Google’s Gemini AI wants to do the busywork in Docs and Sheets

New Workspace features let Gemini generate documents from existing files, analyze spreadsheets from plain-language prompts, and update presentations automatically.

Google is rolling out new AI features designed to quickly flesh out Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides using data from the web and your existing Google files.

The overall aim is to eliminate much of the busywork involved in filling out templated documents, transferring data from saved files or internet sources into spreadsheets, and tweaking slide presentations to add new facts and figures—all while reflecting the personal and professional preferences expressed in people’s previous work.

“It’s not enough to simply generate a generic email or brief,” says Yulie Kwon Kim, VP of product for Google Workspace. “People want AI to understand your specific context, delivering results that are deeply personalized to them and their organization.” 

In Google Docs, that means being able to instruct Google’s Gemini AI to generate a document mimicking the layout or writing style of another document, fleshed out with content from additional sources stored on Google Drive. Already, says Google Docs product lead Frank Tisellano, more than a third of Docs are created as copies of another document, and the AI features are intended to let users create at least a first draft of their new files close to instantaneously. 

When it comes to Google Sheets, the AI is able to translate plain language requests into detailed execution plans to filter, transform, and analyze data. In a streamed demonstration, Eric Birnbaum, who leads the product team for Google Sheets, showed how the new AI could quickly filter through a complex spreadsheet of property data, finding real estate matching certain parameters in a certain neighborhood and generating relevant bar and pie charts.  

“The Gemini agent, just like a human would, goes back and checks its work and fixes anything it might have gotten wrong,” Birnbaum says. 

Birnbaum also used a new AI drag-and-drop feature to automatically fill out a spreadsheet of data about a set of major corporations, populating fields for headquarters city, revenue, and market capitalization based on information from the web. “Just by looking at the column headers, Gemini can figure out how to go find what you need,” he says. 

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