Searching for a specific piece of information buried inside Google Drive is frustrating enough on a desktop. On a smartphone, with a smaller screen and no easy way to skim through documents quickly, it gets worse fast. You end up opening file after file, hoping the right one surfaces before you give up.
Google is now addressing that directly. According to Chrome Unboxed, the company is rolling out two AI-powered features to the Google Drive mobile app: Ask Gemini and AI Overviews. Both tools are coming to Android and iOS, and the rollout started on June 26, 2025.
These features have been available in the Drive web app since April. Bringing them to mobile is a meaningful step, because that is often where people need fast answers most, whether they are in a meeting, traveling, or away from their desk entirely.
AI Overviews is the more visible change. When you search inside Drive, Gemini now scans your documents and shows a summary at the top of the results page. You do not have to open anything. You can type a plain question like “What’s in our Spring 2026 catalog?” and get a coherent answer pulled from multiple relevant files. If the summary does not cover everything you need, one tap takes you into a full conversation with Gemini about those results.
Ask Gemini goes deeper. It gives you a dedicated workspace inside the app where you can have a multi-turn conversation grounded in specific files or folders. If you need to cross-reference three project documents while sitting in an airport, you can point Gemini at those exact files and ask questions across all of them at once. The conversation history also stays saved, so if you close the app to take a call, you can come back and pick up exactly where you left off.
Google has confirmed that the AI tools respect existing data permissions. Gemini will not summarize or surface content that you do not already have access to, which matters for teams using Drive to store sensitive business information.
The rollout is gradual, so the features may not appear in your app right away even after updating. To use them, you need to have Workspace smart features turned on, and your account needs to be on one of the supported tiers:
- Workspace Business Standard and Plus
- Workspace Enterprise Standard and Plus
- Google AI Pro for Education
- Consumer accounts on Google AI Pro or Ultra
The features launch with support for English and 28 other languages. Updating your Drive app through the Play Store or App Store is the first step to make sure you are ready when the rollout reaches your account.
This move fits into a broader push by Google to embed Gemini across its Workspace tools, not just as a chatbot you open separately, but as something built into the apps people already use every day. Drive is a logical place to focus on, given how much unstructured information people store there and how difficult it can be to retrieve it quickly without knowing the exact file name.
