As Meta and OpenAI push into agentic tools, Google is beginning its own agent journey with enterprises.
At the Google Cloud Gemini at Work 2026 event on Thursday, the company unveiled the Gemini Agent, a "universal agent for work" that lives inside of the Google Workspace suite. The agent can answer questions, handle knowledge work tasks, create media, and write and run code within a single interface.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the event that the company is starting with business customers before rolling out to consumers, aiming to solve the “harder problems around security, scale, and performance."
The Gemini Agent operates inside of a user's existing context and can be accessed from any device, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat, and Calendar. It also connects to outside collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and development tools like Git and Jira.
- Google highlighted three ways that the Gemini Agent can work: as a personal assistant, proactively suggesting and delegating tasks, and as a "coworker agent" that works alongside your team.
- The agent also offers Gemini's same "memory, skills, and controls it has everywhere else." For instance, users can ask for meetings to be set up with their usual teams without having to list every single participant, understanding your relationships from previous calendar events.
- Additionally, Google built the agent to have data and analytics skills for both technical teams and everyday business workers. The agent also offers industry-specific tools, skills and connectors for financial services and legal teams.
- To keep costs transparent Google built in controls with multi-model orchestration, smart model routing to Gemini and Anthropic's Claude models, and token spending caps.
Addressing the question of governing these agents, Google noted that each agent gets its own traceable identity, fine-grained and specific access permissions that are approved by organization administrators, and consistent auditing. Tasks are executed inside of an "Agent Sandbox" with an individual network boundary.
Our Deeper View #
Google has been lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic for several months on the frontier AI development front, putting out models at a far slower pace than its competitors. However, Google has all of the winning ingredients for the winning recipe to soar in the industry, with legacy name recognition, market share of work tools for both consumer and enterprise spaces, and tons of resources, both cash and compute, at its disposal. Additionally, Gemini 4 Argon aside, several of the company's recent models have centered cost efficiency at a time when enterprises are curbing token budgets more than ever. Adding an easy-to-integrate, seamless workplace agent like this could further bolster Google's enterprise play, especially considering how thoroughly embedded its tools are in business operations and workplaces.