Welcome to Gemini at Work 2026: Introducing the Gemini agent

Recently at Gemini at Work 2026, Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian made a number of announcements including:

• The new Gemini agent, an always-on digital assistant that answers your questions, handles your knowledge work, creates your images and media, and writes and runs code. 
• Inline in Workspace, Gemini works directly inside Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat, and Calendar, carrying the same memory, skills, and controls it has everywhere else.
• New data and analytics skills that allow both technical teams and everyday business users to use plain-language questions to get to actionable operational insights in minutes. 
• How Google Cloud secures and governs agents through identity and policy management, authorisation and permission controls, secure sandboxing, network gateways, and more.

Introducing the Gemini agent 

In the last year, nearly 500 Google Cloud customers each processed more than one trillion tokens. Today, nearly 80% of all Google Cloud customers are using its AI products, and nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise. At that kind of scale, organisations have moved past experimentation and are running the business on it. Work now starts in the prompt window.

“To meet this moment, today Google Cloud is announcing the new Gemini agent. It is a universal agent that has all of your business context and can be used for everything from knowledge work to answering questions, and content creation to coding, all from a single prompt box. It plans the work, uses skills and tools, connects to your systems, and brings back something finished—inside the documents, the inbox, and the developer environments you already work in. It chooses the best model for the job, has built-in cost controls, and most importantly, has the security, administration, and governance required by your company”, said Thomas Kurian.

Gemini answers your questions, handles your knowledge work, creates your images and media, and writes and runs code – chat, tasks, code all in a single agent and a single API. You give it objectives, not instructions. You delegate an outcome and come back to finished work. For an agent to do that, it has to be connected to your personal workflows, your systems of record, and your enterprise controls.

Gemini can function as your personal assistant or as a team member, where it works on behalf of a group of people, like a project manager within a team, or on behalf of a specific role in an organisation, like an analyst in your finance department.

The agentic capabilities in Gemini are built around core architectural principles:

• Unified Agent: Gemini is an agent that can answer your questions when you chat with it, work autonomously to complete objectives you assign it, and generate code—all from a single interface. You can assign it work, schedule tasks that need to be completed, or have it respond to events.
• Omnipresent Access: Gemini can be accessed from any device including web, iOS and Android mobile devices, Windows and Mac desktops, and any channel (command line, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or Slack). It can also be integrated into third-party applications and surfaces and operates as a headless agent, meaning it does not need a dedicated user interface.
• Persistent Execution: It runs in the cloud, meaning it maintains a single set of memories, context, and one personalisation graph no matter what device or channel you access it on. You never have to re-brief it or wonder which machine you told it to do something on. Work that takes hours or days keeps running after you close your laptop, and it is still there when you come back.
• Multi-Agent Orchestration: Gemini doesn’t work alone. It can dynamically create a roster of sub-agents—temporary, job-specific agents, each with their own identity—to tackle multi-step tasks. Gemini can communicate with these sub-agents to coordinate workflows, including parallel and sequential steps that can run for hours or days. In addition, Gemini can act as a coworker agent—which is more like a team member, with a persistent, defined role and operational presence across days, sessions, and multiple changing responsibilities—and delegate and coordinate tasks. Coworker agents have dedicated identities including their own @agents.com emails, their own persistent storage, and only have access to the context that you or your team members provide.
• Deeply Contextual: Gemini arrives already knowing your tools, data, and work history. Whether you ask it a question, assign it an objective, or have it generate code, Gemini learns from every interaction with you. The longer you collaborate with it, the better it understands you and how you work. Teams can create dedicated projects to further optimise the context, skills, and tools Gemini uses when it works with you.
• Model Choice Flexibility: Gemini is the agent, and the model underneath it is a separate choice. It runs each job on the model that fits best—orchestrating across Google’s Gemini family of models and Claude models today, and other leading private and open models in the future—to deliver optimal quality and lower your costs. The best model for the task is not always the largest one. Matching the model to the work raises accuracy on the difficult jobs and lowers cost on the simple ones. And the leading model changes every few months, so keeping that choice open means your context, your skills, and your data stay put when it does.

Top customers across industries were early testers and are already realising its benefits: Premium sportswear brand On tested this new dynamic selection capability to accelerate its speed-to-market. This builds on the proven, large-scale multi-model strategies already used by leaders: Shopify blends frontier models for millions of merchants to unlock data and drive sales, and PayPal routes 10 million multi-model requests every week.

Powering Gemini: Skills, tools, and context

Gemini understands your business—everything from pricing to product portfolios to departmental norms—and all the institutional knowledge that makes your company unique. Three capabilities make that possible: tools that connect it to your systems, skills that teach it how your work gets done, and context that lets it remember.

• Tools and Tools Registry: Gemini can securely connect to the software your company already runs, including collaboration tools like Confluence, Microsoft Office, Teams, Slack, and Workspace; development tools like Git and Jira; enterprise platforms like Salesforce and ServiceNow; databases like BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, and Snowflake; and files on your own desktop. It can also connect and work securely with any Model Context Protocol (MCP) server inside or outside your company network. It also offers an enterprise tools registry, so teams can build and publish tools for the rest of the company.
• Skills and Skills Registry: Skills  are reusable sets of instructions, knowledge, or workflows stored as modular prompts that teach the Gemini agent how to perform specific, multi-step tasks. Gemini ships with a robust global library of skills. Teams or departments can build and publish custom skills to a shared company registry, and you can build your own personal skills. Gemini chooses the right skills and tools to perform a task and continuously learns from each execution, improving its consistency, while saving token costs.
• Context and Memory: Gemini learns from each question you ask it, each objective you assign it, the people you work with, and uses your personal context and your organisation’s context to personalise and improve the quality of its responses. It keeps four kinds of memory: session memory for the task in front of it, even when it runs for days; semantic memory, a structured knowledge base it builds as it reads documents, talks to people, and works with other agents; procedural memory for how a job gets done, including skills it writes for itself; and episodic memory of everything it has done before. Gemini onboards itself the way a new hire would, learning you, your tools, and your team before it starts.

Gemini in Google Workspace

The unified Gemini agent — the one that answers your questions, handles your knowledge work, and writes your code — works directly inside Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat, and Calendar, carrying the same memory, skills, and controls it has everywhere else. It works inline: in the email thread, in the document, in the chat space.

Inside Workspace, Gemini works three ways:

• Personal assistance: Gemini works as your personal assistant and arrives already knowing your calendar, your team, your projects, and how your documents relate to one another. It is briefed before you start.  For example, you can ask Gemini to set up a meeting with the usual team of regional event leads next week, without supplying a single name or email address. Gemini determines who those people are from the membership of your chat space and the thread from your last event, checks their calendars, and starts an email thread to coordinate a time that works, even with external participants. It handles work that spans applications the same way: researching market trends, building a financial model in Sheets, then creating a deck that presents both, without you re-explaining the project at each step.
• Proactive delegation: Gemini uses this same intelligence to proactively suggest tasks you can delegate to it. For example, if your manager emails you asking for the latest project update as a slide deck, Workspace Intelligence recognises that as a delegatable task and gives you a single-click option to pass it to Gemini. It applies the same reasoning to your inbox, surfacing the message that matters most rather than the one that arrived last, and explaining why.
• A member of your team: You can also use Gemini to create a coworker agent that works with your entire team. You simply describe the role you need, and Gemini creates it. The agent receives its own Workspace account, including an email address, calendar, Drive, and presence in your company directory. Your colleagues work with it the way they work with anyone else, by adding it to a Chat space or @mentioning it. For example, a marketing manager can ask an events coordinator agent in a chat group to draft a launch readiness document, which it posts back to the group when complete. The marketing manager could also tag the agent in a document comment, where it can suggest an edit in the Doc and reply in the comment thread, appearing under its own name in version history. A coworker agent acts under its own identity rather than yours, and it sees only what you share with it. Access follows the sharing and membership your team already uses, and no outside connector holds your data.

Data analysis, data engineering and machine learning 

Google Cloud is also giving Gemini skills built for specific domains, starting with data.

Data and analytics represent a foundational domain where Gemini transforms business workflows, enabling organisations to move from plain-language questions to actionable operational insights in minutes. Google Cloud is introducing purpose-built capabilities tailored to both technical teams and everyday business users:

• For Data and ML Engineers: Google Cloud is extending Gemini with machine learning skills and tools that back every data scientist and data engineer with a team of agents. Engineers describe the outcome they want in plain language, and Gemini generates PySpark code, provides notebooks to edit and test it, trains models, and troubleshoots and fixes pipeline issues on its own.
• For Business Users: Anyone in your organisation can generate reliable, real-time operational reports simply by asking. Gemini uses operational reporting skills integrated with BigQuery and the Knowledge Catalog to construct and save the query. Once saved, teams can run reports on demand without incurring token costs, guaranteeing consistent, verified answers every time.

Three Google Cloud capabilities keep those answers grounded:

• Knowledge Catalog : Gemini integrates directly with your Knowledge Catalog to map business definitions once so all agents use them. This deep understanding of your organisation’s schemas and business rules for terms like “net margin” and “addressable market” dramatically improves accuracy. Whether your metrics live in Databricks, dbt, LookML, or SAP, Gemini reads them directly where they sit to ensure factual responses.
• Smart Storage: Ninety percent of enterprise data is unstructured—PDFs, images, scans, and audio recordings—which often remain “dark” and unreadable. Smart Storage changes this by enriching unstructured objects in place and writing context back directly onto the object itself. The intelligence stays where the bytes reside and inherits your existing security posture.
• Borderless Lakehouse: Organisations should not be forced to move or duplicate their data to use AI. Google Cloud’s borderless Lakehouse allows Gemini to query Amazon S3 and Azure Data Lake with no variable egress fees, read directly from Salesforce Data 360, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday without copying data, and federate open Apache Iceberg tables across Databricks Unity, Snowflake Polaris, and AWS Glue.

You can start by registering data sets that you discover in your lakehouse with the knowledge catalog, and then assign Gemini simple or complex analysis to perform. It identifies the necessary data sets from the Knowledge Catalog, generates the necessary SQL, Spark or Python code to calculate the results, and runs the code on Google Cloud’s Managed Spark Service with Lightning Engine or in BigQuery. It can also generate charts and build dashboards in the tools your analysts already use.

Securing and governing agents

Two factors determine whether an enterprise agent program succeeds or stalls: whether you can govern it, and whether you can afford it.

When deploying autonomous agents across an organisation, governance comes down to answering four fundamental questions:

• Who is the agent, and what identity does it have?
• What is it allowed to do or what permissions is it granted?
• What did it do and where can I see what it did?
• What should it never touch?

Identity, policy, and observability answer the first three. The fourth is Agent Gateway.

• Identity: Every agent gets its own identity, cryptographically attested and governed like an employee, with least-privilege permissions. That identity is stamped into the logs that capture its work, and into any virtual machine spun up to run code on its behalf.
• Authorisation and Permissions: You give each agent fine-grained, role-based access permissions, approved by your organisation’s security administrators. When the Gemini agent connects to an external system, its identity is mapped and propagated through industry standards such as OAuth.
• Auditing: In addition, every action Gemini takes is written to an audit trail and attributed to the agent rather than to a person. Since the identity travels into any virtual machine the agent spins up to run code, you can monitor those logs with Google Cloud’s observability tools in real time and catch anomalous behaviour before it matters.
• Policy Management and Control: Gemini gives you identity, discovery, governance, and security by default. All Gemini agents execute tasks safely inside an Agent Sandbox with its own network boundary. All traffic—in, out, and between agents—passes through Agent Gateway, an AI network firewall enforcing your organisation’s policies in real time. You write the policy once, such as: “agents may not open documents classified Need to Know.” Gemini applies it to every agent in your company instead of checking one agent at a time.

Infrastructure: 80% better price-performance

All of this innovation — the agent, the data, the identity, and everything else— runs on Google Cloud’s AI Infrastructure and models. They are the reason the economics work.

First, Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure is comprised of co-designed chips, the network, the data centre, and the software that connects it all as one highly-optimised system — the AI Hypercomputer. This vertical integration delivers significantly better price-performance than the generic setups, and Google Cloud continues to push the state of the art here. For example, Google’s latest TPU 8i system delivers 80% better price-performance than the prior generation, making complex, high-value agent tasks both fast and highly affordable.

On top of this silicon sit Google’s models: Argon for frontier reasoning, Flash for speed and volume, Omni for generative media, and Gemma for lightweight, open-weights edge workloads.

Gemini Enterprise in action

Many organisations are already driving measurable impact with Gemini Enterprise, including:

• Arden University, a UK provider of flexible online and blended learning, is preparing students for the global job market by rolling out Gemini Enterprise. Over 30,000 students and staff will now have access to advanced Al tools to personalise their studies and gain essential skills for the workplace.
• Honeywell Technologies Forge platform includes predictive maintenance capabilities built on Gemini Enterprise, such as contextualising operational data at scale and providing proactive maintenance recommendations. This helps customers minimise costly, unplanned outages, protecting and extending the lifespan of their mission-critical equipment.
• Lloyds Banking Group is scaling agentic AI across the bank. Envoy, a secure, Gemini-powered pipeline, has already onboarded nearly a thousand engineers building production-ready AI use cases. From fraud detection to commercial client onboarding, Envoy gives teams a reusable agent marketplace, a “golden path” for building agents, and a CI/CD pipeline — all wrapped in the guardrails and security a highly regulated bank demands.
• Nokia is tackling the complexity of modern telecom networks with an ecosystem of specialised agents built on Gemini Enterprise. This allows operators to fix issues before subscribers are impacted by automating troubleshooting and cutting issue resolution time by up to 80%.
• On, a premium sportswear brand, is scaling workforce productivity and efficiencies by deploying Gemini Enterprise to every employee to drive personal productivity and foster an AI-ready culture. Team members have launched no code agents that help with efficient knowledge extraction, executive reporting, market research, scheduling, onboarding and more.
• Ooredoo Qatar, the leading telecommunications provider in Qatar, is integrating Gemini Enterprise into their AI transformation strategy to drive advanced automation and intelligence. Its customer support, marketing, security, and field operations teams have deployed AI agents to optimise internal operations management, while accelerating rapid issue resolution and marketing campaigns to deliver around the clock, highly personalised, proactive customer experiences.
• Qatar University, the nation’s premier institution of higher education, is transforming higher education operations and academic research by deploying Gemini Enterprise campus-wide. Thousands of faculty and staff are deploying more than 2,000 custom AI agents to modernise institutional workflows, automate complex administrative operations, and enhance academic productivity.
• Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, is modernising its collaborative operations and infrastructure by deploying Gemini Enterprise and Google Workspace to 35,000 employees. Flight crews, operations planners, and corporate staff will benefit from automated decision-making, optimised crew logistics, and enhanced corporate productivity, while a resilient dual-cloud strategy strengthens infrastructure resilience and supports the airline’s target growth to 300 million passengers by 2034.

Our commitments to you

As Thomas Kurian said, “As you build the future on Gemini, we make three firm commitments:

1. We take the friction out: A future-proof platform that runs anywhere, executes any task, supports your choice of models, and applies enterprise controls.
2. We eliminate complexity: Google builds and integrates the entire stack: silicon, models, skills, tools, and security.
3. What you build stays yours: Your people and your data do not need to move, and your proprietary inputs and outputs remain entirely your own.

The technology is ready, our global partner ecosystem is scaling, and Gemini is ready to work for you.”

Image Credit: Google Cloud