Google adds your Gmail and Photos to AI Mode to enable “Personal Intelligence”

Personal Intelligence is optional and rolling out first to AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers.

Google believes AI is the future of search, and it’s not shy about saying it. After adding account-level personalization to Gemini earlier this month, it’s now updating AI Mode with so-called “Personal Intelligence.” According to Google, this makes the bot’s answers more useful because they are tailored to your personal context.

Starting today, the feature is rolling out to all users who subscribe to Google AI Pro or AI Ultra. However, it will be a Labs feature that needs to be explicitly enabled (subscribers will be prompted to do this). Google tends to expand access to new AI features to free accounts later on, so free users will most likely get access to Personal Intelligence in the future. Whenever this option does land on your account, it’s entirely optional and can be disabled at any time.

If you decide to integrate your data with AI Mode, the search bot will be able to scan your Gmail and Google Photos. That’s less extensive than the Gemini app version, which supports Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube history. Gmail will probably be the biggest contributor to AI Mode—a great many life events involve confirmation emails. Traditional search results when you are logged in are adjusted based on your usage history, but this goes a step further.

If you’re going to use AI Mode to find information, Personal Intelligence could actually be quite helpful. When you connect data from other Google apps, Google’s custom Gemini search model will instantly know about your preferences and background—that’s the kind of information you’d otherwise have to include in your search query to get the best output. With Personal Intelligence, AI Mode can just pull those details from your email or photos.

For example, as in the video below, you could ask about clothing options for an upcoming trip. Instead of telling the robot when and where you’re going in the prompt, it can get that information from your email confirmation. When AI Mode uses your personal context in a response, it will cite it in-line the same way it does for websites.

Perfectly imperfect

Google says, as it often does, that AI is not perfect. AI Mode with Personal Intelligence can make mistakes, drawing the wrong conclusions from the data it mines from your account. In that case, Google suggests using a follow-up prompt to correct it and get more accurate information. It’s similar to the way you might refine a traditional Google search when the links aren’t to your liking.

AI Mode and Google AI are generally supposed to improve over time to reduce such failures. The way you use the service contributes to that, but Google says the model is not being trained directly on your email or photos, even if you connect them to AI Mode. Instead, Google uses your prompts and the resulting output to train its AI models. Access to Gmail and Photos can be revoked at any time, but it sounds like there won’t be a simple way to toggle off Personal Intelligence for a single query, which is possible in Gemini.

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Posted Friday 23 January 2026 at 4:10 am AEST (my time).

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