Google announced at its annual I/O event in May 2026 the launch of Pics, an AI-powered design and image-generation app built natively into Google Workspace. The app is currently rolling out to a group of testers and will become broadly available to Google AI Ultra subscribers this summer.
Pics allows users to generate social media graphics, invitations, marketing materials, and mock-ups using plain text prompts — no editing experience required. Google says the app is designed to be accessible to a wide range of users, including teachers and small business owners.
The app is powered by Google’s Nano Banana 2 model, which the company says supports precise text rendering, real-world knowledge, and detailed visual output. Gemini powers the editing layer, making individual elements within a generated image fully adjustable. Users can revise a design by writing a new prompt, clicking a specific part of the image and leaving a comment — similar to the commenting workflow in Google Docs — or editing text and details directly by hand. The article’s example: if a birthday party invitation shows the wrong time, users can correct it manually without regenerating the entire image.
Google acknowledges a known limitation of current AI image tools: modifying one specific part of an image typically requires rewriting a full prompt, with no guarantee the rest of the image stays intact. Pics is designed to address that problem through its element-level editing approach.
With Pics, Google is entering a market that includes established design platforms like Canva and AI-native tools such as Claude Design from Anthropic. Google’s move into this space suggests AI-powered design is becoming a competitive focus for major technology companies, particularly for businesses that rely on visual content.
Completed designs can be downloaded, copied, printed, shared, or passed to collaborators for additional edits.
Source: TechCrunch