Gemini in Gmail is what finally convinced me to pay for Google’s AI

I’m definitely not a fan of all the AI-powered plans and tiers that Google offers across Google One and Workspace. There are so many variations, each with its own nuances, that it’s nothing but confusing. It’s no less than a nightmare to make sense of all the usage differences and figure out which one actually meets your needs.

Even though it’s yet another AI plan, the Google One AI Plus tier available in India and other countries earns brownie points in one key area: price. It makes perfect sense for regular users who don’t need 2 TB of storage or professional-grade access to every AI tool Google offers. It costs less than a quarter of the Google AI Pro plan and gives you access to many Gemini features, including Gemini integration within Workspace apps like Gmail and Docs.

I wanted something exactly like this, and Google delivered it with the AI Plus plan. I’ve now found I can’t live without Google’s paid AI features, and it’s all thanks to one specific feature: Gemini in Gmail.

As a writer, I would take offense if AI were to write on my behalf. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want AI to be part of my writing process. I’m perfectly happy using it to review an email draft before hitting send, but the initial writing — the language, words, and tone — has to be mine. Those words should reflect my personality, not something mass-scrapped from the internet.

Once I’ve written an email, I quickly ask Gemini to give it a pass, just to make sure I don’t embarrass myself later with some idiotic grammatical gaffe. If I were to use ChatGPT for this instead, I’d have to copy the email text, paste it into ChatGPT, ask it to proofread, then copy it back into Gmail — adding dozens of unnecessary steps to a process that now takes just a couple of clicks with Gemini baked directly into Gmail.

When AI is precisely where you need it (and when), it becomes a passive assistant you end up using more often than you initially intended.

While writing is only a small part of the Gmail experience, what I love most about Gemini in Gmail is context. Because it lives inside Gmail, it understands my inbox — the emails I’ve sent, the ones I’ve received, and the conversations I’ve been part of. I can query it using the currently open thread or an email I exchanged months ago.

Instead of manually digging through my inbox, trying to remember where I saw something, I can just ask Gemini in plain language and get the information I need instantly and without tantrums.

The idea here is simply to reduce friction so that productivity goes up. That’s what Gemini’s Gmail integration does for me. While Gmail is the Workspace app I use most, I’ve had similarly positive experiences with Google Docs, where I often use Gemini to spot patterns and extract key points from long documents.

It’s honestly a bit disappointing that you don’t get even basic Gemini integration inside Gmail on the free Gemini tier, or with standard Google One plans. Until now, your only real options were spending $20 a month on the Gemini AI Pro plan or subscribing to a business-focused Workspace tier — neither of which makes much sense for home users with limited cloud needs.

The Google AI Plus plan feels like the sweet spot. It gives you access to nearly all of Google’s Gemini and AI features, just with lower (but sufficient) usage limits. Power users still have the Pro plan to fall back on, but the Plus plan lets you get started for a monthly fee that’s only slightly higher than the 200 GB Google One plan.

Google doesn’t currently offer the AI Plus plan in the United States, but it’s available across major markets in Europe and Asia. For me, it launched in India very recently at ₹400 per month (around $4.50), with an additional 50% discount for the first six months.

That means I’m not spending unnecessary money just to access AI features, and I’m getting most of the tools I actually use every day by paying just a tad more than what I was already paying for the base One plan. It’s a win-win.

At this point, AI no longer feels like something extraordinary or an add-on to my workflow. These small AI touches across apps feel like part of the package; so natural that it almost feels like they’ve always been there, much like Smart Compose in Gmail, which has existed for as long as I can remember.

For me, Gemini in Gmail has now become the baseline. And I know it would be genuinely hard to live without it going forward.

Between summarizing emails, giving me quick rundowns of long threads, surfacing older context, and digging through information buried inside email text, Gemini has become irreplaceable in my workflow. Not because it’s better than ChatGPT, but because it’s baked into the app I use every single day — often dozens of times a day.

It’s effectively my virtual secretary: something I can delegate mundane daily tasks, follow-ups, and planning to. I don’t know whether the dependency habit it’s forming is healthy, but I do know that it’s helped me boost productivity and cut down the boring morning ritual of cleaning my inbox.

When you think about it, paying a few dollars a month for a genuinely helpful assistant feels more than reasonable. I would be an idiot to part ways with the Google AI Plus plan when I’m getting so much out of it.