The 30 second story
You know how switching banks means rebuilding all your direct debits and standing orders from scratch? Google has solved the equivalent problem for AI chatbots. Their new switching tools let you move all your chat history, preferences, and personal settings from other AI assistants directly into Gemini. The tool is free for anyone with a Google account and works in the UK, though Google has not specified which other chatbots it supports yet.
Why it matters
Switching between AI tools used to mean starting over completely. All your previous conversations, the way you had trained the assistant to understand your business, your saved preferences - gone. This made businesses stick with whatever they tried first, even when better options appeared. Google’s switching tools change this by making your investment in one AI assistant portable to another. When your chat history and preferences move with you, switching becomes a real option instead of a costly reset.
Be transparent about it
When you import chat histories from other tools, you are moving conversations that might include colleague names, client details, or business information. Tell anyone mentioned in those chats that you are transferring the data to a new system. Offer to share what gets moved and let them know how Google handles the information. Being upfront about data transfers builds trust and keeps you on the right side of UK data protection rules.
What this means for your business
- You can test new AI assistants without losing weeks of training and conversation history from your current one
- Better AI tools become available to you immediately instead of being locked out by switching costs
- Your team can use different AI assistants for different tasks without each person starting from zero
- Competition between AI companies will get fiercer, which means better tools and lower prices