Christopher Mims woke up to three AI alerts. His sleep had been pretty good, if light on REM. He urgently needed to review the cover of a foreign translation of his book. And he really ought to consider a weekend sea-kayaking trip with the family. “People throw around the idea of AI as a personal assistant a lot,” he writes in the Journal’s Keywords column, “but this was the first time it hit me that artificial intelligence really has become my personal assistant.” Specifically, Google’s.
This matters because of who is saying it. Mims is the columnist who rejects every cookie banner and every app-tracking request. He has now let Google’s Personal Intelligence, with his permission, read his activity across almost every Google service. He calls it an enabler of a handful of killer apps.
What it does
Daily Brief is an agenda for the day that Gemini writes every morning. It reads the calendar and the Gmail inbox, pulls up the things stuck in email that should be on the calendar, and prioritizes. One recent brief noticed an upcoming interview with an automotive expert, pulled from correspondence, and offered a one-tap deep-research pass on the expert’s firm. He tapped. The questions it produced informed the interview.
Dreambeans is the experimental sibling. If Daily Brief is the no-nonsense helper, he writes, Dreambeans is “its slightly deranged hippie brother.” It suggests things to learn, do or share with the family, each paired with an AI sketch of the writer and his loved ones doing them. Google Health Coach, the third alert, reads the Fitbit Air band and knows his workouts and goals. “I feel like it gets me.”
| Product | What it reads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Brief | Gmail, Calendar, recent activity | From $5 a month (Google AI Plus) |
| Dreambeans | Email, photos, location, the lot | $20 a month (Google AI Pro) |
| Health Coach | Fitbit Air band data, health goals | Separate plan or a higher AI bundle |
Why Google and not the clever chatbots
Both ChatGPT and Claude can produce a daily briefing like this one. It takes granting the tool access to Gmail and Calendar, then setting up a scheduled task with a prompt that tells it what to scan and how to rank it. Mims wrote a book about AI and had been too lazy to do that. Handing a third-party AI all of his Google-stored information also felt like a much bigger privacy leap than letting Google use data it already had in a new way. Google says the emails, photos and personal information in prompts are not used to train its models. The feature is not available on business accounts.
The closing thought is the investable one. There is a huge gap between what AI can do and what people actually use it for, because most of it sits behind complexity only die-hards get past. Google’s products win on simplicity, and Apple is about to try the same trick with the Apple Intelligence upgrade shipping next month. As his colleague Nicole Nguyen put it, Apple’s AI doesn’t have to be powerful, “it just has to be available and easy to use.”
For a client, one caution
An assistant that reads your inbox will, sooner or later, read a brokerage statement, a tax document and a bank alert. That is convenient and it is also the exact set of documents a fraudster wants. Keep two-factor authentication on the Google account that holds the assistant, never let any AI tool move money, and treat “review this transfer” alerts the way you treat a call from your bank: hang up and dial the number on the card.