How to Use Google Gemini Inside Google Workspace: An Executive Overview

The most immediately valuable Gemini feature for most executives in Gmail is thread summarisation. Long email threads with multiple participants can be summarised at the top of the thread, giving you the current status without reading every message.

For email drafting, select 'Help me write' in Gmail and provide a brief instruction: 'Draft a reply thanking the sender, confirming I will attend the meeting on Thursday, and asking them to send the agenda in advance.' Gemini generates a draft that you review and edit before sending.

The 'Polish' and 'Formalise' functions can refine a rough draft you have written yourself: useful for communications where the right tone matters and you have written something quickly that needs improvement before sending.

Gemini's email drafting works best for standard business communications. For sensitive, nuanced, or high-relationship communications, use Gemini as a starting point that you substantially edit to ensure the personal quality and strategic framing are right.

In Google Docs, Gemini provides writing assistance through the 'Help me write' feature. Type a brief description of what you want to draft and Gemini generates the first draft.

For executives: 'Draft a one-page executive summary of the attached report for a board that has limited time.' or 'Write an agenda for a 90-minute strategy workshop with the senior leadership team focused on [topic].'

Gemini can also work with the existing document: select text and ask Gemini to 'Make this more concise' or 'Rewrite this for a more senior audience' or 'Improve the clarity of this paragraph.'

The '@' function in Google Docs allows you to bring in content from other Google Drive documents, emails, or Google Meet recordings as context for Gemini. If you want Gemini to draft a follow-up document based on a meeting recording and a previous document, you can reference both directly in your Gemini prompt.

Google Meet Gemini provides meeting summaries after recorded meetings. The summary includes key discussion points, decisions made, and action items. This is functionally equivalent to the Microsoft Teams Copilot meeting summary feature.

To use: ensure the meeting is recorded in Google Meet (participants will see a notification). After the meeting, the summary is available in the meeting event in Google Calendar and in the Google Drive recording.

For executives with high meeting loads, setting up automatic recording and summary generation for regular internal meetings reduces the time spent on meeting notes and post-meeting action item tracking.

Note: recording requires participant consent. Establish team norms around recording before applying automatic recording to all meetings, and consider whether external participants need specific consent processes for your sector.

Beyond the Workspace applications, two Google AI tools are particularly useful for executive research.

The Gemini app (gemini.google.com) is Google's AI assistant, comparable to ChatGPT as a general-purpose AI tool. It has the advantage of Gemini's strong search capability and, for Google Workspace customers, integration with Google Drive documents.

NotebookLM is a Google AI tool for working with documents. Upload your research documents, reports, and reference materials, and NotebookLM provides AI-assisted navigation and question answering across them. It is particularly good at synthesising across multiple documents and maintaining source attribution, making it useful for research projects where document provenance matters.

For executives on Google Workspace, the combination of Gemini in Workspace apps (for productivity tasks) and NotebookLM (for document research) provides a comprehensive AI toolkit without leaving the Google ecosystem.