Most people are already using several of Google's AI tools without having consciously picked any of them. The suggested reply waiting in Gmail, the summary at the top of a search result, the writing help in Docs: these are switched on by default, and Google has been adding more of them for years.
What is less clear is how the pieces fit together, and which ones you can turn off. There is Gemini and the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, AI Overviews, the image generator, and the research tool Google recently renamed. This guide covers Google's main AI tools: what each one does, how to reach it, and what to know about your data. The last section looks at whether tools like these change your working day or just add one more thing to keep an eye on.
What is Google AI called?
Most of Google's consumer AI now sits under the Gemini brand. Gemini is a family of large language models built by Google DeepMind, and it powers the chatbot, the AI features inside Gmail and Docs, and the summaries at the top of Search. The naming trips people up because Gemini refers to two things at once: the underlying models, and the app built on top of them. When someone talks about "using Gemini," they usually mean the app.
The Gemini app: Google's AI chatbot
The Gemini app is Google's answer to ChatGPT. You reach it at gemini.google.com or by downloading it on Android and iOS, sign in with a Google account, and you are ready.
It handles the usual range: answering questions, drafting text, summarizing documents, generating images, and holding a back-and-forth conversation. On Android it can act as the default assistant on your phone.
The free tier covers most everyday tasks. Paid plans (Google AI Plus, AI Pro, and AI Ultra) add more capable models, higher limits, and features such as Deep Research, which runs a large batch of searches in the background and returns a cited report in a few minutes.
Fyxer connects to Gmail and Outlook and handles the inbox admin that Google's AI can't
What is Google AI Studio?
Google AI Studio is a free browser-based platform for working directly with Gemini models. It lives at aistudio.google.com, and the name makes it sound more technical than it is. You do not need to write code to try it. You can upload files, type prompts, adjust how the model behaves, and work across text, images, audio, and video.
It does sit closer to the developer end of things, though. Once you have a prompt working the way you want, AI Studio can hand you a code snippet to drop into an application, which is why teams use it to prototype before they build anything for real. In practice, the Gemini app is where you use AI, and AI Studio is where you build with it.
AI Overviews and AI Mode: What changed in Google Search
Two separate AI features now live inside Google Search, and they're easy to confuse.
AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of the results page. They launched in the US in 2024 and are now available in more than 200 countries and territories and over 40 languages. Gemini pulls information from several sources and gives you a direct answer before you click anything. On simple factual questions this works well. On more involved ones the quality varies, and Google has acknowledged that Overviews can get things wrong, so anything that matters is worth checking against the original sources rather than the summary.
AI Mode is the other one. Instead of a summary sitting above normal results, it turns search into a conversation: you ask a question in plain language, get an answer, and keep asking follow-ups, closer to how a chatbot works. Google has been widening access to it through 2026 and now uses an AI Overview as the entry point into it on many searches.
Can you turn off Google AI Overviews?
Not with a single switch. There is no setting that disables AI Overviews across all your searches. What does work is the "Web" filter: run a search, select Web from the filters below the search box, and you get the traditional list of links with no AI summary on top. According to Google's support documentation, Overviews are a core Search feature. If you want the filter applied automatically, appending &udm=14 to a Google search URL produces the same Web-only view without the manual click. We have a fuller walkthrough of the settings involved in our guide to turning off Google AI in Gmail and Search.
Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM): Google's research tool
If you have used NotebookLM, this is the same tool under a new name. Google renamed it Gemini Notebook in July 2026. It stays a standalone research assistant: you upload your own sources (documents, notes, PDFs), and it answers questions grounded in that material rather than the open web, which cuts down on the confidently wrong answers you sometimes get from a general chatbot.
It can also turn your sources into other formats: audio overviews, video overviews, mind maps, and infographics. It is the Google AI tool to reach for when the job is understanding a specific set of documents rather than searching for something new. It is being woven into the Gemini app and, before long, into AI Mode in Search.
Google's AI image generator: Nano Banana
Google's earlier standalone image tool, ImageFX, was folded into Google Flow in 2026, so the simplest route now is image generation inside the Gemini app. It runs on Google's Nano Banana models (the name Google uses for its current Gemini image generation), and it is free with a standard Google account.
You describe what you want and it generates an image, then you refine it in plain language rather than rewriting the whole prompt: "make the light warmer," "lose the background." The results are strongly photorealistic and hold up well against tools that charge for the privilege. Every image carries Google's SynthID watermark, which marks it as AI-generated. If you produce the odd marketing visual, slide, or social image and would rather not pay for a dedicated design tool, it is a sensible place to start.
Gemini in Gmail and Workspace
This is the part most professionals touch every day, often without opening a separate app. Across Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and the rest of Workspace, Gemini can summarize a long email thread so you can see where things stand without reading every message, draft a reply, and pull in context from your Drive and Calendar. Older features like Smart Compose and Smart Reply, the sentence completions and short suggested replies, have been around longer. Since early 2026, Google has switched most of these AI features on by default across Gmail, on both personal and work accounts, with the fuller Gemini side panel coming through the paid consumer plans and the Workspace business tiers.
Because Gemini sits across your Google apps, it can bring in context that a general-purpose chatbot cannot see unless you paste it in. That is a real advantage for anyone already living in Workspace. Where it stops is worth understanding, and we cover it in more depth in our comparison of Gemini and a dedicated inbox assistant.
Can you turn off Google AI?
It depends which part you mean.
AI Overviews in Search cannot be switched off, as covered above. Use the Web filter for results without the summary.
Gemini in Gmail and Workspace can be disabled. In Gmail, open Settings, go to General, and turn off Smart features and personalization. This has to be done in two places if you use a work account: your personal Gmail settings and your Workspace settings separately.
Gemini Apps Activity, which is the logging of your conversations with the Gemini app, can also be turned off. In the app, tap your profile icon, find Gemini Apps Activity, and select Turn off. New conversations stop being saved once you do.
Google AI data deletion: What you need to know
By default, Google keeps your Gemini conversation history for 18 months. A subset of conversations is also read by human reviewers as part of quality checks, as described in Google's Gemini Apps Privacy Hub. Those chats are disconnected from your account before review, but they are kept for up to three years and are not removed when you delete your activity.
To clear what is there and limit future collection:
Delete past conversations at myactivity.google.com, under Gemini Apps Activity.
Stop future logging in the Gemini app: profile, then Gemini Apps Activity, then Turn off. There is an option to turn off and delete everything at once.
Set auto-delete if you would rather keep activity but cap how long it is stored. The choices are 3, 18, or 36 months.
One detail catches people out: even with activity turned off, Google still holds recent conversations for up to 72 hours to run the service. And if you use a Google Workspace account managed by an employer, your Gemini data is not used to train Google's models by default. Personal accounts do not get that protection unless you change the settings yourself.
How this connects to the way professionals work
Everything above is useful on its own terms. The bigger question for most people is whether any of it noticeably changes a working day. The evidence suggests it can, and that the size of the effect comes down to how a tool is used.
There is now decent evidence that the day-to-day gains are real. A Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis study found that people using generative AI saved about 5.4% of their working hours, which works out at roughly 2.2 hours a week for someone working full-time. The gains are larger when AI handles specific recurring tasks than when it acts as a general assistant people consult now and then.
That distinction turns out to matter more than which tool you pick. Fyxer's June 2026 Admin Burden Index, a survey of US office workers conducted with OnePoll, found that 88% of them now use AI in some form. What separated the people getting a real benefit from the people getting almost none was not seniority or age. It was whether their AI was integrated into the software they already worked in, or sat off to the side as a separate tool. Among people using integrated tools, 83% said AI had improved their productivity. Among people using standalone tools, only 20% said the same.
Email is where that gap shows up most clearly. A systematic review of 25 years of research in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology found that email remains the most-used form of business communication despite the arrival of Slack, Teams, and the rest. Yet in the same ABI survey, only 30% of workers used AI to write emails and only 22% used it to read them, which makes the inbox the single largest untapped opportunity most people have. Gemini in Gmail helps here. It can summarize a thread and draft a reply when you ask it to.
The limit of a general assistant is that you still have to drive it. It summarizes the thread you point it at and drafts the reply you request, but it does not organize the inbox before you open it, and it does not learn how you write over time. As Karan Mehandru, Managing Director at Madrona, put it, professionals are "moving beyond tools that merely help us work to agents that work alongside us, handling high-context workflows like email, scheduling, and coordination."
More capable AI is not the whole answer either, and there is a real risk in assuming it is. Gemma Osula, managing director at the executive support agency Pickle, has spent years watching what happens when assistants lean on AI. Her point is that generating more does not mean deciding better. "More output does not automatically mean better outcomes," she says, and without someone experienced enough to filter and check what a model produces, you get polished work that is quietly wrong. Her framing is that "the human is the guardrail." That is also why the ABI found a new category of lost time emerging: workers now spend close to 5.8 hours a week reviewing and editing AI output, a chore that barely existed two years ago.
This is where a tool built around one job pulls ahead of a general one. Fyxer works inside Gmail and Outlook and focuses on the inbox specifically: it organizes your email before you open it, drafts replies in your own voice using context from your past messages, and pulls in what was agreed in your recent meetings. It has processed 1.59 billion emails, and across that volume more than 70% of inbox activity is noise, the marketing and notification traffic that never needed a decision from you. It does not add a separate review step on top of your inbox. Because it also captures notes and actions from your calls, the context carries from the meeting into the follow-up. For anyone whose day runs on email, that focus is what separates a tool you rely on from one you keep meaning to open.
The main Google AI tools: A summary
The sections above go into more depth. Here is a quick reference for comparing them.
Gemini app: Google's AI chatbot, at gemini.google.com and on Android and iOS. Good for questions, research, drafting, and image generation. The free tier covers most tasks; paid plans (AI Plus, AI Pro, and AI Ultra) add more capable models and features such as Deep Research.
Google AI Studio: a free browser-based platform for working directly with Gemini models. No coding needed to try it, though it is built with developers in mind. For anyone who wants to build on top of Google's AI rather than just use it.
AI Overviews and AI Mode: Overviews are the AI summaries at the top of Search results, now in more than 200 countries and territories. AI Mode is the conversational version of search. Overviews cannot be turned off, but the Web filter removes them.
Gemini Notebook: Google's standalone research tool, formerly NotebookLM. Upload your own sources and query them, or turn them into audio and video overviews, mind maps, and infographics.
Nano Banana image generation: Google's free image generation, run through the Gemini app on the Nano Banana models. Describe an image, refine it in plain language, and every result carries a SynthID watermark.
Gemini in Gmail and Workspace: AI built into Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet. Summarizes threads, suggests replies, and assists with content. Can be switched off in your Google account settings.
Getting the most from Google's AI tools
If you use Google Search, Gmail, or an Android phone, you are already working alongside several of these tools, and most of them are on by default. Reviewing the settings, especially the ones that touch your data, is worth the few minutes it takes.
The harder call is deciding where you want AI to take on work on its own. For most professionals that is the inbox, because that is where the hours go. A tool that lives inside the inbox is more likely to be used than one kept in a separate window. Our guide to the best AI tools for business walks through the main options across email, meetings, and content, and how to weigh them up before you commit.
Google AI tools FAQs
What is Google's AI called?
Most of Google's consumer AI runs under the Gemini brand. Gemini is both the family of models built by Google DeepMind and the app built on them.
Is Gemini free?
Yes, the free tier handles most everyday tasks. Google AI Plus, AI Pro, and AI Ultra are paid plans that add more capable models, higher limits, and features such as Deep Research.
What is the difference between Gemini and Google AI Studio?
The Gemini app is for using AI. Google AI Studio is a free platform for working directly with the models and building applications on top of them.
Can you turn off Google AI Overviews?
There is no single switch. Use the Web filter after a search, or append &udm=14 to the search URL, to see traditional results without the AI summary.
What happened to ImageFX?
Google folded ImageFX into Google Flow in 2026. Google's image generation now runs on its Nano Banana models, available free in the Gemini app.
How long does Google keep my Gemini data?
By default, 18 months, adjustable to 3 or 36 months or off. Conversations reviewed by human reviewers are kept, disconnected from your account, for up to three years.
