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  • Ep 622: Gemini AI in Google Sheets: What’s new and 5 daily tasks you didn’t know you could do

Ep 622: Gemini AI in Google Sheets: What’s new and 5 daily tasks you didn’t know you could do

Gemini AI tips for Google Sheets, Meta to use AI chats for Facebook ad targeting, Sora 2 copyright talks heating up, Trump doubles down on AI video usage and more.

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Everyday AI
October 01, 2025

Sup y’all! 👋

✅ You wanted AI in Google Sheets: we delivered.

🎁 The entire internet is trying to get access to OpenAI’s Sora 2, as it was launched as an invite-only social media network with AI video creation built in.

We’ve got invite codes to share for Sora 2, and we’re randomly dishing one out in tomorrow’s newsletter. To enter, just share today’s LinkedIn livestream.

🗳️ Speaking of OpenAI’s Sora 2, I personally have a TON of thoughts. What do you think?

Sora 2: What will the impact be?

🗳️ Vote to see live results 🗳️

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

See ya tomorrow.

✌️

Jordan

(Let’s connect on LinkedIn. Just tell me you’re from the newsletter otherwise stranger danger!)

Outsmart The Future

Today in Everyday AI
8 minute read

🎙 Daily Podcast Episode: You probably won’t believe what you can do with Gemini AI in Google Sheets. Give it a watch/read/listen.

🕵️‍♂️ Fresh Finds: An upgraded version of Sora 2, Disney taking back some of its IP from AI company, AI performing half of expert jobs and more. Read on for Fresh Finds.

🗞 Byte Sized Daily AI News: Meta to use AI chats for Facebook ad targeting, Sora 2 copyright talks heating up, Trump doubles down on AI video usage and more.  Read on for Byte Sized News.

💪 Leverage AI: We show you 5 of our favorite ways to save time with Gemini AI in Google Sheets.  Keep reading for that!

↩️ Don’t miss out: Did you miss our last newsletter? We covered OpenAI launching Sora 2, Microsoft's Agent Mode deep dive, Claude 4.5 Sonnet landing, ChatGPT adding instant shopping and more! Check it here!

Ep 622: Gemini AI in Google Sheets: What’s new and 5 daily tasks you didn’t know you could do 📋

You definitely missed this AI drop 👇

AI functions are live inside of Google Sheets thanks to Gemini. 

I know what you're saying... AI functions? I can barely spread the sheets! 

That's the beauty of it. With a simple =AI of your keyboard, you can talk to your spreadsheets in natural language and tap into the full power of Google Gemini. 

Also on the pod today:

• Gemini formulas: type and go! 🧑‍💻
• Sentiment analysis in one click 😮 
• Auto-generate content at scale 🚀

It’ll be worth your 39 minutes:

Listen on our site:

Click to listen

Subscribe and listen on your favorite podcast platform

Listen on:

Here’s our favorite AI finds from across the web:

New AI Tool Spotlight – Verdent is an AI coding platform that runs multiple agents at once, Everyday is an AI assistant that does basic everyday tasks for you, Dialed is AI-powered, personalized pop talks. (And thanks to the Dialed team for Sora access!)

AI Copyright — The popular Character.AI app has dropped Disney characters in their platform. Here’s why.

Data for AI — Wikimedia is launching a product to make its data easier for AI. What does it mean?

Claude Updates — Anthropic is reportedly working on a “skills” feature, to allow ou to train its ai chatbot on certain skills.

Big Tech — Microsoft wants to bring its AI chip use more in-house. How will that impact its market share?

Sora 2 — There’s a more powerful version of Sora 2 coming out soon.

Microsoft Copilot Use — See why LinkedIn’s CEO uses Microsoft Copilot for almost every important email.

Meta and Compute — Meta is reportedly acquiring chip startup Rivos to speed up its GPU ambitions and gain more control over AI infrastructure. Curious what this means for Meta’s AI roadmap?

AI Benchmarks — OpenAI’s benchmarks show that AI models are already at expert level for half of tasks they tested.

 

1. Meta to mine AI chat history for targeted Facebook, Instagram ads 🕵️‍♂️

In December, Meta will use your AI chat interactions to target ads and content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more, with notices rolling out next week. Sensitive topics are excluded, but there is no opt-out other than not using Meta’s AI features, and data can flow across connected accounts.

This is a timely shift that turns AI conversations into ad signals, similar to Amazon’s ambitions for Alexa, and it raises clear privacy questions for AI-heavy products like Meta’s smart glasses.

2. New Study: Chatbots Aren’t the Go-To for News 🗞️

A new survey from Pew Research Center finds that only about one-in-ten U.S. adults get news often or sometimes from AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini, while 75% never use them for news and fewer than 1% prefer them over traditional sources.

Younger adults under 50 are more likely to tap chatbots for news, yet they also report spotting inaccuracies more often, with roughly half of chatbot news users saying they at least sometimes encounter content they think is wrong. Many users are unsure about the quality and truthfulness of chatbot news, which signals lingering trust gaps as these tools spread into daily information habits.

3. Sora 2 release leads to copyright fights heating up 🔥

According to Reuters, OpenAI’s Sora now allows AI videos spun from copyrighted content to appear in public feeds unless rights holders opt out, a policy already rebuffed by Disney.

OpenAI argues its approach aligns with fair use and has previously pressed the Trump administration to endorse training on copyrighted material as vital for U.S. competitiveness and national security. The company says it is adding guardrails like liveness checks and permission requirements for likenesses, but the opt-out model is likely to intensify negotiations with studios and creators.

4. Trump’s AI-Edited Video Escalates Shutdown Standoff 🥊

President Donald Trump posted a second AI-altered clip that mocks House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries with a sombrero and mustache, sparking fresh accusations of bigotry as a midnight government shutdown looms.

The video dropped after White House talks stalled, with Jeffries calling Trump “unserious” and warning Republicans lack interest in good-faith negotiations. At the center of the funding fight is whether to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, with Democrats insisting on preserving health protections and Republicans pushing to separate policy from the spending bill.

5. Cancer centers debut federated AI platform to break data logjams 🪵

According to the Cancer AI Alliance, top U.S. cancer centers have just launched a federated learning platform that trains models on millions of patient records without moving raw data, marking a timely shift from stalled pilots to real deployment.

By sending models to hospital firewalls and aggregating only insights, the system sidesteps privacy and compliance hurdles and could speed up cancer research, diagnostics, and treatment development faster than traditional data sharing. The announcement signals immediate opportunities for startups and teams to build clinically relevant tools and strike partnerships without waiting on new data agreements or policy changes

🦾How You Can Leverage:

We’re not sure how this crazy AI feature slipped through the cracks. 🤔

What’s one thing so many business leaders have to tackle constantly? 

Spreadsheets. 

And what do most us hate wrangling? 

Spreadsheets. Obvi. 

That’s why we tackled Google’s latest updates to AI functions and Gemini capabilities in Google Sheets on today’s show. 

After all, would you rather search the internet for that cryptic 92-character formula, or just chat with Gemini and watch those numbers on screen automagically dance? 

(DANCE NUMBERS DANCE!) 

Yeah, the latter is way better. 

So on today’s show, we break down what’s new, how to use it, and some of our favorite time-saving tips and tricks. 

Yeah, let’s get it. 

1 – You Need a Paid Account But the Setup Is Stupid Simple 🔥

Bad news first: You gotta have a paid Google Workspace account to access Gemini in Sheets. If your company uses Gmail for email, you probably already have it. Check with your IT folks.

Good news: Once you're in, there are two ways to use it and both are ridiculously easy.

Option one is the Gemini sidebar. Click that little sparkle icon in the upper right corner of any spreadsheet and start chatting like you would with ChatGPT. Ask it to build dashboards, find trends, generate charts—whatever. Natural language, no technical knowledge required.

Option two is the new =AI() function. Type that into any cell, throw your question in quotes, and boom. It works like a normal spreadsheet formula except you're literally just talking to it.

Example: =AI("what's the average of column C for rows where column B says complete")

That's it, fam. No memorizing syntax. No Googling formulas. Just type what you want in plain English.

Try This

Open any Google Sheet right now. Look for the sparkle icon next to your profile picture in the top right.

Click it and type: "what are five interesting things you could do with this spreadsheet?"

Read what it suggests. You'll probably see capabilities you didn't know existed for your specific data.

Now click into an empty cell and type =AI("summarize column B in three bullet points"). Replace B with whatever column has text in your sheet.

Watch it work. You just used AI in a spreadsheet without learning a single formula.

2 – It Solves the Stuff You Actually Hate About Spreadsheets ⚡

Here's what Gemini in Sheets actually does for you in plain language:

It reads through hundreds of rows of messy text and tells you what matters. Got 600 customer reviews? It'll categorize what people actually value in three seconds instead of you reading for three hours.

It spots patterns you'd never find manually. We threw podcast download data at it and asked for non-obvious trends. It found that longer episode titles work better for niche topics but shorter titles win for broad topics. That's the kind of insight that takes data analysts days to uncover.

It builds stuff from nothing. Type "show me the top 10 competitors in my industry with their pricing" and it creates a full table pulling current data from the internet. Zero copy-pasting from websites.

It generates content at scale. Need email subject lines for 500 products? Write one formula and drag it down. Done.

Try This

Find a spreadsheet with customer feedback, survey responses, or any text column with at least 20 entries.

Click an empty cell next to that text data. Type =AI("what's the main theme here") and reference the cell with text.

Drag that formula down 10-20 rows. Watch it pull different insights from each entry based on actual content.

Now think about what you normally do with this data. Do you read everything looking for patterns? Do you manually tag responses by category?

This thing just automated that entire process. Use it for anything where you're stuck reading walls of text trying to find meaning.

3 – Five Time-Saving Moves You Should Steal Today 🚀

These are the actual workflows that save the most time that we tackled on today’s show.

Discover what's possible. Open any spreadsheet, click the Gemini sidebar, and ask "what are five AI commands I could run on this data to save time?" Let it tell you what you're missing instead of guessing what to ask for.

Generate instant dashboards. Type "create a dashboard highlighting the most important findings" without specifying anything else. It'll decide what matters and visualize it automatically in seconds.

Run sentiment analysis without expensive software. Use =AI("extract the main benefit mentioned here") on any customer feedback. Drag it down and suddenly you've got insights that used to cost thousands in consulting fees.

Create tables from thin air. Click "help me create a table" and describe what you need. "Top 15 project management tools with pricing and user ratings." It builds the whole thing pulling current data from the web.

Spot hidden trends. Ask Gemini to "find 10 non-obvious trends that impact [your key metric]" and tell it to think carefully. It'll surface connections between data points you'd never notice.

Try This

Pick your most annoying weekly spreadsheet task. The one you dread every Monday morning.

Open that spreadsheet and click the Gemini sidebar. Describe your pain point in plain language: "I need to categorize these 200 entries by topic every week and it takes forever."

Let Gemini suggest solutions. It'll probably offer three different approaches you haven't considered.

Test the fastest one. Time yourself. Compare it to your old manual process.

Now multiply that time savings by 52 weeks. That's how many hours you're about to get back this year.

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