Anybody who’s had to grapple with turning a spreadsheet jam-packed with raw data into a killer chart or graph will rejoice at a new update Google has made to its Gemini AI tool.
The company says that improvements to how the model works with its Google Sheets spreadsheets application will help take the pain out a critical business function that many find “time consuming and oftentimes overwhelming” by providing insights about and answering questions on your data.
As the Chinese-owned DeepSeek chatbot throws the market into disarray, it may well be that the generative AI battlelines may be drawn around their use with practical business tools – an aspect that Google has already been keen to exploit with its Gemini Pro model.
Immediate Rollout for Sheets AI Features
Google announced the update on its Workspace blog, confirming that the improved usability would begin rolling out immediately with expected completion by February 20th.
It says that, from now on, small businesses and marketing analysts using Gemini will find it easier to visualize and analyze data within the Google Sheets interface. The new features will be available only to Google Workspace users with Business, Enterprise and Education plans, together with subscribers to Google One AI Premium.
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Once turned on by the Workspace admin, eligible users will be able to access Gemini in Sheets by clicking on the Ask Gemini spark button in the top right corner of the application.
Google says that the functionality will allow users to do things like “identify top-performing products and then instantly dive into their sales trends — all without writing a single line of code”. It does this by transforming requests into Python code, executing on them and then analyzing the results in real time.
Gemini in Sheets: What You Can Do
Google says that Gemini can provide valuable insights on your Sheets data, including contextual trends, patterns, and correlations. Additionally, it can generate charts based on your data.
In its blog, Google gives several examples of its application, including a marketing manager analyzing campaign performance, a small business owner managing cash flow and a financial analyst investigating inventory trends.
“Building data visualizations and identifying trends in data is a critical business function, however it can be time consuming and oftentimes overwhelming.” – Google
It also shows screencaps of Gemini answering prompts to “Generate insights or trends for this data”, and “Create a chart of segment by MRR” with additional instructions around highlighting cells.
New Sheets Features Good For Business
Gemini’s functionality joins a long line of AI innovations to appeal to business and enterprise-level customers.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, is trying to make itself an essential tool not limited to individual users looing for suggestions of Mexican restaurants in their neighborhood or drafting emails of complaint to their landlord.
In December it launched ChatGPT Canvas for better collaboration between team members, while many businesses have used ChatGPT to answer customer service inquiries for some time now.
As part of its Wave 2 updates in September, Microsoft tweaked its Copilot model to integrate more seamlessly with Word, Outlook, OneDrive, Teams and PowerPoint. That was the same month that Anthropic introduced the Claude Enterprise Plan aimed at businesses.
