Google Cloud unveils Gemini AI agent to finish work tasks

Google Cloud announced the Gemini agent on Thursday at its Gemini at Work 2026 event. The company calls it a single "universal agent for work" that can take an assignment, plan the steps and come back with finished output inside the tools employees already use. It is the latest sign that the biggest AI vendors want to replace chatbots with persistent digital workers.9to5google+1

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said users give the agent "objectives, not instructions." "You delegate an outcome and come back to finished work," he said. "For an agent to do that, it has to be connected to your personal workflows, your systems of record, and your enterprise controls". The agent is in private preview. According to 9to5Google, it will be widely available soon to Workspace customers on select Business and Enterprise plans.constellationr+2

How it works

The agent can be used across the web, mobile, desktop and command-line tools, as well as inside Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Slack. An API also lets it run "headless" inside third-party applications. Within Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Chat, users can call it up by typing @Gemini.venturebeat+1

Google says it runs each job on the model that fits it best. Today that means the Gemini family and Anthropic's Claude, with other proprietary and open models planned. For multi-step work, it can spin up sub-agents and coordinate parallel or sequential workflows that run for hours or days. Teams can also set up persistent "coworker" agents with their own email addresses, calendars and Drive storage. These agents can see only the information team members explicitly share with them.9to5google+3

The agent draws on four kinds of memory: session, semantic, procedural and episodic. It connects to systems including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira, BigQuery, Snowflake and Microsoft Teams. Google also highlighted smart routing to cheaper models and hard project-level spending caps that pause the agent when a budget runs out. Early customers include On, Shopify and PayPal.siliconangle+3

A crowded race

The launch follows a busy few weeks among competitors. VentureBeat reported that Microsoft unveiled an updated Copilot on September 25 and OpenAI introduced always-on "Dots" agents on September 29. On October 6, Anthropic announced native Claude integration with Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.venturebeat

Important details are still missing. VentureBeat noted that Google has not announced separate pricing, a general-availability date or independent benchmarks showing how reliably the agent completes long, cross-application tasks. Google says nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise, but those deployments do not necessarily reflect adoption of the new agent.venturebeat

As VentureBeat put it, the contest increasingly turns on "which platform enterprises trust to coordinate their work — even when the underlying models come from competitors".venturebeat