By the Smili Phone team
Google just gave its AI an employee badge. At its Gemini at Work event on October 8, 2026, Google Cloud announced a single universal Gemini agent for business work, along with a new kind of assistant called a "coworker agent." Each coworker agent gets its own Google Workspace account: a real email address, its own calendar, its own Drive storage, and an entry in the company directory. Colleagues hand it work the same way they would a person, by mentioning it in a Google Chat message or tagging it in a document comment.
What makes this different from a chatbot is persistence. The agent runs for days on a long task, remembers context across sessions, and can even spin up smaller sub-agents for complex jobs. It works inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Chat, Calendar, and Drive, and it connects to Microsoft 365 and Slack too. Behind the scenes, Google routes each job to the model that fits best, choosing between its own Gemini models and Anthropic's Claude, with more models planned later. Admins can set hard spending limits per project so a runaway task cannot burn through a budget.
Why permissions are the real story
Giving an AI its own inbox is convenient, and it is also a trust decision. Google says a coworker agent acts under its own identity rather than yours, sees only what is shared with it, and logs every action under its own name in an audit trail. That is the right design, because an agent that can read your email and edit your documents deserves the same scrutiny as a new hire. We covered the FTC's probe into rogue AI agents last week for exactly this reason: the risk is not the model, it is giving powerful software broad access without clear rules.
For a small business, the lesson is simple. Before you hand an AI agent the keys to your inbox, decide what it may touch, what it must never touch, and who reviews what it did. Google frames it as four questions: who the agent is, what it may do, what it did, and what it must never touch. That is a good checklist for any business, whatever tools you use.
What to try
The Gemini agent is in private preview for Gemini Enterprise customers, with broader availability expected for select Workspace Business and Enterprise plans. Google has not announced pricing or a general availability date yet. If you are curious, start small: pick one repetitive task, like drafting a weekly schedule or summarizing a long email thread, and give the agent the minimum access it needs. Watch what it does before you open the door wider.
Tools like this will reach small shops everywhere, including here in Escondido. If you are trying an AI assistant on your phone or laptop and something looks off, bring it by 1882 W El Norte Pkwy and we will help you sort out the permissions together.
Related: the FTC probe into rogue AI agents · OpenAI's agent push at DevDay
