Google gives Gemini its own email address and makes it an enterprise coworker

Google announced on October 8 that Gemini is becoming a fully agentic AI — one that can be given objectives, plan its own approach, and take actions across a company's systems, not just answer questions in a chat window.

The new agent is being rolled out to enterprise customers first. It gets its own Google Workspace account, complete with a calendar, an email address, and context about a company's teams and approvers. Employees can tag it, email it, or add it to group chats, and it logs everything it does in an audit trail attributed to the agent rather than a person — a detail Google flagged as critical for enterprise governance.

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud's CEO, framed the shift as moving from instructions to objectives. "You can give it an objective, not just an instruction," Kurian said at the Google Cloud event. The agent breaks down goals into tasks, picks which subagents or tools to use, and reports back on its reasoning via a tasks inbox that shows step-by-step progress.

Connectivity is a central selling point. Gemini can pull from and write to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres, Snowflake, and any server that supports the Model Context Protocol. Google also said it will support open-source and private models alongside its own, with users able to choose their preferred model — including Anthropic's Claude.

Google says Gemini already has over 1 billion monthly active users and that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies are Gemini Enterprise customers. Early design partners include Shopify, On, and PayPal. BNP Paribas, Merck, and Ulta Beauty are among the named enterprise customers.

The business-first rollout signals where Google sees the high-stakes use case: as Pichai noted, enterprise deployments demand harder guarantees around security, scale, and performance than consumer apps. A consumer version is planned but has no announced timeline.

No pricing details were disclosed at the event. Google said new flexible spending options will include multi-model orchestration, smart routing, and real-time spend caps — framing cost control as a first-class governance feature rather than an afterthought.

As reported by TechCrunch, the announcement marks a significant escalation in the enterprise AI agent race, with Microsoft's Copilot and Salesforce's Agentforce competing for the same Fortune 500 budgets.