What do you actually do with a Gemini?

Reflecting more of Google’s practical focus for Gemini and AI in general at I/O 2026 last week, I’m still struggling to find ways to make this technology useful in ways that really matter. So what do you do with Gemini?

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In the past few years, artificial intelligence has become a part of everyday life. Not necessarily in use, but at least to hear about all the “progress” being made with it. I don’t really consider myself an AI hater, but I’m not the biggest fan of the technology. AI can do impressive things, but it usually feels like a game of trying to reinvent the wheel. Gemini’s AI Mode in Views and Search is a pretty brilliant new experience, but they ultimately do the same thing, albeit often worse at it (always Google has admitted that the internet is “rapidly declining”. – I wonder why). AI tools, Google or otherwise, just don’t feel like an objectively better upgrade, but usually also a wildly resource-intensive lateral evolution – I’m not at all bitter about RAM prices or anything.

But despite all that, I am I’m still trying to figure out where Gemini and AI as a whole make real sense in my life – it’s just an uphill battle.

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Perhaps the best real-world use case I’ve seen for AI is coding. Being great language models, rationalizing code generation is something these tools can be pretty good at. I just got around to it, I made a quick Chrome extension that I needed, but I can see the appeal right away. I still believe that a good developer should be behind anything, especially anything built by AI it was sold or widespread – but the utility is obvious.

Other than that, though, it’s pretty hit or miss.

As mentioned last week WeekendI think Google is doing a good job of coming up with ideas for where AI can be useful. One of the last “eureka” moments for me in finding use cases for Gemini was in Google Sheets.

Spreadsheets can be a huge headache, but if you know how to use them, they’re really good at what they do. Personally, I don’t think I’m good enough to at least use a spreadsheet and create formulas to do what I need, but the advanced side of things has never been easy. This usually involves a ton of searching the web for tips and tricks, and then a ton of trial and error to make sure those tips actually work in the context I’m working on. Twins indeed good at that though. Without going into details, I was trying to create a spreadsheet that could take multiple inputs – player names, payouts, and payout structure – and spit out the results. I spent an hour trying to do it the “old fashioned” way, but I finally got around to trying Gemini’s integration into Sheets. Using natural language, he was able to spit out formulas that could actually take advantage of the context of the rest of the table, creating “COUNTIF” and “XLOOKUP” formulas that were far beyond what I could understand on my own, and frankly, I didn’t even know how to research in the first place. I still had to do a lot of manual corrections, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I hadn’t learned to use a spreadsheet and its formulas. without AI helped, but Gemini saved me a lot of time and frustration.

The work area as a whole is where Gemini can come in handy. I’m still worried about the whole “Documents Live” demo from I/O, but creating a Table formula in a Slideshow and maybe creating an image are actually useful ways to trigger AI.

But I really want to hear about it from our readers.

What are you Are you using twins?

Search? Productivity? Coding? I’m very interested in how you find Google’s AI tools useful. Let’s discuss!

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