What changed
Google announced on October 8 a new Gemini agent for business customers. It runs in the cloud, holds one set of memories across all your devices, and continues working after you close your laptop. You can give it a task like "update the team on this project as a slide deck" or "schedule a meeting with the regional leads" and it figures out who to email, what's in the last thread, and when people are free. It works inside Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, Calendar, and connects to Slack, Microsoft 365, and other business tools. Google says it can orchestrate across its own Gemini models and Anthropic's Claude, picking whichever model fits the job. It also introduced real-time spending caps that stop work when you hit a budget limit.
What you can do with it now
If your team already uses Google Workspace, you can try the Gemini agent for recurring tasks that take the same steps every week: pulling numbers into a report, scheduling check-ins with the same group, summarizing email threads into a status update, or drafting a standard proposal. Start with one task that has a clear owner and a clear definition of "done." Give the agent the assignment, let it run, then check the result against what you would have done yourself. Measure how much time you spent reviewing and fixing versus how much time the task used to take. If it finishes cleanly three times in a row, add a second task. If you're spending more time correcting than you saved, the task isn't ready for delegation yet. Google's spend caps let you set a budget per task, so test with a low limit first.
What to keep in your own hands
The agent needs access to your email, calendar, files, and potentially customer data to do its job. Before you turn it on, decide which folders, inboxes, and contacts it can see and which it cannot. Don't give it access to anything confidential until you've tested it on low-stakes work for at least a month. Make sure you can see a log of what it did, who it emailed, and what it changed. If the tool doesn't show you that audit trail, don't use it for client work. And remember: an agent that saves you an hour a week is useful, but only if you're not spending two hours a week checking its work. The goal is a task you can hand off and forget, not a task you have to babysit.