Gemini
What it does well
- Working inside Workspace (Sheets, Docs, Gmail)
- Long context and video/image understanding
- Closeness to Google's ad products
How I use it
- Cleaning and summarising large exports inside Sheets
- Google Ads asset ideas and PMax copy variants
- Report narrative text for Looker Studio
An honest read
Limits
Its real strength is inside Google's own ecosystem; outside Drive, Sheets and Gmail there isn't much that sets it apart. On work that needs sustained reasoning, the tone and depth of its answers can shift within a single session, which means manual cleanup on anything that has to read consistently, like a report. It also tends to relay Google Ads' own recommendations more optimistically than I would.
When I switch to another tool
For multi-step analysis and long documents I go to Claude. For sourced research, Perplexity. On the visual side Canva Magic Studio is faster because it exports straight into social formats.