How connecting Deep Research to your actual work documents creates platform dependency.
Google Just Weaponized Your Workspace Against Switching Costs
Google Just Made Gemini Deep Research Even More Useful for Work
Here’s the problem with some AI research tools: they know everything about the internet and nothing about your business.
You ask for a competitive analysis, and you get generic industry reports. You want a market summary, and you get what everyone else gets. The AI has no idea what your team already discovered three months ago, what your customers told you last quarter, or what’s buried on page 47 of that strategy doc someone wrote.
For Google Gemini users, that just changed. As of this week, Gemini Deep Research can pull directly from your Gmail, Google Drive, and Chat. You can also upload additional files directly into the deep research window in addition to connecting those sources. Not just the web anymore. Your actual work.
Why This Actually Matters
Think about how research happens in real life at your company. Someone needs to write a board memo on market positioning. They spend three hours hunting through email threads from April. Digging up the product roadmap deck. Finding that competitive spreadsheet someone made six months ago that has the good data. Then searching the web for whatever’s public.
Gemini can do that entire loop now in one pass.
You tell it to build a market analysis for a new product launch and point it at your team’s brainstorming docs, the email thread with your enterprise customer, your internal project plans, and the open web. It combines all of it. Or you ask it to write a competitor report that cross-references public announcements with your internal strategy memos and the back-and-forth in team chats.
This is the shift from generic AI that sounds smart to contextualized intelligence that actually knows what you’re working on. And it’s available to all Gemini users starting now. Not just paid subscribers, which is interesting.
What You Can Actually Do
Here’s a concrete example. Your CFO wants to know if you should expand into a new vertical. Normally you’d need to pull together notes from customer calls (buried somewhere in Gmail), the financial model your analyst built (good luck finding the latest version in Drive), Slack threads where your product team discussed whether this is even feasible, plus industry reports and what competitors are doing.
Now you select Deep Research from Gemini’s Tools menu. You choose your sources from a dropdown. Gmail, Drive, Chat, or web. You can pick all of them or just a few. Then you ask for the analysis.
Gemini builds a research plan, scans everything you pointed it to, writes a multi-page report in minutes. I mean, that’s the pitch anyway. But the control part matters. You’re not giving Gemini blanket access to everything forever. You pick which sources to connect each time you use it.
The Play Google Is Making Here
This isn’t just a feature update. It’s Google turning its infrastructure advantage into something much harder to compete with.
Google owns the entire work stack where many companies already live. Gmail for communication. Drive for files. Chat for collaboration. Calendar. All of it.
It works natively with Google Workspace via Gemini Extensions you enable (and admins can control), so there’s no custom API build required. If your team’s workflow starts depending on Gemini connecting your emails to your docs to your chats, switching to another AI platform means rebuilding that entire context layer from scratch. That’s friction.
And the fact this works for free Gemini users, not just enterprise subscribers, tells you something about Google’s priorities right now. Get people hooked on the workflow first. Worry about pricing later. Classic platform strategy.
What to Do Next Week
If you’re already using Gemini, try Deep Research on a real business question. Pick something where the answer lives partly in your team’s documents and partly on the web. A competitor analysis. A market entry decision. Something messy. See how it performs compared to doing the research yourself.
If you’re evaluating AI tools for your organization, add “native workspace integration” to your criteria. The ability to search your team’s actual work, not just generic knowledge, is becoming table stakes faster than I expected.
And if you’re a Google Workspace customer who hasn’t tried Gemini yet, this might be the moment. You already have the infrastructure. The feature went live on desktop this week, mobile coming in the next few days.
The gap between AI that knows everything and AI that knows your business just got smaller.
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Contact: steve@intelligencebyintent.com