Google Chat's Gemini side panel is being replaced

It replaces the Gemini side panel that has sat inside Google Chat, with a single command bar built into the app instead. From that bar you can search across Gmail, Drive and Calendar without leaving the conversation, draft a reply or an image directly inside a chat thread, and get help scheduling a meeting or tracking a to-do that came up in a message.

The change is a redesign, not an add-on. Google is retiring the old panel rather than running it alongside the new bar, so a team that used the panel for quick lookups inside Chat will be using the new one from the moment it lands on their account.

It is rolling out to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus accounts, the same tiers that already include Gemini at no extra cost. The rollout starts August 26, 2026 and is gradual, reaching accounts over as much as 15 days rather than all at once.

Two catches worth knowing. It only applies if a Google account's display language is set to English at first, so a team running Workspace in another language keeps the old side panel until Google expands support. And through October 1, 2026, Google is giving eligible accounts a temporary promotional bump to usage limits, so early testing feels more generous than what settles in afterward.

This is the part worth acting on. Conversation history from the old Gemini side panel in Chat does not migrate to the new Ask Gemini bar on its own. If anyone on your team used the panel to summarize a long thread or pull up a file and kept that answer as a reference, it will not simply reappear in the new interface.

A Workspace admin can pull that history through the Admin Console's Data Export tool, and end users can do the same through Google Takeout if the admin has allowed it, but look under the category "Gemini in Workspace", not "Google Chat", since that is where Google files it. One more small loss: Gems, the custom saved prompts some teams build for repeat tasks, stop working inside Chat once the new bar lands, though they keep working in the side panels of Docs and Gmail.

Check two things this week. First, confirm your plan is one of the four listed above, since a Business Starter account or a personal Google AI subscription does not get this change. Second, ask whoever uses the Gemini panel most inside Chat whether they have anything worth keeping from it, and if so, have your admin export it before the old panel goes away for their account.

After that, there is nothing to configure. Once the new bar appears, try it on the kind of question that used to send someone hunting through three apps: where a file is, what a thread decided, or what is on the calendar for a meeting mentioned in a message. That is the actual point of the change, not the redesign itself.