Google brings Gemini to the road

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Good morning, { AI enthusiasts }. 2026 has been all about Google’s product-centric AI push, putting Gemini in every thing you employ… and now, the corporate is bringing that technique to the road.

With a brand new experience rolling out to Maps, the Sundar Pichai-led company is betting Gemini could make your trips easier, more immersive, and hopefully loads more hands-free.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Google launches Gemini-powered Maps

  • Microsoft’s step toward ‘medical superintelligence’

  • Automate Gmail with Google Workspace Studio

  • AI agent hacks McKinsey’s ‘Lilli’ chatbot in two hours

  • 4 latest AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just dropped a serious Gemini-powered upgrade for Maps, introducing two latest features: Ask Maps, which enables you to ask questions and get relevant answers to plan trips, and Immersive Navigation, which renders the route in 3D.

The small print:

  • Ask Maps simplifies trip planning by letting you ask questions on the route/stops, with Gemini fetching from 300M+ places and reviews to reply.

  • Immersive Navigation renders the route in 3D, using Gemini to research Street View and aerial imagery to point out buildings, overpasses, crosswalks, and more.

  • Other upgrades include more conversational voice guidance, Street View previews of destinations with parking info, and trade-offs for alternative routes.

  • Maps is the newest Google product to get the Gemini touch, following Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive, Meet, Photos, and Android.

Why it matters: Because the race to construct the very best model continues, Google is showing the tech’s value by putting it where it matters most — into people’s day by day lives. With Gemini now in Maps, Gmail, Docs, and Android, the corporate reaches billions without asking anyone to put in anything latest. That’s turning out to be its true moat.

TOGETHER WITH VANTA

The Rundown: Security teams today are managing more complexity than ever. Vanta brings together leading CISOs Jadee Hanson (Vanta), Alex Stamos (ex-Meta), and Andrew Becherer (Sublime Security) for a candid conversation on staying ahead of audits, AI change, and growing vendor complexity.

See live demos across three core pillars:

  • Enterprise Control to tailor and scale your security program

  • Context-aware AI Agent to surface what matters and automate the remainder

  • Privacy Automation that embeds ROPA, inventory management, and DPIAs into your on a regular basis workflows

MICROSOFT

Image source: Microsoft

The Rundown: Microsoft AI debuted Copilot Health, a brand new AI experience that uses your health records, wearable data, and medical history to present personalized insights — moving toward what CEO Mustafa Suleyman describes as “medical superintelligence.”

The small print:

  • Sitting as a secure space inside Copilot, the brand new offering connects to 50+ wearables, EHR records from 50K+ U.S. hospitals, and Function lab results.

  • The AI analyzes this data and offers personalized insights to assist people make sense of their health and get essentially the most out of their doctors’ consultations.

  • Microsoft says Copilot Health’s advice is grounded in information from credible organizations akin to Harvard Health, with answers linking back to the sources.

  • The information connected to the platform shouldn’t be used for training, and users retain the choice to disconnect data sources and delete the linked data altogether.

Why it matters: Microsoft is evident that it doesn’t want to switch doctors — it desires to be the following smartest thing. The corporate hopes this work will eventually pave the best way for “medical superintelligence,” where AI has the knowledge of a general physician and the depth of a specialist, and stays accessible and reasonably priced for billions worldwide.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: On this guide, you’ll learn how you can use Google Workspace Studio to automate your Gmail inbox. You’ll have the option to establish agents that triage incoming messages, extract key information from invoices, and draft replies using Gemini.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Workspace Studio, take a look at pre-made email boosters on the homepage, designed for things like day by day email recaps and VIP notifications

  2. To construct your personal flow, click the plus button, select “After I get an email” as your starter, add an Add labels step, and toggle on AI-powered labels

  3. Select the categories you wish Gemini to observe for (like “Receipts & Invoices”). Gemini will read each incoming email and label it routinely

  4. Hit “Activate” and send yourself a test email. Check the Activity tab in Workspace Studio to see exactly what happened at each step

Pro tip: You possibly can add a “Check if” step for brand new receipt labels. Use Extract with Gemini to tug details, then Sheets → Add a row to log them.

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With SerpApi, you get:

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  • ZeroTrace Mode to maintain your searches confidential

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Try SerpApi without cost today — Rundown readers can get 50% off for 3 months via chat or email.

MCKINSEY

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Security startup CodeWall revealed its AI agent broke into McKinsey’s internal AI ‘Lilli’ in under two hours, gaining full read-write access to a database with confidential chat messages, client files, and user accounts — all in plain text.

The small print:

  • As McKinsey’s AI for chat, evaluation, and search across 100K+ internal documents, Lilli is utilized by 70% of its staff, some 45K people, for client work.

  • CodeWall’s agent found exposed API docs with 22 endpoints that didn’t need authentication. One had a basic security flaw that enabled database access.

  • It included 46.5M messages discussing strategy, M&A deals, and client work, 728K files with client data, 57K user accounts, and 95 control prompts.

  • McKinsey was informed concerning the flaw, following which it analyzed the situation with a 3rd party (found nobody else got access) and patched the vulnerability.

Why it matters: The undeniable fact that this wasn’t a four-person startup but McKinsey & Company shows even the very best can miss the fundamentals. If firms at this level are getting it improper, every company rushing to ship AI internally for business-critical workflows must take a harder take a look at what they could be leaving wide open.

QUICK HITS

  • 🤖 Scrunch – See how AI interprets your site, run a free audit, and unlock the brand new option to reach customers*

  • 💻 Personal Computer – Perplexity’s AI agent system for Mac Mini

  • 🧠 Claude – Anthropic’s AI, now with interactive diagrams/charts in chat

  • Codex – OpenAI’s coding assistant, now with automations and themes

xAI hired Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg — senior product engineers from Cursor — to speed up Grok’s coding capabilities, with each directly reporting to Elon Musk.

Meta reportedly delayed its next AI model, named Avocado, until a minimum of May after it underperformed against frontier models in internal evaluations.

Perplexity expanded its “Computer” agentic system to Pro subscribers, enabling access with the choice so as to add credits depending on usage needs.

Pentagon CTO Emil Michael said “there’s no likelihood” of renewing talks with Anthropic, and that Claude would “pollute” the provision chain with “a unique policy preference.”

Dating app Bumble plans to introduce “Bee,” a generative AI assistant that can privately learn user preferences after which suggest relevant matches based on them.

Axiom, the AI reasoning startup focused on formal mathematics and verified AI, announced a $200M Series A round at a $1.6B+ valuation, led by Menlo Ventures.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Jeff C. in Oklahoma City:

“I actually have been using AI to help me in constructing required training courses for our team of aircraft maintenance professionals. The time to actual use has been reduced significantly. What once took months to create could be accomplished in lower than a day.

The standard of the training has significantly improved through the usage of AI/ChatGPT. The Federal Aviation Regulations are a winding road from all of the varied documents. AI has been in a position to untangle the ‘spider’s web’ of documents, allowing accurate & up-to-date training.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

That is it for today!

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