What's New in Your AI Tools
Google Gemini & Workspace
- Meeting recaps are coming to Google Chat — Announced October 19: Google is introducing meeting recaps in Chat, so the summary of what was said and assigned lands directly in the conversation instead of living only in Meet or your notes. The recap pulls from Meet's "Take notes for me" output and gives teams a single place to follow through on meeting tasks. Rapid Release domains started seeing it October 16; Scheduled Release domains start October 27 (both gradual, up to 15 days). Availability is Business Standard/Plus and Enterprise Standard/Plus for now — Google hasn't listed Education editions, so treat this as a preview of where Meet-to-Chat follow-up is heading rather than something campus users will see this quarter.
- Gemini in Google Sheets is now on iOS — Following its Android launch, Gemini in Sheets is now available on iPhone and iPad, so you can ask questions about your spreadsheet data and get analysis while away from your desk. Gradual rollout started October 15, and notably the availability list includes Google AI Pro for Education, the add-on edition UC San Diego users are on — so this one should reach campus Gemini users as the rollout completes.
- You can now analyze BigQuery data in Sheets with natural language — Also announced October 19: connect a spreadsheet to BigQuery with Connected Sheets, then ask Gemini questions conversationally — and Gemini runs the query against the full dataset in BigQuery, not just the rows visible in your sheet. Ask "What were total transactions last quarter?" or "How does that compare to the same quarter last year?", then describe a dashboard ("revenue by region, monthly trend, top 10 products") and Gemini proposes a plan and builds a new tab with refreshable pivot tables, database formulas, and charts. This is ON by default with no admin control, so if your unit has Connected Sheets users with BigQuery access, they now have conversational access to the warehouse.
- Google Vault can now export Gemini in Workspace conversations — Announced October 22, available now: Vault adds filtered eDiscovery exports for Gemini in Workspace. Administrators can filter users' Gemini conversations by custodian and date range across Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet, then export them (JSON, with metadata aligned to the GenAI conversation format) including user prompts, AI responses, and generated attachments. Availability explicitly includes Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus — meaning Gemini conversations across UC San Diego's Workspace domain are now exportable for records and legal holds. If your unit handles public-records or litigation requests, this closes a real gap in the campus AI compliance story.
- Gemini Notebook connects to the Gemini app, and Gemini apps publish to Google Sites — Two smaller Gemini app updates from the October 23 recap worth knowing: Gemini Notebook (a supported campus tool) is now a Connected App in the Gemini app, so you can type @Gemini Notebook in a chat to create notebooks, add sources, save notes, or query existing notebooks without leaving the conversation. And interactive apps built in the Gemini app can now be exported to Google Sites with one click, landing as a private site draft you can customize and publish. Both are available now to Workspace customers and personal accounts.
Copilot for Microsoft 365
- Copilot Code wants to make everyone a (governed) app builder — Announced October 21 and rolling out through the Frontier program: Copilot Code is a new AI coding experience inside Microsoft Copilot aimed at the person who knows the workaround, not the professional developer. Describe a goal in natural language and Copilot asks clarifying questions, uses Work IQ to pull requirements from your email, meetings, documents, and connected data, then builds a working application — you can refine it by conversation, edit the code directly, run locally, or publish to a Microsoft-managed cloud. Two things matter for campus: when an app is shared, it runs on Copilot Managed Runtime and inherits your organization's existing governance, security, and data-permission controls, and when a personal tool grows up, you can connect it to GitHub and open a draft pull request for review — a clean on-ramp into the engineering workflow rather than a parallel shadow-IT track. Watch this one; it's the citizen-developer story Microsoft has been promising, arriving through the same agentic tech that powers GitHub Copilot.
- Microsoft Ignite is November 17–20 — Registration is open for Microsoft's annual conference, which this year runs November 17–20. Expect the next wave of Copilot and agent announcements there; we'll cover what matters for the campus in a future edition.
Zoom AI (ZoomMate)
- Zoomtopia recap: the Unified Context Layer, and AI that finishes the meeting — At Zoomtopia 2026 (October 20), Zoom pitched its next chapter: a Unified Context Layer that links conversation history with documents and data across Zoom and third-party apps, so people and AI agents get the full picture of a discussion instead of fragments. The concrete capabilities riding on it: Enriched notes (November) link shared screens, slides, and in-meeting chat to the exact moments they appeared in a searchable transcript; Follow the meeting (December) delivers personalized transcripts and summaries for people who missed part of a meeting; My Notes Workflows (rolling out now) turn meeting summaries into follow-up work in Zoom Chat and Salesforce, with ready-made workflows for sales, marketing, and IT or custom ones described in plain language; and ZoomMate Agent Teams (available now) runs specialized agents as a coordinated team. Zoom also showed My Notes hardware integrations with DTEN and Bota devices (November and Q1 2027) that extend AI note capture to in-person conversations — relevant to anyone thinking about hybrid meeting equity. On the meetings side: Translate Me (October) translates your audio into another language using a synthesized version of your own voice, and a Live Meeting AI Agent (Q1 2027) will privately assist during meetings.
- Zoom is opening its platform to external AI assistants via MCP — The quieter Zoomtopia story may matter most long-term: new MCP servers across the Zoom portfolio let developers and AI agents schedule meetings, pull transcripts, search content, and run admin actions from outside the Zoom app entirely. Search & Ask APIs are available now for querying Zoom's context layer from Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Copilot, Gemini, and Slackbot; an Admin MCP Server (October) handles admin tasks conversationally; and Zoom capabilities are being wired into external assistants including Claude, Codex, Copilot, and Muse. Zoom also added new management controls for governing AI activity across the account. For campus, this means Zoom context is becoming a first-class citizen in whichever AI assistant you already use — including the agentic tooling we're building on TritonAI.
Coming Up: Trainings & Workshops
- Bridging Biomedical Breakthroughs Summit: AI in Biomedical Innovation — Wednesday, November 4, 1–6:30 p.m. at Price Center West, Ballroom AB. The School of Biological Sciences' fourth summit brings together faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, and healthcare leaders on how AI is accelerating therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical imaging, with faculty innovation pitches and sessions on moving discovery toward real-world impact. Open to faculty, postdocs, students, and industry partners.
- Operationalizing AI: From Research to Real-World Impact — Thursday, November 5, 8:30 a.m.–1 p.m. at the HDSI Data Science Building, Multipurpose Room. Part of the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing's Mini-Symposium Series, this event asks what it actually takes to translate AI research into scalable systems, products, and applications — the technical, organizational, and strategic decisions that determine whether a promising model becomes a deployed one. Registration is via Eventbrite (tickets free to $53.24) and closes Tuesday, November 3.
Self-paced options in the meantime:
- Take the AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
- Browse all 15 TritonAI Discovery Series training videos — hands-on sessions covering Zoom AI, TritonGPT, Google Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and the Citizen Developer track.
- Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.
TritonAI News
- NSF renews TILOS with $15 million, keeping UC San Diego at the helm — Announced October 15: the National Science Foundation awarded $15 million over five years for Phase II of the AI Institute for Learning-enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS), which UC San Diego has led since it was established in 2021 as one of the nation's first NSF AI Institutes. The renewal runs November 1, 2026 through October 31, 2031 under PI Yusu Wang of the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, with UC San Diego co-PIs Tara Javidi, Henrik Christensen, and Arya Mazumdar. Phase II widens the aperture from learning-enabled optimization to physically embedded intelligence, organized around three thrusts: foundational AI that adapts and generalizes more robustly, embodied multi-agent AI that coordinates in the physical world, and an AI hardware substrate for reliable operation across chips and infrastructure. Brown joins as a new partner alongside MIT, Penn, UT Austin, and Yale.
- UC San Diego is part of a DOE-funded multi-agent AI push for geothermal energy — Also announced October 15: the Department of Energy Office of Science selected MAESTRO — Multi-agent AI Expert for Subsurface Reasoning and Optimization — among its Genesis Mission Phase II awards. Led by UC Irvine, the project brings together researchers from five UC campuses (including UC San Diego's Lianhui Qin, assistant professor of computer science), four national laboratories, and three industry partners to use multi-agent AI to discover and tap geothermal resources safely and economically. It's another signal of how federal AI investment is funding agentic systems applied to hard physical problems — the same shift TILOS Phase II is betting on.
- A new global guide to higher-ed AI governance lands, and it validates the deliberation-first approach — Released October 21: D2L, WCET, and OpenEd Culture published "Governing AI from Strength," findings from a multi-year global longitudinal study on AI governance in higher education, packaged as an action guide covering governance strategy and AI literacies. The guide's throughline — that sustainable AI adoption comes from institutional deliberation and built-in literacies, not top-down mandates — tracks with what UC San Diego has been doing with its departmental AI deliberation process, where faculty bodies work through AI's implications discipline by discipline. Between this, last month's EDUCAUSE Top 10, and peer institutions formalizing faculty-led governance, the campus's approach is increasingly the one the sector is converging on.
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