Google Workspace Intelligence Links Apps With Context

Google announced Workspace Intelligence at Cloud Next '26, a semantic layer that maps emails, chats, files, and collaborators into shared context across the entire Workspace suite. Rather than running Gemini inside individual apps, the system now tracks what a user is working on and pulls relevant material from across Docs, Sheets, Gmail, and Drive in real time. Sheets gets natural-language building with HubSpot and Salesforce imports. Slides generates full decks from company templates. Drive Projects becomes a shared context hub. The move follows Workspace Studio from December and Personal Intelligence from January, and it positions Google Chat as the central command surface. Microsoft has been building the same cross-app context layer with Copilot since 2024, so this feels less like innovation and more like Google closing a distribution gap it cannot afford to leave open.