The implication
If your business uses Google Workspace Business Standard or Excel with a ChatGPT Plus account, AI is likely already switched on inside those tools — Gemini has been included in Workspace plans since January 2025, and ChatGPT for Excel went generally available in May 2026. The decision is no longer whether to adopt AI, but which specific task to start with.
Somewhere in the last few months, the AI most SMBs need probably showed up inside the tools they're already paying for. Google Workspace's Gemini has been included in Business plans since January 2025. ChatGPT for Excel went generally available on 5 May 2026, across every plan tier. This isn't a decision about whether to adopt AI anymore. It's a decision about what to do with capability that's already switched on.
What actually happened
In May 2026, three things happened. OpenAI made ChatGPT for Excel generally available — describe a calculation in plain English and it builds the formula or model directly in your workbook, across all plan tiers. Anthropic announced pre-built workflows connecting Claude to QuickBooks and Google Workspace for month-end reconciliation and cash flow tasks, though accessing them requires a Claude Team plan. And Google announced Gemini Spark — a $99.99/month agentic assistant — which got most of the attention despite being US-only, beta-only, and entirely separate from the Gemini already included in standard Workspace plans since January 2025.
What Joshua is watching
I spent several months building ava-pro — a Claude-powered assistant that connects directly to Google Workspace: reading and summarising Docs, drafting emails in Gmail, pulling files from Drive, updating Sheets. The integration itself wasn't the hard part. Figuring out which tasks were actually worth automating took most of the time. AI embedded in a tool doesn't tell you what to use it for — it just removes the friction of starting. That question is the same whether you're using Gemini in Docs, Claude connected to QuickBooks, or ChatGPT in Excel: which task, at what frequency, and who owns the output?
What you can do today
If you're on Google Workspace Business Standard or above, Gemini is already in your Gmail and Docs — look for the Gemini icon in the compose window. Try one specific task: ask it to summarise your five longest email threads from the past month. If you use Excel with a ChatGPT Plus account, install the ChatGPT add-in from Microsoft AppSource and try one calculation you currently do manually — run it alongside your existing formula first to verify the output before using it on anything live. For teams who want a structured approach to deciding which AI capabilities to build confidence in across the organisation, that framing matters as much as the tools themselves.
