Google Gemini, reviewed

Gemini is Google's family of models and the assistant built on them. It lives in its own app, in Gmail and Docs, in Search, on Android and in Chrome. In 2026 its app reached a billion people a month, even if not every promise along the way was kept.

Today Google opened its new flagship model to more people. Here is how Gemini serves a company now: what it is, what is genuinely good, what is not, and our verdict.

What changed this year

In August, Sundar Pichai said the Gemini app had passed one billion monthly active users, two months after ChatGPT reached the same mark. The figure counts the app alone, not Gemini inside Search. Google says the app generates more than 150 million images a day and that 63 percent of its users talk to it by voice.

The models took a less straight path. Gemini 3.5 Pro, which Pichai had said would come in June, will not be released, Reuters reported, and Google reorganised DeepMind, whose chief executive Demis Hassabis stepped aside. On 30 September it announced Gemini 4 Argon instead, a larger model for coding, knowledge work and cyber defence. It went first to trusted security partners in Google's Fairwind Program. Since today, “Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can now access Gemini 4 Argon” in the app.

Around the models, the app keeps growing. It now connects to tools such as Airtable, Linear, monday.com, Adobe and Webflow, and in September Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash, which it says brings its best reasoning and coding yet at the speed and low cost of the previous Flash.

What is genuinely good

The integration is the strongest argument. A company on Google Workspace already pays for much of Gemini. In Switzerland, the Standard plan costs CHF 14 per user and month on monthly billing and includes Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet and Chat. For a company on Google, no assistant sits closer to the documents and the inbox where the work already is.

The context is long. Google AI Pro offers a context window of one million tokens, enough for a large contract set or a year of minutes in one request. Argon raises the output limit to one million tokens, up from 64'000, so that it can, in Google's words, “think deeply and generate hundreds of thousands of tokens in a single trajectory.”

And the price is low. Google AI Pro costs CHF 17 a month and includes the Pro models, video generation, Deep Research, image generation with Nano Banana, credits for Flow, Google's film tool, and 5 terabytes of storage. Developers pay an introductory 2 dollars per million input tokens and 10 dollars per million output tokens for Argon, rising to 4 and 20 dollars after the introduction.

What is not

Some of the newest features do not reach Switzerland. Gemini in Chrome, with features such as auto browse, requires a supported region. On 13 October, Google's own list included the United States and the United Kingdom but neither Switzerland nor any member state of the European Union.

The products change often. On 17 November Google turns Gems, the custom assistants many people built, into a new format called skills. The migration is automatic, but TechCrunch noted that skills are called up with a slash command, “a user interface that engineers, not regular folks, tend to prefer,” and that Google has a long habit of renaming and reshuffling features.

The flagship is also not yet ahead everywhere. Google's own benchmark table showed Argon behind on two of the four coding tests it chose to publish, Reuters reported, and Google has not said when Argon will reach everyone beyond its paying subscribers.

Privacy needs care on personal accounts. Google says a subset of chats in the Gemini apps is read by human reviewers, that reviewed chats are kept for up to three years, and asks: “Please don't enter confidential information that you wouldn't want a reviewer to see.” Work and school accounts may fall under different terms, which is one more reason to keep company work inside Workspace.

Lock in and cost

For a company already on Google, Gemini is in our view the cheapest serious assistant. Personal plans run from free to CHF 17 for Pro and CHF 100 or CHF 170 for Ultra, with five or twenty times the usage of Pro. Workspace runs from CHF 7 to CHF 22 per user and month, with the stronger models from Standard upwards.

The lock in is the other side of the same coin. Gemini is at its best when your mail, files and calendar are with Google, and it is least useful when they are not. Gems, notebooks and habits built in the app stay in Google's world.

Our verdict

For a company that runs on Google Workspace, Gemini is the natural first assistant: close to the work, generous with context and low in price. Swiss teams should know that some agent features are not available here yet, and that the range of models and features will keep moving.

Whichever assistant you choose, keep your company's knowledge, rules and skills in a place you own. Twin, the AI brain we build for companies, connects to Google Workspace and to your other systems, and is delivered as source code that goes with you if you change assistant.