Google says Gemini-powered automations coming to Workspace

After making many Gemini AI features standard on Google Workspace, Google executives said it’s a step towards bringing AI agents to bear at scale across many organizations that use its cloud productivity platform (which includes popular enterprise apps such as Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Meet, Google Sheets, Google Slides, etc).

Google Workspace is used by at least 8 million paying customers and commands a staggering 84.95% of the cloud work apps market, according to Thrive, an online marketing agency.

Aparna Pappu, vice president and general manager of Google Workspace, said Google has taken a “crawl, walk, run” approach to bringing AI agents to more users. 

“You can think of bringing agents as a series of building blocks where people are training their assistants to learn how they work,” Pappu said during a Q&A with reporters and analysts at a Gemini at Work event in New York Thursday. “We’re working toward a set of trained assistants that lead to agents.”

Google announced earlier this week that the standalone Gemini chat app — powered by its Gemini AI model — is now integrated into Workspace for Business, Enterprise and Frontline paid accounts.

Gemini for Workspace allows people to ask Gemini to summarize emails on Gmail, find information stored on multiple documents on Google Drive or write a natural language prompt on Sheets to generate a custom chart. 

Unlike other platforms that target specific workflows, such as sales and marketing, which are releasing AI agents, Google Workspace reaches a wide and diverse audience. 

Pappu noted that Google has been considering agents on Workspace for a while now. She pointed to Chip, the AI Teammate demoed during Google’s I/O developer conference in May. 

“We introduced AI Teammates at Google I/O which is an AI coworker that does a specific task. We want to eventually do this in scale in an enterprise which we believe Workspace is helping enable,” Pappu said. 

Google also plans to slowly roll out Gemini-powered workflow automations on Workspace beginning in October.

Workflow automation would let users set automatic tasks that automatically read an email or document, categorize it, and do an action.

For example, if a user receives an email with an invoice, Gemini will know it’s related to finance and budgeting and then bring the invoice to the appropriate team for payment. 

That type of workflow orchestration is also one of the building blocks for AI agents. 

Agents for more users 

AI agents have become a touchpoint for many companies dealing with employee productivity. In the past month alone, several companies released AI agents or connections for AI agents. Slack added integration for AI agents from Salesforce, Asana, Cohere, Workday, Adobe Express and Writer. ServiceNow also released its own AI agents for customers. 

Meta also said it will add functionality for users to build agents on WhatsApp or Messenger to answer questions. 

It’s not a surprise that a large organization like Google will offer access to AI agents to its many customers.

Many businesses, small or large enterprises, do use Google’s Workspace suite of email, documents and spreadsheets along with other Google Cloud products that connect to customer management systems and the like. 

Google is betting on AI-powered productivity

Google’s Gemini at Work event aimed to show how much the company’s flagship AI models have saved time for its customers. 

“We’re starting to hear from customers that they’re seeing more employee retention and even happiness because they use Gemini,” Pappu said. “It’s really more than just the time saved, but also about taking away the small annoying tasks.” 

Google said customers who use Gemini—in Workspace or otherwise—have been able to be more productive and cut down on time usually spent on tedious tasks like coding translations.

Pappu said Gemini has pushed more businesses to be more competitive, even if they are still small because Gemini offers expertise without needing consultants.