You Can Export It. You Can't Hold It.

Administrators can now export what staff typed into Google's assistant and what it answered back, filtered by person and by date. What has not arrived yet, in Google's own words, is retention rules and legal holds. The record is retrievable before it is governable.

On October 22 Google turned on something quieter than a feature. Administrators can now export what staff have typed into its assistant, and what the assistant said back. Our interest, and we have none to declare on the product: we do not resell Google Workspace. We do get asked what a company has to keep and for how long, and we are not lawyers. This one needs yours. The technical part — you can skip this box "Google Vault now supports filtered exports for Gemini in Workspace," Google Workspace Updates blog, October 22, 2026, quoted in Google's own words. The feature allows "administrators to filter and export users' Gemini in Workspace conversations." Scope is set by "specific user accounts or organizational units (OUs) up to 5,000 users in size" and you "filter by a specific date range (with time zone selection)." Exports run "via the Vault UI or API" and "include user prompts, AI responses, generated attachments (such as images)." Coverage is limited: "This update captures Gemini in Workspace conversations created when conversation history is turned on." On governance as it stands today, "Admins can use OU-level conversation history and deletion settings in the Admin console to govern data retention," including "preventing manual conversation deletion by users or configuring automatic deletion after a period of inactivity," and "There is no end-user setting for this feature." Rollout is marked available now to both Rapid and Scheduled Release domains, with "Support for Vault API users will be available within 14 days of the UI rollout." Availability: Business Plus; Enterprise Standard and Plus; Education Fundamentals, Standard and Plus; Frontline Standard and Plus; Enterprise Essentials Plus; and the Vault add-on. And the limit that matters: "Additional information governance features for Gemini in Workspace, such as retention rules and litigation holds," "will follow in future releases." Google Vault is Google's own records-keeping and legal-discovery tool. An organizational unit is Google's name for a department or group inside your staff directory. Gemini is the name of Google's assistant. A user interface is the ordinary screen a person clicks on; an application programming interface is the way one piece of software talks to another without a person involved. What that actually means "Export" here means pull it out as a file. An administrator picks people or a department, picks a date range, and gets the conversations. It includes both halves. What the person typed, what came back, and any images the assistant produced along the way. It only covers conversations that were being kept. Google's wording is that it captures conversations created when conversation history is turned on. Where history was off, there is nothing to export. And here is the asymmetry. Google says that retention rules and legal holds for these conversations will follow in future releases. So today you can take a copy out, and you cannot yet freeze one in place or set a rule for how long it lives. Why a thirty-person firm should care Nobody chose for these conversations to be records. They became records because a tool that reads them now exists. Once something is retrievable, the question of whether it should have been retrieved stops being hypothetical — and that question usually arrives in a letter rather than on a quiet Tuesday. The edition catch, because it will catch somebody The assistant features that switched on this month reach Business Standard. This export tool does not — it needs Business Plus or the Vault add-on. A firm can therefore be generating these conversations every day with no way to export or govern them at all. That is an awkward place to be sitting. What to do, and it is a decision rather than a task Decide how long these conversations should be kept. Google gives you deletion settings by department. Somebody has to pick a number. Decide who may export them. It is an administrator power. Write down who holds it. Tell your staff. People type things into an assistant that they would never put in an email, precisely because it feels like a scratchpad. It is not one. And ask your attorney what your industry expects you to keep. We can set what Google allows us to set. What you are obliged to keep is not our call, and anybody in our trade who tells you otherwise is guessing.