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Google's new Gemini agent gets a company email address and a Claude option

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Google's October 8 Gemini Enterprise launch gives its single work agent a persistent cloud identity, its own @agents.company.com email, and the option to run tasks on Anthropic's Claude instead of Gemini.

Google's new Gemini agent gets a company email address and a Claude option

Google's new Gemini agent, unveiled October 8 at the company's Gemini at Work event, holds a standing role on a team: it gets its own Workspace account, its own @agents.company.com email address, and its own audit trail attributed to the agent rather than a person, according to TechCrunch's report on the launch. Access stays limited for now: only enterprise customers can use it, and only in private preview, per The Verge.

What

Inside the Gemini Enterprise app, the agent runs in the cloud, so it keeps one set of memories and context across mobile, desktop, the command line, and third-party apps like Slack, Microsoft 365, and ServiceNow, per Google Cloud's announcement post. Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Calendar get the same agent built in, and the post says it can spin up temporary, job-specific sub-agents to split up multi-step work, or operate itself as a persistent "coworker agent" with a defined role across days and sessions. Users are not stuck with Google's own model choice either: by default the system picks whichever model fits a task, but they can override that and route a request to a third-party model, starting with Anthropic's Claude, TechCrunch reported. Scale claims came from the top: Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Gemini has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote that nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies already use Gemini Enterprise, figures the company gave at the event that TechCrunch also relayed.

Enterprise buyers get a Claude option without leaving Gemini's interface

A company already paying for Gemini Enterprise is not locked into Gemini models for every task; it can point specific requests at Claude from the same tasks inbox, with Google saying it plans to add open-source and other third-party models to that picker later. Compliance and security teams get a cleaner record too: a dedicated email and an action log tied to the agent, instead of a staff member, means the trail no longer collapses into one shared service account. Cost oversight follows the same pattern, since new spend controls, including real-time caps and model routing by cost, give IT a lever to bound multi-model usage rather than trusting per-model default pricing. None of this reaches individual users yet: access is restricted to enterprise customers in private preview, and Pichai told TechCrunch that Google is intentionally starting with businesses "to solve the harder problems around security, scale, and performance" before expanding to consumers.

What to watch next

Watch for Google to open the private preview more broadly or set a general-availability date, and for which models beyond Claude actually land in the picker. A consumer version of the same persistent, cross-app agent is expected to follow the business rollout, though Google has not given it a timeline.

Sources