Gemini Now Builds and Edits Your PDFs, Spreadsheets and Slides in the Chat, Free. Microsoft Deletes Your Old Copilot History on 31 December Unless You Sign In. Two Legal Teams Published Their AI Numbers, and Both Keep the Same Rule.

On Thursday 29 October Google turned on file creation in the Gemini app. Ask it for a quote, a job tracker, a client letter or a slide deck, and Gemini builds the file and shows it in the chat. You edit it right there: go full screen and type, highlight a passage and ask a question, or tell Gemini to change the tone or the structure.

What works where. You can preview and edit PDFs on the web and on mobile. Google Docs, Google Sheets, slide decks, Markdown, plain text and code are web only. Slide decks open in Google Slides or download as PPTX or PDF, spreadsheets open in Google Sheets, and you can upload documents and PDFs to Drive.

Who gets it, in Google's words: "now available to all users in all languages where the Gemini app is available". The Workspace post spells out what that means: every Google Workspace customer, every Workspace Individual subscriber and every personal Google account, at no extra charge.

If you run a Workspace account, this is the line to know: "There is no admin control for this feature." The only switch you've got is turning the Gemini app on or off for the whole organisation.

A day earlier Google also upgraded Fill with Gemini in Sheets (the AI function that fills cells from a prompt, like categorising 500 expense lines). It now shows the web source it used inside each cell and handles up to 3,000 cells per request. In Google's own 95-person study it ran up to 55 times faster than manual entry on a 500-cell task. This one's paid Workspace only: Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, web only, rolling out since 20 October.

Early this morning Microsoft emailed Copilot users. Here's what it says: "To keep your existing Copilot history, open the updated experience and sign in by December 31, 2026." And: "If you don't sign in by December 31, 2026 your Copilot history and content from the older experience will be deleted."

This is about Copilot on a personal account (a Microsoft, Google or Apple sign-in), which is how most small firms use the free version. Work and school accounts get minor changes and a new icon, and Microsoft says the boundary between work and personal data doesn't change.

What comes across: your chats, images and the other content you created, with files going to OneDrive. If you've used more than one personal sign-in, the histories get merged under your Microsoft account.

What doesn't come across: Group Chat threads, and the images made in them, are gone once your account updates. Copilot Labs content was retired on 29 September. Deep Research was retired on 18 August. Podcasts are being retired too. Copilot on Samsung and LG TVs ends on 1 December.

The bit that bites a small business is Copilot Tasks, which Cowork replaces over the next few weeks. Your conversations move. Your saved memories don't. Scheduled tasks "will move but will be turned off by default". You can't text or email Tasks any more either: "Chatting with Tasks via text messaging or email is not available in Cowork." Existing shared links to Tasks responses stop working. And this is the one to watch: "Cowork is a Premium or Pro feature in Preview. If you have a Personal or Family subscription, you will lose access to Cowork." You can still read your old Tasks conversations, but to run them again you need Microsoft 365 Premium or Pro.

The support page says most of the update happens automatically and web users get redirected. But it's the email that sets the deadline. Sign in anyway.

On Wednesday 28 October OpenAI published a case study on Legora, a Stockholm legal AI company founded in 2023 that sells contract review software. Legora's own legal team wrote a playbook (a written list of the NDA terms they'll accept), then let the AI take a first pass at every incoming NDA and flag anything outside it. The firm's general counsel says NDA review went from about 20% of the legal team's capacity to under 1%.

Legora's figures for one Fortune 100 customer: contracts turned round 90% faster, more than $20 million saved on outside litigation and diligence spend, and 9.5 hours a week handed back to each lawyer. Its Tabular Review tool checks thousands of contracts against a set of questions in minutes, so the contracts that used to sit outside the batch someone checked by hand now get read.

On Thursday 29 October OpenAI published a second story, on Ropes & Gray, a 1,500-lawyer firm building a transactional diligence tool (the document review a buyer does before an acquisition). The tool lists everything in a data room (the shared folder of deal documents), groups the documents by issue and drafts the report in the firm's own format. The firm tests it by comparing its drafts with human-written reports from completed deals, and rates the output as "comparable to the work of a capable junior-to-mid-level associate". Its stated aim is an issue-level report in hours rather than weeks.

Two quotes worth reading twice. Howard Glazer, Ropes & Gray: "Our clients don't pay us to review contracts. They pay us to make judgments based on what's in the contracts." Josh Lichtenstein, Ropes & Gray: "Our lawyers still need to review everything. Because anything that we're going to deliver to a client, we need to be able to stand behind 100%."

A word of caution on the numbers. Both stories are vendor case studies, the customers supplied the figures, none of it is audited, and Legora sells AI to lawyers. So treat the shape of the workflow as the evidence, not the percentages.

What a small firm can copy is the method, not the software. Write down what acceptable looks like (that's the playbook), get the AI to do the first pass against it, and name one person who reads everything before it goes out. It works for engagement letters, supplier contracts, lease renewals and broker terms, not just NDAs.