Get started with Google Workspace Flows

In this video, I’m going to show you how to save time and automate work with Google Workspace Flows, an AI web app that can research, analyze, and generate information to help you streamline repetitive tasks with agents in the loop. Everything is anchored around a 'flow'.

You create flows, which can automate multiple actions across different apps and the internet.

For example, you can build flows to help you in your day-to-day tasks by automatically triaging your inbox, prepping you for important meetings, or drafting follow-ups with customers.

There are three core building blocks that make up flows.

The starter is the event or schedule that starts your flow.

Examples of starters are you receiving an email message from a specific person, or a scheduled start every Monday at 9 am.

Steps are the actions that the flow does after it starts. For example,

it can reply to an email, update a spreadsheet, or ask Gemini to research a topic for you.

Finally, steps can create variables. Variables let you connect information from one step to another.

For example, you can automatically capture a sender's email address from an incoming message and add it to a spreadsheet. Let’s get started and we’ll look at three different ways you can start automating your work in Workspace Flows.

Access the Workspace Flows builder by either typing the URL in your browser or via the flows icon in Gmail. Enter what you want the flow to do and when.

An example of that would be “whenever I get a customer support email, label it as Support, and then draft a response based on this faq doc”. Workspace Flows will generate a custom flow for you which you can review. You can edit, delete, reorder, and add more steps to the flow as needed.

When you turn on a flow, the app checks that your steps are set up correctly and connects to Google Workspace services. Your flow watches for the starting event or schedule, and runs based on that. Let’s see how you can start building a flow using one of the templates, which are pre-built flows for common tasks that need minimal configuration.

In the Workspace Flows builder, you’ll find the templates in the Discover section.

Select the template you want to use, let’s use this template to help stay on top of asks from the manager. When the template opens, you see the steps in the left panel while the right panel shows the set up options for the selected step. When you start with a template, it’s best to click through each

step to make sure you understand how it is configured and adjust it to your needs.

First let’s check out the starter. In this case, we want to start this flow when the manager sends us an email, so we can configure the filter here as needed.

Let’s examine the next step. As you can see, this “Summarize” step uses a variable to tell Gemini which email thread to summarize.

The variable is the email thread, which was created by the starter, and the prompt here gives Gemini special instructions on how to summarize the email so you can customize it to your needs.

Next let’s look at the last step, which allows you to send a Chat notification to someone.

This step also uses variables in a templated message, like the sender’s name and the summary from the Summarize step. As you go between steps, you might see a red warning dot on a step in the left panel. That dot indicates that the step is missing required information. We see that we need to define who the

Chat notification will go to, and in this case we want to notify ourselves.

Start typing your name or email address and then select from the search result.

At this point, you could add more steps to further customize your flow. Your flow can leverage AI agents and capabilities from Gemini and Gems, data across your Workspace apps, and even third-party apps and apps that you custom-build yourself.

When you have your flow ready, you can turn it on, and then you can send a test email to trigger the flow and see it in action in Gmail or on this “Activity” panel.

Lastly, we can create a flow from scratch. In the Workspace Flows builder, access the New Flows section and then select the starter. Here, you can take advantage of the many different starters available across your Workspace apps, where many everyday tasks often start from.

For example, you can automate prep for upcoming calendar meetings, get notifications when someone has added a file to your Drive folder, and more!

Just like you saw previously in this video, add and configure the steps to the flow per your needs and turn it on.

Want to learn more about Workspace Flows? Then check out more resources and documentation linked in the description of this video.