Gemini Just Got Keys to 13 More Business Apps

Google announced Connected Apps on September 23, adding thirteen third-party services to Gemini. The business names on that list are the ones worth noticing: Airtable, Linear, monday.com, PandaDoc and Zoho, alongside Adobe, Squarespace, Webflow and Picsart. Those are systems Canadian small businesses actually run on, and any member of staff can now connect one to an assistant in about twenty seconds.

What shipped

You connect supported services through Gemini's settings, then bring one into a conversation with an @ mention or simply by asking. Google frames it as managing projects, creating visual assets and completing tasks without moving between tabs. Adobe's own documentation describes its connectors as a way to create, edit and transform content through natural-language instructions inside supported assistants.

The apps split roughly three ways. Creative and web: Adobe, Picsart, Squarespace, Webflow. Business and operations: Airtable, Linear, monday.com, PandaDoc, Zoho. Consumer: Apartments.com, Experian, Peloton, SeatGeek. Google also shipped new Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech models alongside it.

One caveat to carry into any plan. Coverage states that availability and functionality vary by application, account type and region, and Adobe notes that its connectors and their capabilities can differ between countries. Confirm the specific app you care about rather than assuming the announcement applies where you are.

Why this one matters more than a feature release

For two years the pattern has been an assistant that can read what you paste into it. The direction now is an assistant that reaches into the systems where your work lives, and the individual apps become backends behind a conversation.

For a small business that is genuinely attractive. Pulling the status of three projects out of monday.com, checking a record in Airtable and drafting the client update becomes one request instead of four tabs and a copy-paste. The tab-switching tax we described in why AI tools fail at the workflow layer is exactly what this reduces.

It also does something quieter. Every connection adds a system the assistant session can reach, and the sessions do not come with an access review.

The approval that never happens

That last row is the one that bites. A staff member who connected the company Airtable to their personal Gemini account keeps that connection after they leave, and nothing in your offboarding checklist covers it because the connection was never on a list.

Zoho, PandaDoc and Airtable commonly hold customer records, contracts and pipeline data. That makes an unapproved connection a data governance event rather than a convenience, and it is the shape of problem described in shadow AI with credentials attached.

A ten-minute decision

Blanket blocking pushes usage somewhere you cannot see, which is worse than the thing you were avoiding. The workable position is a short written rule, decided before the connections exist.

Which systems may be connected at all. Anything holding customer data, financial records or contracts goes on the restricted list.

On which account. Restricted systems connect only on managed business accounts, never personal ones. This single line covers most of the offboarding risk.

Who may do it. A named person, or a request that takes a day. Either works. Nobody deciding is what does not.

Then ask the team what they have already connected, without blame, because some of it exists already. That inventory is the foundation of the framework in a one-page AI governance framework, and it is the same discipline as privileged access management applied to connections rather than logins.

Test before you trust it

Whether an integration can read only or also write is per-app, and the announcement does not settle it for any particular one. Before letting an assistant touch a real record, try the specific action you want on something disposable and watch what happens.

The general question of whether a connected assistant actually resolves your disconnected systems, or just makes them easier to browse, is worth answering before you connect everything. We took that apart in whether an AI layer fixes data silos.

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