Google Cloud unveiled a single Gemini agent that takes goals instead of questions, works in the background for days, and can join a company as a staffer with its own inbox and calendar.
Google Cloud introduced a universal AI agent for the workplace on Thursday, one it says can take a goal, go off and do the work, and return with the finished result. CEO Thomas Kurian presented it at the company's Gemini at Work event, saying that "work now starts in the prompt window."
The product, simply called the Gemini Agent, works inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Chat and Calendar, and also reaches into Microsoft 365 and Slack. Google says it keeps running in the cloud after you close your laptop, so a single task can stretch across hours or days.
The most interesting feature is what Google calls coworker agents. A manager describes a role, such as events coordinator, and Gemini creates an agent with its own Workspace account: an email address, a calendar, Drive storage and a listing in the company directory.
This is similar to what other agentic frameworks have explored. For example Grok popularized it with Grok Bot, OpenAI did the same with GPT dots, and Hermes introduced its bots feature offering the same functionality.
The new agent connects to Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira, Snowflake, BigQuery and any server that speaks Model Context Protocol, an open standard that works like a universal plug between AI and software. It also runs on more than Google's own models: Gemini currently orchestrates across Gemini and Claude models from Anthropic, routing each job to the one Google considers the best fit for quality and cost.
Letting software act on its own raises obvious safety questions, and Google's answer is to treat each agent like an employee. Every agent gets a cryptographically attested identity, a digital ID verified through cryptography, and every action lands in an audit trail attributed to the agent rather than a person.