Google Cloud has unveiled a single Gemini-powered agent designed to act as one front door for artificial intelligence at work, reaching across Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack and business systems such as Salesforce and SAP.
The company said the agent can take on multi-step jobs rather than simple questions: gathering material from emails, documents and chat threads, drafting a customer proposal, and then building the slide deck to present it. Where a task suits another model better, the agent can hand work to Anthropic’s Claude models, an unusual act of openness between AI rivals.
A second part of the launch gives AI “coworkers” their own identities and permissions inside a company, so an agent built for finance cannot wander into human-resources files. Google paired that with a new security and governance dashboard intended to show administrators exactly what each agent did and when.
Executives framed the release as a shift from chatbots that answer to software that completes work, arguing that companies care less about which model responds than about whether a task is finished accurately and under the right controls.
The agent is due to appear first in Google AI subscriptions before a wider enterprise rollout. Analysts said the cross-platform reach could pressure competitors whose assistants mainly live inside their own software, setting up a contest over who owns the main doorway to office AI.
The launch intensifies a race among software giants to own the assistant layer of the office. Microsoft has pushed its Copilot across a similar suite, while startups argue that neutral agents working across rival products are what customers actually want. Google’s willingness to route some tasks to a competitor’s models is a bet that usefulness will matter more than brand loyalty.
Corporate buyers, meanwhile, have grown more demanding about audit trails after early experiments with chatbots produced embarrassing errors. Tools that show exactly which files an agent touched, and under whose authority, are increasingly the price of admission for enterprise deals.
