Google Rewired Its Productivity Suite. Most Businesses Haven't Turned It On.
If your team runs on Google Workspace, you already have access to something worth understanding.
Google I/O kicks off tomorrow. Tech media will spend the next 48 hours covering model benchmarks, demo videos, and developer keynotes.
Most of it won’t matter to you if you run a real business.
But here’s what does: the most significant change Google made to its productivity suite in years already shipped three weeks ago, buried inside a Google Cloud conference announcement. Almost no one in the SMB world noticed.
On April 22, Google introduced Workspace Intelligence. It’s a new AI layer that connects every app in your Google Workspace account into a shared context system. Your Gmail knows about your Drive files now. Your Chat knows about your Docs. Gemini can search and reason across all of it at once.
If your team lives in Google Workspace, most of what I’m about to describe is already available to you, inside the plan you’re already paying for.Why this is different from the AI in Workspace you’ve tried before
For years, Gemini in Google Workspace operated app by app. Gemini in Gmail knew about your inbox. Gemini in Drive knew about your files. But they didn’t talk to each other. If you asked Gemini in Gmail “what did we decide about the Harrison project?”, it could only search your email. It had no idea what was in the Drive folder or the Chat thread.
Workspace Intelligence changes the underlying architecture. It creates what Google is calling a “semantic layer” that maps emails, chats, files, calendar events, and collaborators into one shared knowledge graph. Every Gemini interaction inside Workspace now has access to the full picture.
Yulie Kwon Kim, VP of Product for Google Workspace, described it this way in the April 22 announcement: “Workspace Intelligence delivers unified, real-time understanding to power agentic work. It is a secure, dynamic system that inherently understands complex semantic relationships within your Workspace apps.”
The operational translation: Gemini can now answer complex questions about your business by pulling context from multiple apps simultaneously, without you specifying where to look.
For the last three years, the operators I work with have been asking the same question: “How do I get AI that actually knows my business?” The answer has usually involved building custom integrations, training workflows, or stacking multiple tools. Workspace Intelligence is the first time Google has shipped something that actually moves toward that answer for the people who already live in their ecosystem.
The four features worth turning on now
Ask Gemini in Chat
This is the most immediately useful thing to explore. Google Chat now has an “Ask Gemini” command interface that functions as a unified launchpad for work across your entire Workspace.
From Chat, you can ask for a daily briefing that surfaces your urgent emails, unread threads, and priority action items. You can ask it to find any file in Drive using a plain English description. You can ask it to schedule a meeting for everyone on a thread, or generate a doc or slide deck directly from the conversation.
The feature also connects to Asana, Jira, and Salesforce. If your team uses any of those tools, Gemini can now pull external project context into a conversation alongside your Workspace content.
The pattern I keep seeing with operators who are actually saving meaningful time with AI tools: they pick one command interface and build the habit of going there first before opening six tabs. Ask Gemini in Chat is the strongest version of that habit Google has ever shipped.
Drive Projects
Drive Projects is a new organizational layer that lets you bundle related files and emails into a shared context space. When you create a Drive Project, everything inside it becomes a unified context for Gemini.
The practical value is that Gemini stops giving you surface-level summaries based on whichever document you happen to have open, and starts synthesizing everything related to a project.
Design firm WATG used this kind of setup to cut proposal generation from days down to minutes, according to Google’s case study coverage from Cloud Next. That’s not a company with 10,000 employees. That’s an architecture and design firm that decided to build AI into an existing workflow.
The move is to create one Drive Project this week for your most active client or internal project, add the relevant files and emails, then ask Gemini a specific operational question about it. That single test will tell you whether the context-sharing is working for your setup.
AI Inbox and AI Overviews in Gmail
AI Inbox gives you a filtered view of what actually matters in your inbox, based on your work patterns and active projects. AI Overviews in Gmail search synthesizes multiple email threads into one summary answer, rather than surfacing individual messages.
If you’ve been spending time hunting through old Gmail threads for decisions and context, AI Overviews turns search from “find the email” to “tell me what was concluded.” For operators managing high email volume across multiple clients or projects, this is a real hours-per-week change.
Gemini in Sheets, Docs, and Slides
Sheets now builds or edits entire spreadsheets from natural language descriptions, including data imports from HubSpot and Salesforce. Docs generates infographics pulled from your business data, handles comment triage, and can edit a document based on feedback left in comment threads. Slides will soon generate full editable decks in one pass using your company templates.
None of this is magic. But for operators who spend significant blocks of time in these three apps every week, these are real reductions in setup and formatting time.
What operators who are using this are saying
Sharon Prosser, VP of SMB sales at Google, spoke at Cloud Next about where things actually stand for small businesses: “We’ve got double-digit millions of SMBs using Google Workspace, with AI at their fingertips. Customers can use Gemini Enterprise as an AI agent platform and they can get it up and running in minutes.”
She also said something that maps directly to what I watch happen with real operators: “The light bulb has to go off quickly for an SMB. Every minute counts. Being open to helping us understand their pain points where workflows are maybe a little bit more arduous or paper intensive, and with Gemini Enterprise, it’s a perfect way to kick off the AI experience.”
The operators I’ve talked with who’ve started using Workspace Intelligence describe the same experience: the first week, they’re skeptical because the answers aren’t that different. The second week, after they’ve organized their Drive Projects and connected their key tools, the answers start pulling from the right context. The third week, they stop thinking about it as a feature and start thinking about it as part of how work flows.
Tirol, a 52-year-old Brazilian dairy company, used Gemini Enterprise to build an interactive knowledge bank that democratized access to supply chain data for workers across the organization. That’s not a tech startup. That’s a half-century-old food business using a Google Workspace add-on to solve a real operational problem.
The honest tradeoffs
Workspace Intelligence is useful in practice, but it comes with real limitations.
The quality of Gemini’s answers is directly proportional to how organized your files actually are. If your Drive has thousands of loosely named documents with no folder structure, Gemini will pull messy context and return messy answers. This is less of a product limitation and more of a forcing function: Workspace Intelligence makes the disorganized-Drive problem expensive in a new way.
Some features, including Slides deck generation and parts of the Sheets integration, are still rolling out and availability varies by plan. The rollout has been uneven, which means checking your specific plan’s feature list before building workflows around something is the right move.
The Asana, Jira, and Salesforce connectors are new. They’re useful for surface-level questions but won’t replace a well-configured standalone query against those tools. Treat them as context supplementation, not full replacement.
And if your team operates on Microsoft 365 rather than Google Workspace, the honest comparison is real: Microsoft Copilot is doing similar things at the Office layer. I covered the Office integration in Issue #018. If your team splits between both, a decision about which ecosystem to standardize on is more urgent than it was six months ago. Hybrid isn’t a good long-term position as these tools get more capable, because context doesn’t transfer well across ecosystems.
What to do before Google I/O closes out tomorrow
Three concrete steps for this week:
One: Go into Google Chat today and find the Ask Gemini button. Ask it for a daily briefing, then ask it to find a specific file you know exists somewhere in Drive. This is the fastest test of whether the context layer is actually working for your setup.
Two: Create one Drive Project for your most active current project or client account. Pull in the relevant files and recent email threads. Then ask Gemini a specific question about the project status. Compare the answer you get to what you would have gotten from Gemini in Gmail alone. That comparison tells you what the unified context is buying you.
Three: Watch the Google I/O keynote tomorrow at 10 AM PT. Expected announcements include new Gemini model capabilities and additional agentic features for Workspace. If you’ve already started using Workspace Intelligence, the new features will layer in cleanly. If you haven’t started yet, I/O will add more reasons to.
If you’re not sure where to start with what’s already in your Google Workspace account, that’s the kind of clarity session I run with operators. Book a time at muddventures.com/book and we can map out exactly what to turn on for your specific setup.
Andrew