Unfortunately, I missed the Google Next conference this year.
It looked like a great event with loads of exciting announcements, including significant ones for Google Workspace. The big shift in 2026 is the evolution from AI assistance (Gemini helping you) to Agent workflows (Gemini doing things for you).
Here’s a list of the most interesting for us Sheets/Workspace developers, but let me know if you think I missed anything!
Across Google Workspace
- Google Workspace Intelligence: making Gemini assistant smarter by letting it tap into your organization’s actual work context, not just the open internet. It looks at your work content and patterns and reasons over that.
- Universal Search: Agents can search across all Workspace Apps to get a consolidated view of the user’s context across all apps.
- Official Workspace CLI (Command Line Interface) to call Workspace APIs from command line.
- Dedicated Workspace MCP Server: For Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Chat, People.
- Agent Control Centre in Google Workspace Admin Console to help you monitor, control, and audit agent access to your data in Workspace.
Gemini in Sheets
- Build or edit entire spreadsheets: Using natural language.
- Sheets canvas (see announcement #1): To build fully interactive mini-apps right on top of your data, like dashboards, heat maps, kanban boards, and more.
- Fill with Gemini: AI assisted way to fill in your data quickly using drag and drop or prompts.
- Capacity & Performance: Sheets capacity doubled to 20 million cells and faster performance in Sheets.🔥
- Unstructured text: Paste and convert unformatted text into Google Sheets tables with Gemini.
Google Apps Script
- Built-in Gemini sidebar within Apps Script: Code explanation, generation, modification, and debugging.
- Apps Script as a core service: From June 2026, brings better reliability, security and compliance.
Workspace Studio
Workspace Studio is the new visual, drag-and-drop tool that lets users build workflow agents using natural language. New features coming:
- Skills feature (see announcement #2): To deploy agentic automation across every team.
- NotebookLM Integration: Integrate notebooks from NotebookLM directly into Google Workspace Studio automation workflows to use existing documents as a grounded knowledge source.
- Third-Party Connectors: Out-of-the-box integration for agents to pull data from Asana, Jira, Mailchimp, and Salesforce directly into Workspace.
- Gems Integration: An “Ask a Gem” step that allows flows to send prompts to private Gems to automate summaries or document creation.
Further Reading
Here’s Google’s official video summarizing the key Workspace announcements:
And here’s the full list of all 260 product announcements from Google Next 2026:
260 things we announced at Google Cloud Next ’26 – a recap
Really interesting breakdown of the updates. The move from simple AI assistance to full agent workflows feels like a major turning point for Workspace. Features like the Agent Control Centre and universal search across apps sound like they’ll make collaboration much smoother, while doubling Sheets’ capacity to 20 million cells is a huge win for anyone working with large datasets. The Workspace Studio and third‑party connectors also look like they’ll open up a lot of automation possibilities. Exciting times ahead for developers and teams working in Google’s ecosystem