drive, the new Drive Projects tools makes it easy to organize files and emails centrally so that Gemini has the full context available for a specific project. The updates aren't limited to general intelligence, for there were additional updates that impact the broader Google Workspace ecosystem. For instance, there's a new "Sheets canvas" that makes it quick and easy to create interactive mini-applications and dashboards on top of any dataset, including information stored in Salesforce and HubSpot. In the "agentic" realm, Google introduced new "Skills" that make it easy for teams to build and deploy automated workflows across the Workspace suite. For instance, someone might create a new skill for agents to automatically review invoices by comparing new ones against historical documents, in order to flag any discrepancies. Meanwhile, Google Vids is getting a boost with its new "digital avatars," which can be customized with company branding and logos. They now support 24 languages, making it easier for international companies to create high-quality video messaging without a production studio. Elsewhere, the "Take Notes for Me" feature in Google Meet is being expanded to capture summaries and action items, even on third-party platforms such as Zoom and Teams, so long as the user accesses that meeting from a Google device. As AI agents become more autonomous, securing them becomes more important than ever, which is why Google is looking to address this with its new AI Control Centers and agent management tools. These give administrators everything they need to monitor and audit how agents interact with sensitive data, and for companies with strict regulatory needs, Google is also expanding its sovereign controls. This means that customers will soon be able to lock their data into a specific region, such as the U.S., the EU or specific countries such as India and Germany.

Google's Workspace Intelligence wants to be the ultimate AI coworker that actually knows your business

At Cloud Next 2026, Google introduced Workspace Intelligence, a new semantic layer for Google Workspace that creates a unified context by mapping emails, chats, files, collaborators, and active projects. The idea is to shift Workspace from a collection of productivity apps into an AI-driven system that can replicate how you actually work. Workspace Intelligence is aimed at organizations that want AI to be more than just a chatbot. Google Workspace head of product Yulie Kwon Kim says the system is intended to "emulate the institutional knowledge of a long-tenured employee, but for AI." Google says it can gather material, rank priorities, track stakeholders, and adjust outputs to user writing styles. To build a truly useful AI coworker, you need context, and a lot of it. Workspace Intelligence's goal is to provide rich organizational context from a company's documents, emails, presentations, and messages. This lets the system do things like generate content in your voice, picking up on preferences like whether you never use exclamation marks or love using them. In practice, that gives Google Chat a larger role. Kim describes conversations with Gemini as becoming more like running a "command center for your work." The chat feature, now named Ask Gemini in Chat, will make it easier for workers to find files, generate documents and slides, and schedule meetings. Google paired the launch with a broad product update across the suite. In Google Docs, Gemini can tap into Workspace Intelligence to create infographics from business data, edit multiple images for visual consistency, and handle user comments with automated revisions. In Sheets, users can generate and modify spreadsheets with data imported from Gmail or Drive. The new Sheets Canvas lets Gemini transform data into mini-apps or dashboards unique to Sheets. Slides gains the ability to produce editable decks in one pass using company templates and brand visuals, while Gmail introduces AI Inbox and AI Overviews for email search. Drive, on the other hand, adds Drive Projects, providing a centralized hub for shared files and emails. Since companies need to hand over important organizational data, Google has confirmed that Workspace won't use customer data for ads or model training outside Workspace without permission. It is also worth noting that Google has offered AI tools across Workspace before, but those interactions didn't have access to an organization's broader data. Workspace Intelligence is now available to all paid Google Workspace users. Some features are rolling out over the coming weeks, while others stay in preview, including Workspace actions in Gemini Enterprise, Gemini auto-browse in Chrome Enterprise for US customers, and a new Workspace MCP Server for external AI apps and agents.

Google's New 'Workspace Intelligence' Is About to Be Your Ultimate AI Coworker

Some of the most popular work-focused apps of all time are about to become more intertwined than before, thanks to artificial intelligence. Google has announced Workspace Intelligence, a new "semantic layer" for its Google Workspace suite of products. The new capability enables Gemini-powered AI agents to understand and replicate the unique context of your workplace and job when you use products like Google Sheets and Google Docs. Yulie Kwon Kim, Google Workspace's head of product, says that Workspace Intelligence is intended to emulate the institutional knowledge of a long-tenured employee, but for AI systems. "There are a lot of LLMs out there that are powerful and capable," says Kim, "but they end up being generic. They don't know your institutional history, how you like to format your professional voice and preferences." The key to creating an actually-useful AI coworker, says Kim, is to provide AI models with the "rich organizational context" found in a company's documents, emails, presentations, and messages. Because Workspace Intelligence automatically scans your emails and messages, it can generate content that sounds like it was written by you, and can transform its outputs to replicate your unique voice. With this context, Gemini will know to format a spreadsheet in Google Sheets the right way, for example, or know to never include exclamation points in your emails. Or maybe to include them all the time!

Google Just Unveiled These New Gemini-Powered Workspace Upgrades

Google Vids adds branded avatars with more language support Google has unveiled a broad set of updates for its Google Workspace at Google Cloud Next 2026, with a strong focus on AI-powered productivity and smarter collaboration. The company introduced Workspace Intelligence, a system that can interpret relationships between files, projects, and collaborators across apps like Docs, Slides, and Gmail to enable more advanced, automated workflows. These updates are said to highlight Google's effort to make Workspace more intelligent and automated, though some features may continue to be updated before they are widely released. Google Meet, Sheets, and Gemini Get Big AI Upgrades at Next 2026 The company revealed that the "Take Notes for me" feature on Google Meet will soon work beyond standard video calls. Users will be able to capture summaries and action items from in-person meetings, as well as sessions hosted on platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Google noted that more than 110 million users engaged with this feature in the past month. Google Sheets will also get upgraded with new Gemini-powered capabilities. Users will be able to more easily pull data from external platforms such as HubSpot and Salesforce. The update also introduces a new canvas that lets users build interactive elements such as dashboards, heat maps, and Kanban boards directly within spreadsheets. The search giant is also opening up Workspace capabilities to developers through a new MCP server. This allows external apps and AI agents to securely interact with services like Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and Chat. A command-line interface is also in development to simplify these integrations. The company is also rolling out "skills" in Workspace, which are reusable automation tools designed to handle routine processes. For instance, a team can set up a workflow to check invoices and highlight inconsistencies. These skills can be created in Workspace Studio and shared with others. Google is improving Google Vids by adding more customisation to its avatars. Users can include branding elements such as logos or backgrounds. The avatars will also support additional languages and can be inserted automatically when turning presentations into videos. The Gemini Enterprise app is gaining tighter integration with Workspace tools. Users will soon be able to manage Calendar events and work on Docs or Slides directly in the app. For enterprise customers, Google is introducing an auto-browse feature in Google Chrome Enterprise. This tool helps users complete complex, multistep tasks across websites and applications while maintaining security protections. On the security front, new governance tools will help administrators track and control how AI systems access data. Google is also expanding options for data residency and offering client-side encryption for sensitive information. The company is also making it easier to switch from Microsoft 365. A new migration system aims to speed up data transfers, while improved compatibility features will help users work more smoothly with Office files. These features will begin rolling out over the coming weeks, Google said.

Google rolls out Workspace Intelligence with Gemini-powered AI across Docs, Gmail, and Drive

Workspace Intelligence understands user intent, ongoing projects, collaborators, and content across tools like Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, Chat, and Drive, while acting as a unified AI layer across Google Workspace. It goes beyond basic automation by recognizing complex semantic relationships between emails, files, chats, projects, and organizational knowledge, helping ensure relevant information is available when needed and reducing context gaps between apps. The system is built around three core capabilities: This enables agentic workflows, where AI systems can complete tasks based on user goals. Workspace Intelligence is built with enterprise-grade security at its core. Google states that user data is handled with strict controls within Google Workspace. Key security and governance aspects include: The system is built on an AI-first foundation based on three pillars -- agents, deep context, and security -- to support enterprise-grade AI workflows. Google states that Workspace Intelligence will roll out across Workspace services with administrative controls for organizations. Some features, including AI Overviews and Ask Gemini in Drive, are already available, while others such as full presentation generation and expanded integrations will be introduced gradually.

Google launches AI-powered Workspace Intelligence: What it is and how it works

Google says the system prioritises privacy with enterprise-grade security and admin controls over data access. Google has officially launched a new AI-powered system known as Workspace Intelligence. As the name implies, it is integrated into Google Workspace and uses Gemini to understand user intent, ongoing projects, and workflows in real time, eliminating the need to manually switch between apps or collect scattered information. The system connects data from various services such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Drive to create a unified context for the user's work. Instead of responding to prompts, it can collect relevant information, prioritise tasks and generate outputs that are customised as per individual work styles and preferences. Among the notable additions is Ask Gemini in chat, which acts as a central command interface. Users can assign tasks in natural language and the system can respond by creating documents, preparing presentations, scheduling meetings or retrieving files without switching apps. It can also display daily summaries, call out urgent action items and integrate with third-party software such as Asana, Jira and Salesforce. Workspace Intelligence also improves the core apps including Docs, Sheets and Gmail. Starting with Docs, it can create drafts, generate visuals, and improve content in response to feedback. Slides users will soon be able to create full presentations aligned with company templates. Lastly, Gmail users can benefit from AI-powered summaries and prioritised inbox views to maximise their productivity. Also read: Google unveils new AI chips to rival Nvidia: Here is what they offer The search engine giant claims that this is built with enterprise-grade security and governance. The data is restricted to user permissions, and the company insists that Workspace data is never used for advertising or external AI training. Administrators will have control over which data sources the system can access. Workspace Intelligence is now being rolled out to business, enterprise and education users, with broader availability expected in phases starting April 22, 2026.