Google's making a major bet on AI in the classroom. The tech giant is rolling out select Gemini features across its Education tier of Google Workspace at no extra charge, while also introducing Workspace Studio, a new no-code AI agent builder. The move comes as schools worldwide grapple with how to integrate generative AI into teaching and learning workflows, and Google's betting free, integrated tools will become the default.
Google just lowered the gates on its premium AI tools for one of its most strategic markets. At the BETT conference in London, the company announced it's making select Gemini capabilities available free to educators and students across multiple tiers of Google Workspace for Education, a significant move that signals the company's commitment to making generative AI table stakes in schools.
The announcement breaks down into two big pieces: expanded free access to Gemini across Workspace apps, and the introduction of Workspace Studio, a new AI agent builder that lets educators automate workflows without touching a line of code. According to Vivek Chachcha, Product Manager at Google for Education, educators have already been telling the company that integrating AI into their existing tools "has saved them hours of time and helped them be more creative." The rollout is Google's response to that feedback.
Here's what's actually shipping. Education Fundamentals users get Gemini in Gmail—think Help Me Write for drafting emails, Suggested Replies for quick responses, and AI Overviews for summarizing threads. Education Plus and Teaching and Learning add-on subscribers are getting the full suite: Gemini in Docs for content creation, Gemini in Slides for generating original images and slides, Gemini in Forms for quick assessment creation with AI-powered response summaries, Gemini in Sheets for data analysis with custom functions, and Gemini in Vids for creating polished videos from text prompts or existing slides.
The rollout timing matters here. Most of these features are hitting in the coming weeks for users 18 and older, but Gmail and Sheets are staggered to later months. That's likely a data handling precaution—email and spreadsheets often contain sensitive student information, so Google's probably being cautious with the rollout. Administrators are also getting more granular control, able to toggle individual Gemini apps on or off per app rather than an all-or-nothing switch.
But the real newsmaker is Workspace Studio. This is Google's answer to educators who want to build custom AI workflows without hiring engineers. Workspace Studio, now bundled as a core service in all Education editions, harnesses advanced reasoning to let anyone create no-code AI agents in minutes. The company showed demos of practical use cases: an agent that preps you for meetings by summarizing notes and pulling attendee details into Chat, another that automatically saves email attachments to Drive and logs them in Sheets (perfect for organizing permission slips), and a third that triages admin emails to surface priorities and extract actionable tasks.
