Google brings agentic AI to Gemini, starting with businesses

At a Google Cloud event on Thursday, the company announced it’s bringing its Gemini AI into the agentic age, with the launch of a unified agent that can not only answer questions but also get things done on the user’s behalf, all from a single interface.

The move comes as AI tools have been moving beyond being just conversational experiences to those that can take ownership of assigned tasks, generate code, schedule meetings, book appointments and travel, and more. It also follows the rise of consumer-facing agents like Meta’s Muse and those that operate over messaging, like Instinct and others, as well as the recent debut of ChatGPT’s Dots.

The company still has a good shot at achieving scale for its agentic efforts: as Google CEO Sundar Pichai pointed out at the event’s start, Gemini today has over 1 billion monthly active users. He also noted that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 businesses now use Gemini Enterprise at work.

Given Gemini’s adoption in the corporate world, Google will initially focus on bringing the agent to businesses before later rolling it out to consumers.

According to Pichai, this will allow the company to solve the “harder problems around security, scale, and performance,” which come with launching powerful agents such as these.