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Ep 682: Google Sheets and Gemini: 5 ways to use Gemini AI to save time and work smarter

Updates on Apple’s AI efforts, Softbank’s $41B investment in OpenAI, xAI launces Grok Business and more

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Everyday AI
December 31, 2025

 

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2025 has been a friggin whirlwind. Sheesh!

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Jordan

P.S., with the New Year tomorrow, we’ll be taking the day off.

Outsmart The Future

Today in Everyday AI
8 minute read

🎙 Daily Podcast Episode: Google Sheets has been hiding serious AI power with Gemini, and it can save you way more time than you think. Give it a watch/read/listen.

🕵️‍♂️ Fresh Finds: GPT-5.2 Pro benchmarks show big math gains, NVIDIA announcements might be around the corner and more.  Read on for Fresh Finds.

🗞 Byte Sized Daily AI News: Updates on Apple’s AI efforts, Softbank’s $41B investment in OpenAI, xAI launces Grok Business 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: Meta makes shocking agent acquisition, Microsoft’s new Copilot moves, Notion tests new AI Workspace and more. Check it here!

Ep 682: Google Sheets and Gemini: 5 ways to use Gemini AI to save time and work smarter

Bet you didn’t know you could do THAT in Google Sheets. 👀

You mighta slept on this the past few months, but 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! Lolz.

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.

Don't worry.... we're gonna put it to Work this Wednesday together.

Also on the pod today:

• Gemini AI formula hacks 🧮
• Gemini spotting hidden trends 🔎
• Sentiment analysis on reviews 😊
 

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 – Creaibo helps Create 10x better content that Sounds like you, faster, Foundire Searches 800M+ candidates, screen resumes, run AI interviews, and verify backgrounds — seamlessly, Vidcard is The World’s First Video Business Card

AI and Math — EpochAI released its benchmarks for GPT-5.2 Pro, which shows it has a massive lead in FrontierMath.

Nvidia Chips — Nvidia ramps H200 supply as Chinese orders and TSMC expansion tighten chip availability

AI Chips and Stocks— AI data centers are turning into a multi‑trillion dollar race for GPUs, power and cooling. Curious which companies win big?

AI Helping Paralyzed Man — Paralysed after New Year swim — now walking again with AI-powered tech

AI Models — Tencent released HY-Motion 1.0, a billion-parameter diffusion-transformer that turns text into high-quality 3D character animations.

NVIDIA Announcement — NVIDIA just announced that its CEO, Jensen Huang, will keynote CES.

1. SoftBank completes $41B OpenAI commitment, sending final $22–22.5B this week 💸

SoftBank has finished its multiyear funding pledge to OpenAI, delivering a final $22–22.5 billion that brings its total commitment to roughly $41 billion and lifts its stake to about 11%, according to CNBC.

The timing is significant as OpenAI lines up massive infrastructure deals and potential new investments from Amazon while preparing for an IPO, underscoring a race to fund AI compute and product expansion. SoftBank’s move follows earlier sales of its Nvidia holdings and a separate $4 billion purchase of DigitalBridge to shore up AI infrastructure bets, signaling a major reallocation of capital toward AI.

2. xAI launches Grok Business and Enterprise with enterprise-grade security 🤝

xAI today rolled out Grok Business and a higher-tier Grok Enterprise offering, making its conversational assistant available to teams with built-in privacy and admin controls.

The product promises permission-aware Google Drive access, source-cited answers, and agentic search for large document stores, while Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM, advanced audits, and an optional Vault for customer-managed encryption keys and isolated data planes.

3. Apple to debut AI-powered Siri in 2026 🔌

According to GuruFocus, Apple now plans to launch a revamped, generative-AI Siri in 2026 after missing its 2025 target, making this the company’s most important software release in years and a critical test of its ability to compete with Google and OpenAI.

The upgrade is central to Apple Intelligence and will be free, meaning Apple’s financial upside depends on whether the new assistant drives iPhone, iPad, and Mac hardware upgrades. The delay followed internal leadership churn and raises investor pressure despite a strong 2025 stock rebound driven by tariff relief and optimistic hardware forecasts.

4. Qwen Code v0.6.0 lands with experimental Skills and multi-provider support 🤖

Qwen Code released version 0.6.0 with timely additions that make the developer toolkit more flexible and production-ready, including an experimental Skills feature and new Gemini and Anthropic provider support.

The update also brings practical improvements like VS Code description enhancements, new /compress and /summary commands for non-interactive workflows, and reliability fixes that address flaky tests and Windows CLI issues.

5. Brookfield launches its own cloud to lease AI chips 🏗️

Brookfield is moving fast into cloud services tied to a new $10 billion AI fund, creating Radiant to lease data center chips directly to AI developers, a report says. The move, timed amid a wider $100 billion AI infrastructure push, gives Brookfield tighter control over energy, real estate and compute inputs that pure cloud providers do not have.

This strategy could squeeze traditional cloud giants already under pressure to justify heavy capex, and it highlights growing market concern about industrial and utility constraints from AI infrastructure buildouts.

🦾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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