What's New in Your AI Tools
Google Gemini & Workspace
- Gemini in Slides can now edit an entire presentation at once — Announced October 29: a single prompt in the Slides side panel can now update content across a whole deck, not just one slide. You can restyle everything at once ("Update this whole deck to match the style of this reference file"), simplify or expand the presentation grounded in files from Drive, condense multiple slides into one, or align title styles across all slides. Gemini decides which slides need changing, applies edits as if you made them (so undo and version history work), and shows a summary of what it changed in the side panel. Through at least December 1, 2026, Workspace customers get promotional access to higher limits for multi-slide creation. Rollout is extended (potentially longer than 15 days), so campus users will see it over the coming weeks.
- Fill with Gemini in Sheets adds cell-level citations and much larger requests — Rolling out since October 20: when you use the Gemini AI function to fill cell values, each cell now shows the exact web sources it referenced, so AI-generated data in a spreadsheet can actually be audited and verified instead of taken on faith. Upgraded processing is faster and more consistent cell-over-cell (Google cites up to 55x faster than manual entry on a 500-cell task), and capacity jumps to 3,000 cells per request — enough to summarize, categorize, or translate entire columns in one pass. On by default for anyone with Gemini in Sheets enabled; no admin control.
- You can now create, preview, and edit files directly in the Gemini app — Gemini app chats can now generate real files and let you work on them in place: expand to full screen and type edits directly, highlight text to ask questions, or have Gemini refine what you highlighted. It handles presentation outlines and slide content (editable in Slides or exportable as PPTX/PDF), structured trackers and tables that open straight in Sheets, and PDFs, Docs, LaTeX, Markdown, and TXT files you can upload to Drive when done. Available now to all Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and personal accounts, in all languages where the Gemini app is available. No admin control — worth knowing if your unit tracks where documents get drafted.
- Immersive explorations arrive in the Gemini app — The Gemini app now includes a library of interactive, visual "immersive explorations" that let you peel back topics layer by layer — tracing trade routes on the Silk Road, peering inside a jet engine, or studying the physics of lightning — with guided explanations at each node you tap. More of a teaching and learning feature than a productivity one, but it's a natural fit for course material and concepts that are easier to show than to describe. Available on web and mobile to all Workspace customers and personal accounts; English plus several other languages, with an English-only experience elsewhere.
Copilot for Microsoft 365
- Microsoft's October Copilot recap: Copilot Notebooks becomes Workspaces, and Copilot gets an autopilot — The October 30 "What's New in Microsoft Copilot" post is one of the biggest monthly updates in a while. Highlights: the Copilot app gets a redesigned shared navigation pane and Projects (a persistent space that keeps related chats, tasks, instructions, and files together so you stop rebuilding context); Copilot Notebooks is becoming Copilot Workspaces, a shared team surface where you can create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files collaboratively without leaving the workspace; Autopilot runs Cowork tasks on a schedule or when a specified event occurs, so routine multi-step work moves without a manual prompt; and skills — reusable capabilities built in natural language — expand from Cowork into Copilot Chat, alongside role-based plugins for Sales, Service, Education, Legal, and Finance. There's also a lot for the apps: Excel gains accounting skills, a clean-data skill that scans for duplicates and type errors, and an interactive canvas that builds a live report from workbook data; PowerPoint gets a stronger design model, interactive slide generation, and reusable task skills; Word adds a legal plugin with 20+ purpose-built skills and native Markdown round-tripping; and Teams meeting organizers can now get AI meeting summaries without retaining a transcript. On the governance side, Purview DLP now extends to Microsoft Cowork, and Copilot memory can be placed under retention policies. Most of this rolls out to the Frontier program now and worldwide in November.
- Microsoft Ignite is November 17–20 — Still the date to watch: expect the next wave of Copilot and agent announcements, and we'll summarize what matters for the campus in a future edition.
Zoom AI (ZoomMate)
- ZoomMate's October 30 release: meeting summaries can fan out to multiple apps in one step — Zoom's October 30 ZoomMate release is all about the post-meeting workflow. A new Send Meeting Data action node lets a single reusable workflow step push a customized meeting summary to multiple destinations at once — first-party and third-party — instead of one app per workflow. Meeting criteria filters on the My Notes trigger got finer-grained (external meetings only, internal only, topic matching), the AI reasoning node can now read uploaded HTML files as context, and admins can deploy standardized meeting summary templates that users pick from a drop-down when configuring workflows. My Notes replaces its Workflow tab with a Follow ups tab that surfaces suggested tasks derived from meeting notes and connects directly into Workflows. Automated workflows are also now available to EU-region users through local infrastructure. For campus teams already sending Zoom summaries into Slack, email, or docs, the multi-destination node is the practical upgrade: build the routing once, reuse it everywhere.
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, on what it actually takes to translate AI research into scalable systems, products, and applications. Eventbrite registration closed November 3; if you registered, it's this week.
- UCSD/SDSU Fall 2026 Software Carpentries Workshop — Tuesday–Friday, November 3–6, mornings. The UC San Diego Library, Research IT Services, and SDSU Research Cyberinfrastructure team up on a free, four-half-day workshop for novice-to-intermediate learners covering the core software and data skills researchers need: Unix shell, version control with Git, and programming fundamentals. A solid foundation before layering AI tooling on top.
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
- UC San Diego launches the Center for Principled Agentic Intelligence — Announced October 28: as AI agents increasingly plan and act with limited human direction, UC San Diego is launching the Center for Principled Agentic Intelligence (CPAi), a partnership between the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing and the School of Arts and Humanities, with $1 million in support over three years plus $250,000 in shared computing resources. The center organizes its work around three principles — alignment, trust, and responsibility — and runs two initiatives: an AI Alignment and Society program co-led by Mikhail Belkin (HDSI) and Eddy Keming Chen (Philosophy and HDSI) examining how training and evaluation shape agent behavior, and a second team building an open-source testbed that simulates real-world tasks to measure how and why agentic systems fail, whether they stay within defined boundaries, and whether their behavior can be audited. For a campus deploying agentic workflows in production — ours and the ones we run on TritonAI — an independent, university-based evaluation capability is exactly what the sector is missing.
- $1 million gift advances agentic AI for education at UC San Diego — Announced October 29: Sanjay and Charlene Srivastava have given $1 million to the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing to fund research on how agentic AI — systems that can independently carry out complex tasks and adapt as information changes — can create more effective, accessible, and personalized learning experiences, from UC San Diego students to working professionals. The gift also names the Sanjay and Charlene Srivastava Multi-Purpose Room in the Halıcıoğlu School. It's one more signal that the agentic AI conversation on campus now spans both the technology side (CPAi's evaluation work) and the human side (how people actually learn with these systems).
Have feedback on this newsletter? Get in touch.