Google Brings Agentic AI to Gemini, Starting With Businesses

Gemini enters the agentic age

At a Google Cloud event on Thursday, Google announced that it is bringing Gemini into the agentic age with the launch of a unified agent that can answer questions and also get things done on the user's behalf, all from a single interface. The company is introducing the agent to businesses first, with a consumer rollout planned for later.

The move comes as AI tools have been moving beyond conversational experiences toward ones that can take ownership of assigned tasks, generate code, schedule meetings, and book appointments and travel. It also follows the rise of consumer-facing agents like Meta's Muse, messaging-based agents like Instinct, and the recent debut of ChatGPT's Dots.

Objectives, not just instructions

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Gemini today has over 1 billion monthly active users, and that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 businesses now use Gemini Enterprise at work. He argued that starting with businesses allows Google to solve the "harder problems around security, scale, and performance" that come with launching powerful agents.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, explained that the new agent can be given objectives rather than just instructions, meaning it can plan the work, use custom skills and tools, and connect to businesses' internal systems to accomplish its goals. Requests can include attachments such as files, folders, or projects designed for specific workstreams.

By default the AI picks the best model to complete a task, but users can also take over and choose a model themselves, including third-party models, starting with Anthropic's Claude models. Google said it will expand the model picker to include open source models and other private models in the future.

An agent with its own account

The agent can connect to business data and systems including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, and Snowflake, and it can connect and work securely with any Model Context Protocol (MCP) server inside or outside a company's network.

A "tasks inbox" interface lets users keep track of what Gemini is doing, including its thinking process, delegation of tasks to subagents, loading of special skills, code, and progress. The agent also has its own Workspace account, with its own email address and its own context, so it knows who at the company is on which team, their time zones, who needs to approve items, and what is on people's calendars. Users can call the agent by tagging it, emailing it, sharing with it, or adding it to a group chat, and its actions are written to an audit trail attributed to the agent rather than to a person.

Google said the agent will be accessible from iOS and Android mobile devices, Windows and Mac desktops, the command line interface, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, and Slack.

Enterprise first

The agent's early testers included sportswear brand On, Shopify, and PayPal. Google said Gemini Enterprise customers include large businesses such as BNP Paribas, Bradesco, Merck, Orange Spain, Santee Cooper, SOMPO, Ulta Beauty, and Wesfarmers.

Google also said new flexible spending options, including multi-model orchestration, smart routing, and real-time spend caps, will help businesses keep their enterprise AI costs under better control.

Sources: Techcrunch