I Let Google's Personal Intelligence Access My Life–and It's a Help

I woke up on a recent morning to three different AI alerts: My sleep had been pretty good, if light on REM; I urgently needed to review the cover of a foreign-language translation of my book; and I really ought to consider a weekend sea-kayaking expedition with the family.

People throw around the idea of “AI as a personal assistant” a lot, but this was the first time it hit me that artificial intelligence really has become my personal assistant. Specifically, Google’s AI.

I’ve long been a skeptic of personal AI—my privacy paranoia has made me one of those people who always rejects cookies and app-tracking requests—but my experiences with it lately have me turning into one of those AI guys. Pretty soon, you might be one too.

With my permission, Google’s Personal Intelligence tool can access all my activity in almost every Google service. It has turned out to be an enabler of a handful of killer apps.

Daily Brief is an agenda for the day that Google’s Gemini AI app generates for me every morning. It tells me what I have on tap for the next 24 hours and any pertinent future events, highlighting both items already on my calendar and things still stuck in my Gmail inbox. It has become indispensable for organizing my waking hours, prioritizing critical tasks and remembering important obligations.

Then there’s Dreambeans, the company’s newer, experimental Personal Intelligence app. If Daily Brief is the no-nonsense helper, Dreambeans is its slightly deranged hippie brother. It suggests things I might want to learn about, experience or share with my family. I’m drawn to the uncanny specificity of its suggestions, each one paired with an AI-generated sketch of myself and my loved ones actually doing those things.

For now, accessing Daily Brief costs as little as $5 a month, through the Google AI Plus plan, while Dreambeans requires a $20-a-month Google AI Pro plan.

For years, we’ve been promised proactive AI that eases our burdens, rather than reactive AI that just waits for our prompts. Early adopters who use so-called agentic AI for work know how powerful it can be to hand AI a task and then ignore it until it’s done. But, until now, this functionality has been mostly absent from consumer apps.

Google made Personal Intelligence accessible to all users in the U.S. in March for Gemini chatbot queries. Google launched the Daily Brief in May, and I’ve been testing both since their earliest days.

It has taken months for these services to demonstrate real utility for me, but now I wouldn’t want to be without them.

A recent example: my daily brief included a note about an upcoming interview with an automotive expert, pulled from my email correspondence with him. It also included a one-tap option to use Gemini’s deep-research capabilities to gather some recent developments at this firm and formulate questions based on them. On a whim, I tapped it, and the results were so good they helped inform that conversation.

Adding this kind of proactive help to the Daily Brief is what product manager Lawren Tilney’s team at Google DeepMind is trying to do. “We really think this can be kind of your life partner, your proactive ally for your day,” she says.

Both ChatGPT and Claude can generate a daily briefing like Google’s, but it requires mastering several of their features at once. First, a user must grant these AI tools access to Google services like email and calendar, and then create a regular task that will fire off every morning, using a prompt that tells the AI to scan these sources and prioritize their contents.

Setting those up isn’t just considerably more complicated, it also means giving these third-party AI platforms access to all of my Google-stored information. That feels like a much bigger leap of faith, privacy-wise, than allowing Google to use data it already has in a new way.

For those who already pay for Google’s Gemini AI, switching on all this functionality is as straightforward as turning on Personal Intelligence and then adjusting some of its settings in Gemini.

“Daily Brief operates under the same strict privacy protections as our other consumer apps,” Tilney says.

If you’re worried about your data being used to train AI, Google says that while general prompts and responses may be used, your emails, photos or any other personal information won’t be, even if they appear in prompts and responses.

Google’s Personal Intelligence feature isn’t currently available for business Google accounts, although some companies are starting to use Gemini Enterprise, which can perform similar tasks.

There is a huge gap between what today’s AI tools are capable of and what we actually use them for. Many of their abilities are, for now, locked behind a level of complexity that only die-hard geeks can get past.

Google’s Daily Brief, Dreambeans and the integration of Personal Intelligence into Gemini all win on simplicity. I wrote an entire book about AI, and yet I’ve been too lazy to leverage its full power in my personal life.

I didn’t set out to leverage AI, beavering away in the background while I sleep, to set my priorities every morning, and even help me regulate my physical and mental health. But now I get it, because these proactive features more or less fell into my lap and made themselves useful.

Apple is also betting that personal AI will explode once it’s built into the devices and services already in our hands. Like Google, Apple already has access to its users’ digital lives.

As my colleague Nicole Nguyen wrote of Apple’s upgraded Apple Intelligence, built into the versions of its device operating systems due out next month, “To win people over, Apple’s AI doesn’t have to be powerful, it just has to be available and easy to use.”

Google is already demonstrating this is true.