Enterprise

Google unveils the Gemini agent — a single 'AI coworker' with its own Workspace account

At Gemini at Work 2026, Google Cloud introduced a persistent, multi-model agent that plans multi-day tasks across Gmail, Docs, Slack, and Microsoft 365, and gets its own email address.

By Asher Glick· Enterprise software desk·2026-10-08·4 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Hivan Arvizu — Team collaborating around a laptop in an office

Google Cloud used its Gemini at Work 2026 event today to introduce the Gemini agent, a persistent multi-model worker that gets its own Workspace account, its own email address, and the authority to plan multi-day tasks across Gmail, Docs, Slack, and Microsoft 365. “You delegate an outcome and come back to finished work,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. The pitch is less chatbot, more headcount.

The design choices give that framing teeth. The agent is invoked the way a human colleague is: by tagging it, emailing it, sharing a doc with it, or adding it to a group chat. It knows who’s on which team, who approves what, and what’s on people’s calendars. Every action writes an audit trail attributed to the agent rather than a person. Google describes it as acting on “objectives, not just instructions.”

Under the hood, it picks the best model per task by default, currently Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, with open-source and other private models to follow. Connectors already include Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake, and Postgres, plus any Model Context Protocol server inside or outside the network. It’s reachable from iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, the command line, ServiceNow, and both major productivity suites. Industry-specific versions for financial services and legal are already in preview; government, healthcare, and retail are next.

Kurian’s framing was that an agent “has to be connected to your personal workflows, your systems of record and your enterprise controls.” Sundar Pichai supplied the scale numbers: over 1 billion monthly active Gemini users, and nearly 90% of Fortune 100 businesses now using Gemini Enterprise at work.

The announcement lands in a specific week. The Salesforce Campaign Agent that launched last week runs demand generation inside the CRM; the first-party audience targeting ChatGPT Ads rolled out via LiveRamp ports CRM data into a competing ad surface. Different stacks, same bet: the unit of enterprise AI is no longer the prompt but the delegated task.

For now, the Gemini agent is in private preview, with wide availability coming soon for Workspace customers on select Business and Enterprise plans. The pricing of that Business tier is the next shoe. Whoever makes an autonomous coworker legible to a thirty-person company first wins the decade’s most contested seat.

Sources