Google's new Gemini agent gets its own work email and an audit trail in its own name. Give every automation an identity like that

Google's new Gemini agent works like a coworker with its own login, and that design choice matters more than the model inside it.

What happened

At its Gemini at Work event on Thursday, Google announced a unified Gemini agent for businesses. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said it can be given "objectives, not just instructions": it plans the work, uses custom skills and tools, and connects to internal systems. TechCrunch lists Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres and Snowflake, plus any MCP server inside or outside the company network.

The agent gets its own Workspace account and email address. The Verge reports it operates as a "coworker agent" with an @agents.company.com address. It knows who is on which team, their time zones, who needs to approve items and what is on calendars. People can tag it, email it, share files with it or add it to a group chat, and as it acts it writes an audit trail attributed to the agent, not a person. A tasks inbox shows its reasoning, subagent delegation and progress.

By default it picks the model for each task, and users can choose one, starting with Anthropic's Claude. Google also mentioned real-time spend caps. For now it is in private preview for enterprise customers.

My take

Many small business automations I see run under somebody's personal login. The Zap was built with the owner's Gmail, the n8n credential belongs to a staff member who left, and the CRM history says a human sent an email that a workflow actually sent. When something goes wrong, nobody can tell what the automation did and what a person did.

Google is treating the agent like a new hire: its own account, its own address, its own trail. You do not need Gemini Enterprise to copy that:

1. Create a dedicated service user in the CRM and email tool for each automation or agent.
2. Connect workflows with that account's credentials, not a person's.
3. Make every record the workflow touches show it was the automation.
4. Write down who approves what, so an agent knows when to stop and ask.

It costs a seat or two. It saves the day you need to switch something off, rotate a key or answer a client asking who sent that message.