Google Adds Agentic AI to Gemini, Starting With Business Customers

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the start of the event that Gemini now has more than 1 billion monthly active users and that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 businesses use Gemini Enterprise at work. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the new agent can be given "objectives, not just instructions," meaning it can plan the work, use custom skills and tools, and connect to a company's internal systems to reach a goal.

According to a TechCrunch report on the event, the launch follows a broader shift in AI tools from conversational assistants toward systems that take ownership of assigned tasks, generate code, schedule meetings and handle bookings. It also follows consumer-facing agents including Meta's Muse, messaging-based agents such as Instinct, and the recent debut of ChatGPT's Dots.

By default the agent selects the model it judges best for a task, but users can take over and choose a model themselves, including third-party options beginning with Anthropic's Claude models. Google said the model picker will later be expanded to include open source and other private models.

Requests can carry attachments such as files, folders or other projects built for specific workstreams that combine files and skills. The agent can connect to business data and systems, including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres and Snowflake, and Google said it can work securely with any Model Context Protocol server inside or outside a company's network.

Users can follow the agent's activity through a "tasks inbox" interface that shows its thinking process, its delegation of tasks to subagents, the special skills it loads, code and progress.

The agent has its own Workspace account, with its own email address and its own context, functioning much like another coworker. Google said it knows who at a company is on which team, their time zones, who approves items and what is on people's calendars. Users can reach it by tagging it, emailing it, sharing with it or adding it to a group chat. As it acts, it writes an audit trail attributed to the agent rather than to a person. The agent is accessible from iOS and Android mobile devices, Windows and Mac desktops, the command line interface, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow and Slack.

Google said early testers of the agent included the sportswear brand On, Shopify and PayPal. It named BNP Paribas, Bradesco, Merck, Orange Spain, Santee Cooper, SOMPO, Ulta Beauty and Wesfarmers among Gemini Enterprise customers. Google also said new flexible spending options, including multi-model orchestration, smart routing and real-time spend caps, are intended to give businesses tighter control over enterprise AI costs.

Pichai said the decision to start with businesses will let Google work through the "harder problems around security, scale, and performance" that come with launching powerful agents of this kind.