Claude Now Integrates with Google
May 1, 2025
A few quick notes from the intersection of AI, marketing, branding, and small business.
Claude’s Google Integration. As of April 15, 2025, you can now have Claude connect to your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. This means that you can ask Claude to access to your emails, calendar events, and documents then you can ask questions, get synopses, analyze documents and a lot more. This function eliminates the frustration of searching for those specific emails about that one project. Just ask Claude to read the emails from a certain team or client or topic and tell you what it discovers.
You can use the integration to summarize multiple emails or documents, write a report based on various documents on your Google Drive, or find out how many times you’ve met with someone over the past year. I asked Claude to summarize several recent email exchanges as a way to prep for a meeting. Another client had sent a bunch of overlapping emails about one topic. I had Claude read and summarize, which meant I didn’t have to untangle the spaghetti of ideas and requests. Claude can also write draft emails to someone based on past exchanges while keeping your calendar in mind.
The integration with Google Drive has completely changed my work habits. Everything’s on Drive now. I can ask Claude to write a proposal based on the past proposals I uploaded or write a report based on a number of documents. Yes, Claude, ChatGPT and other allow you to upload knowledge documents into projects, but there are size limits and it’s not feasible to upload everything.
While Claude reads most file formats, I found that Apple Pages and Numbers aren’t among them. Speaking of spreadsheets, lots of potential but you may find they need to be organized in particular ways or else Claude will ask for help.
Consider having Claude look through your email and calendar and generate a prioritized action list for each day. Or consider having Perplexity gather product specs and other market intelligence from competitors. Drop that all into your Google Drive then Claude can create a launch plan. Honestly, the use cases go on and on. I’m sure this type of integration will be common in the near future. The key is going to be making its use a habit.
Not sure why they call it beta. The integration is currently in beta for Claude subscribers on the Max, Team, Enterprise, and Pro plans. You’ll need to enable the feature in Claude, then allow access to one or all three of the Google services.
But is it secure? Anthropic emphasizes strict authentication and access controls, ensuring that only authorized users can connect their Google accounts to Claude. While this addressed my privacy concerns, you may decide otherwise depending on the sensitivity of your business data.
What about ChatGPT? As of now, not really but kind of if you use a workaround. ChatGPT allows you to upload files directly from Google Drive into a chat session. See this Tom’s Guide article. Once a file is uploaded, ChatGPT can analyze, summarize, translate, or otherwise process the content as requested. This sort of integration is available to all ChatGPT users, including those on free plans, but it’s a far cry from the offering from Claude.
