Google's AI assistant inside Google Drive can now read your Gmail inbox. Until now, the tool called 'Ask Gemini in Drive' could only search through files and folders you had stored in Drive. Starting this week, you can point it at your email as well, and ask it questions in plain sentences.
The practical use is straightforward. You open Google Drive on a desktop browser, click 'Ask Gemini,' select Gmail as a source in the left-hand panel, and type your question. The assistant searches across your emails and files together and returns the relevant result. No keyword search, no filter menus, no scrolling.
For people who work in roles that generate a lot of email trails, this is a real time-saver. A procurement manager looking for the original price agreement with a supplier, an operations director tracking down who approved a change order, a consultant searching for the version of a report a client signed off on: these tasks usually take ten minutes of clicking. This tool does it in seconds.
Google says the feature is built directly into Drive's architecture and never copies or replicates your files. It also respects existing permission settings, meaning the assistant can only show you content you already have access to. For companies where data access is tightly controlled, that matters.
On pricing: individual users need a Google AI Pro subscription at $19.99 per month to access this. The top-tier Google AI Ultra plan at $249.99 per month also includes it. For organisations already on Google Workspace Business or Enterprise plans, it is included as part of those subscriptions.
One limitation worth noting: the feature is currently desktop-only. It has not yet come to the Google Drive or Gmail mobile apps, which is a real gap for anyone who does significant work on a phone or tablet.
The broader direction here is clear. Google is steadily turning its productivity suite into something you can query with natural language instead of navigating with clicks. Gmail search, for all Google's investment in it over the years, has always been clunky for complex queries. This new tool bypasses that problem entirely by letting you just describe what you are looking for.
If your organisation already pays for Google Workspace Business or Enterprise, this feature is available to you right now at no extra cost. It is worth five minutes to try on a real task before deciding whether it changes how your team works.