Google brings Gemini deeper into Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive with new beta features

A wave of Workspace updates puts Gemini inside Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive, with a benchmark result Google is happy to shout about.

The blinking cursor is Google’s enemy. Every time a Workspace user stares at an empty document, spreadsheet, or slide deck and reaches for a different tool to get unstuck, that’s a moment Microsoft 365 Copilot is happy to fill.

Google’s answer, rolled out today in beta, is a sweeping set of Gemini updates across Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive that are less about adding features and more about changing the fundamental workflow: describe what you need, point Gemini at your files and emails, and let it build the first draft.

The updates are rolling out today to Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers, the consumer-facing paid tiers that replaced the old Google One AI Premium branding, and will be available in English worldwide for Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The Drive features are initially US-only. 

The headline product is what Google calls “Help me create” in Docs. A new bottom bar alongside the existing side panel lets users describe a document in plain language, a neighbourhood newsletter, a coaching plan based on last season’s notes, a travel itinerary lifted from a thread of confirmation emails, and Gemini will pull relevant information from files, Gmail, and Drive to produce a first draft.

Two additional editing modes sit alongside it: “Match writing style” unifies the tone across a document, while “Match doc format” lets users apply the structure of one document to the content of another. The practical use case Google offers is pulling flight and hotel details from emails and reformatting them to match a saved itinerary template.

In Sheets, the headline claim is a benchmark result. Google says that Gemini in Sheets has achieved a 70.48% success rate on SpreadsheetBench, a public benchmark developed to test AI models on real-world spreadsheet editing tasks, which it describes as exceeding competitors and approaching human expert performance.

 On top of the benchmark claim, a “Fill with Gemini” feature auto-populates table cells with summarised, categorised, or web-sourced data. Google cites an internal study of 95 participants comparing manual entry against Fill with Gemini on a 100-cell task; it is careful to note that the 9x speed improvement figure cited by 9to5Google is based on that controlled study, not general usage data.

Slides gets an updated slide-generation tool that pulls context from files, emails, and the web, and can edit individual slides on instruction, adjusting colours, tone, or layout based on a follow-up prompt. Full deck generation from a single prompt, the more ambitious feature, is marked as “coming soon” rather than live today.

The Drive update is arguably the most strategically significant. Google is adding AI Overviews to Drive search, the same format it uses in Google Search, so that a semantic query surfaces a cited summary at the top of results without requiring users to open any document. A second feature, “Ask Gemini in Drive,” lets users select files and pose complex questions across them, pulling from Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and the web simultaneously. Google’s own framing in the Workspace blog describes it as transforming Drive “from a passive storage container into an active knowledge base.”

Yulie Kwon Kim, VP of Product for Google Workspace, authored the announcement, which was light on named executives beyond her byline. Google has not provided subscriber numbers for Google AI Ultra and Pro, so the addressable audience for today’s beta is not independently verifiable. The business version of the same features is covered in a separate Google Workspace blog post for enterprise customers.

The timing is pointed. Microsoft has been embedding Copilot into Microsoft 365 at pace, and the productivity suite market, where Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are the two dominant platforms, has become a proxy war for enterprise AI adoption. Google’s strategy, evident in today’s release, is not to build a separate AI assistant that sits alongside its apps but to fold Gemini so deeply into the existing interfaces that the apps themselves become the AI interface.

Whether users will trust Gemini to crawl their inboxes for document content without hesitation is a different question, one Google addresses only briefly, noting that information is “safeguarded” without specifying the technical controls.

All features are in beta, which means the experience will continue to change. The full deck-generation feature in Slides, and any broader language expansion beyond English, have no confirmed dates. Google says it will bring features to more languages “soon.”