Google Calendar
Google Calendar is one of the most widely used scheduling tools in the world, serving individuals, teams, and entire organizations across both personal and professional contexts. As part of the broader Google Workspace ecosystem, Calendar acts as the central hub for how people allocate time, coordinate meetings, and organize collaborative work.
Despite its ubiquity, Calendar functions primarily as a logistical tool: it tells users when something is happening, but it does not help them understand what the meeting is about or how to prepare. This gap creates friction for professionals who juggle multiple meetings, projects, and stakeholders each day.
The core personas who rely heavily on Google Calendar include:
Employees who attend recurring meetings, syncs, and cross-functional discussions. Their primary need is to quickly understand the context of each meeting — relevant emails, documents, decisions, and action items — without manual searching.
Individuals responsible for running structured meetings, driving alignment, and ensuring follow-through. They need a reliable way to prepare agendas, surface past decisions, and assess the readiness of participants.
Users with dense calendars who depend on fast, high-level summaries to stay informed. They often enter discussions with limited time and require concise, accurate context.
These personas rely on Google Calendar daily, but the preparation process typically spans multiple tools — Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and third-party communication channels. The absence of an integrated preparation assistant leads to unnecessary context switching and wasted time.
Calendar's core competitors include Microsoft Outlook/Teams Calendar, Calendly, Motion, and emerging AI-driven scheduling tools such as Reclaim.ai. While these tools streamline logistics, none provide a comprehensive, integrated meeting preparation layer within the calendar experience.
This created a strong opportunity to explore an AI-powered solution that proactively prepares users for upcoming meetings by summarizing context, extracting action items, surfacing relevant documents, and enabling structured agendas — all directly within Google Calendar.
Over the past several years, user feedback across Google Workspace channels has highlighted a recurring pain point: users consistently struggle to prepare effectively for meetings. While Google Calendar excels at scheduling, it provides little intelligence around meeting context, forcing users to manually search across multiple tools before attending a discussion.
Signals indicating this unmet need show up in three major areas:
1. Workspace Search Logs & Support Inquiries
Internal search data and user queries repeatedly reveal that users look for features like:
These recurring searches indicate users expect Calendar to help them prepare — yet the product provides no such capability.
2. Context Fragmentation Across Apps
User interviews and observational research show that preparation behavior often looks like this:
This workflow is repeated before almost every meeting and leads to lost time, confusion, and inconsistent preparation.
3. Meeting Quality Scores Across Organizations
Teams report that meetings frequently start late, context must be re-established each time, and critical information is often missed.
A recent Google Workspace study showed that:
These signals pointed clearly toward a systemic preparation gap across Calendar users.
Preparing for meetings is one of the most common and time-consuming knowledge worker activities, yet it remains largely manual and repetitive.
There is a significant opportunity to turn Google Calendar into an intelligent preparation hub.
An AI-powered assistant inside Calendar could:
This unlocks a new category of value for Calendar, shifting it from:
A passive scheduling tool → to → an active preparation and decision-support platform.
By addressing this gap, Google Calendar can improve meeting readiness, reduce cognitive load, and strengthen the overall Workspace ecosystem.
During early exploration, several additional patterns strengthened the case for this feature:
Strong User Demand Across Segments
Across Workspace admin feedback, Product Forums, and enterprise customer interviews, we identified 65+ unique requests for better meeting preparation tooling, making it one of the highest unmet workflow needs tied to Calendar.
High Retention Impact for Workspace
Meetings are the backbone of enterprise communication. Providing intelligence in Calendar could influence adoption and retention across multiple Workspace products (Gmail, Drive, Docs, Meet).
Clear Productivity Gains
Preliminary time studies showed that knowledge workers spend 6–12 minutes preparing for each meeting, repeated multiple times per day. Even modest efficiency improvements here yield major aggregate time savings.
Competitive Gaps
While Outlook, Motion, and AI-first scheduling apps offer improvements in automation or task syncing, no mainstream calendar platform offers a complete, contextual meeting preparation assistant integrated directly into the calendar interface.
These insights collectively indicate a meaningful opportunity: improving meeting preparation is not only a high-value user need but also a strategic play for long-term Workspace engagement.
Equipping Google Calendar with an AI-powered preparation assistant is foundational to improving how users engage with their meetings. By consolidating context, summarizing information, and reducing time spent searching across Gmail and Drive, we believe Calendar can meaningfully enhance meeting readiness and overall productivity. This intelligence layer is required in order to help users understand what they're walking into and what actions they need to take next — ultimately elevating the role of Calendar within the Workspace ecosystem.
We hypothesize that introducing this functionality directly within the calendar event layout is the lowest-risk, highest-impact entry point. Placing AI Meeting Prep at the event level allows users to access summaries, related documents, and extracted action items at the exact moment they need them — without navigating to new surfaces.
This approach provides:
Based on input from engineers and Workspace SMEs, embedding the AI assistant within the event view offers a technically feasible way to layer intelligence on top of existing Calendar and Drive APIs. Once this foundation is validated, expansion to other contexts such as notifications, Google Meet, or recurring meeting threads becomes significantly easier.
After establishing reliable access to historical meeting context — including emails, docs, and prior notes — we believe the system can scale naturally to additional surfaces. This includes preparing users before they open Calendar (via smart notifications), supporting in-meeting workflows (via Google Meet), and reinforcing outcomes after the meeting (via follow-up summaries and action item extraction).
However, removing or restructuring existing Calendar components without first proving the value and correctness of AI-driven context is risky. Ensuring that the assistant performs reliably in the event view must come before deeper structural changes or more proactive system-wide behaviors.
These hypotheses provide guardrails around where to start, what to build first, and how the feature should scale as confidence and accuracy improve.
Below are the four primary use cases that emerged consistently through early discovery interviews, workflow observation, and competitive analysis. These job stories helped clarify what our solution must address in both the initial release and future iterations. They also provided alignment across Design, Engineering, and Product regarding where AI could deliver the most meaningful impact.
I want to... quickly understand the most important context for an upcoming meeting
So that I can... enter the discussion prepared without searching across Gmail, Drive, and past notes.
Example: "Show me a concise summary of the last meeting's decisions, open questions, and top priorities for the next call."
I want to... automatically surface the documents and emails most relevant to a meeting
So that I can... review everything I need in one place instead of manually hunting for attachments or threads.
Example: "Pull up the design doc that was shared last week and the email thread where the final deadline was discussed."
I want to... extract action items and assigned owners from previous interactions
So that I can... ensure follow-through and accountability before entering the meeting.
Example: "Show me a list of tasks from last Thursday's sync, who owns them, and any overdue items I should bring up."
I want to... generate a structured agenda based on meeting history and shared documents
So that I can... run a more focused, organized meeting without starting the planning process from scratch.
Example: "Propose a draft agenda with sections for updates, decisions, blockers, and next steps."
AI analyzes: Previous meeting notes, related emails, open items, and attached docs.
And generates: Key decisions, discussion history, open questions, and stakeholder responsibilities.
AI scans across: Emails, Docs, and Slides.
And extracts: Tasks, owners, due dates, and pending follow-ups.
Tasks integrate with Google Tasks or Workspace.
Using semantic search, Calendar suggests:
No more digging.
Users can generate:
Editable inside Calendar.
After the meeting, AI generates a:
Automatically sent to attendees (optional).
"Preparation Time Saved per Meeting"
Measured through:
Control: Standard Google Calendar
Variant: AI Prep panel
Measure: Engagement, task completion, pre-read compliance, and meeting outcomes.
AI Meeting Prep turns Google Calendar into a proactive partner that:
Google Calendar becomes more than a scheduling app—it becomes a meeting intelligence hub.
This project taught me how to:
AI Meeting Prep reflects my approach to building assistant-driven products that work invisibly, intuitively, and contextually—without overwhelming the user.