Google brings an agentic Gemini to businesses first

At a Google Cloud event on Thursday, Google announced it is bringing Gemini into the agentic age with a unified agent that can answer questions and also get things done on a user’s behalf, all from a single interface. The move follows a broader shift of AI tools from conversational experiences to ones that take ownership of assigned tasks — generating code, scheduling meetings, and booking appointments and travel — alongside the rise of consumer-facing agents like Meta’s Muse and messaging-based agents such as Instinct, and the recent debut of ChatGPT’s Dots.

Google has a strong base to build from: CEO Sundar Pichai said at the event that Gemini has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 businesses now use Gemini Enterprise at work. Given that corporate adoption, Google will roll the new agent out to businesses first, before later extending it to consumers — a sequencing Pichai said lets the company solve “the harder problems around security, scale, and performance” that come with launching agents this powerful.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the new agent can be given “objectives, not just instructions,” meaning it can plan the work itself, use custom skills and tools, and connect to a business’s internal systems to accomplish its goals. By default the AI picks the best model for a task, but users can choose a model themselves — including third-party models, starting with Anthropic’s Claude, with open-source and other private models to follow. Requests can include attachments such as files, folders, or projects, and the agent can connect to systems including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, and Snowflake, as well as any Model Context Protocol (MCP) server inside or outside a company’s network. Users can track its work from a “tasks inbox” that shows its thinking, subagent delegation, skill loading, code, and progress.

Notably, the agent gets its own Workspace account — its own email address and context — and knows who’s on which team, their time zones, who needs to approve items, and what’s on people’s calendars; it can be summoned by tagging, emailing, sharing, or adding it to a group chat, and every action it takes writes an audit trail attributed to the agent rather than a person. It will be accessible from iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, the command line, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, and Slack. Early testers included On, Shopify, and PayPal, and Gemini Enterprise customers cited include BNP Paribas, Bradesco, Merck, Orange Spain, Santee Cooper, SOMPO, Ulta Beauty, and Wesfarmers. Google also said new spend controls — including multi-model orchestration, smart routing, and real-time spend caps — will help businesses manage enterprise AI costs.

Why it matters

By leading with businesses rather than consumers, Google is betting that solving security and scale for enterprise agents first will let it compete directly with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic for the corporate AI-agent market before the consumer race heats up.