TechCrunch reports that at a Google Cloud event on Thursday, Google announced a unified agent that does more than answer questions: it can get work done for the user from a single interface. The company is bringing the agent to businesses first and plans to offer it to consumers later. At the start of the event, Sundar Pichai said Gemini now has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and that nearly 90 percent of Fortune 100 businesses use Gemini Enterprise at work. Those figures describe Gemini and Gemini Enterprise as they stand, not usage of the new agent. Pichai said starting with businesses lets the company work on the harder problems of security, scale, and performance. Thomas Kurian said the agent can be given objectives, not just instructions. It plans the work, uses custom skills and tools, and connects to a business’s own systems.
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By default the system picks a model for the task. Users can also choose, including third-party models, starting with Anthropic’s Claude models. Google said it will later add open-source models and other private models. A request can include files, folders, or projects built for a specific workflow. The agent can connect to company data and systems. The article lists Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, and Snowflake, among others, and says it can connect to any Model Context Protocol server inside or outside the company network. A tasks inbox shows what the agent is doing, including its thinking, delegation to subagents, loading of skills, code, and progress. Google said the agent has its own Workspace account, like another coworker: its own email address and its own context, including teams, time zones, approvers, and calendars. People can tag it, email it, share with it, or add it to a group chat. When it acts, the audit trail is attributed to the agent, not to a person. Access includes iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, the command line, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, and Slack.
[1]The article names the sportswear brand On, Shopify, and PayPal as early testers of this agent, and separately lists Gemini Enterprise customers, including BNP Paribas, Bradesco, and Merck. That second list is not evidence that those customers used the new agent. The consumer version is not out. Google also said new spending options, including multi-model orchestration, smart routing, and real-time spend caps, will help businesses control cost. That is the company’s statement, not a published saving.
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