On October 8, 2026, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, presents the Gemini agent at Gemini at Work 2026, described as a universal agent for work. It answers questions, handles knowledge work, creates images and media, writes and executes code, from a single interface and a single API. The user hands it goals rather than instructions and comes back to a finished result. Kurian cites adoption figures: nearly 500 customers each processed more than a trillion tokens over the year, nearly 80% of customers use Google Cloud's AI products, and nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise.
The architecture rests on five principles. The agent is unified: it converses, works autonomously, plans tasks, or reacts to events. It is accessible everywhere, including Microsoft 365 and Slack, and can operate without an interface. Its execution is persistent in the cloud, with a single memory regardless of channel. It orchestrates temporary sub-agents and colleague agents with their own identity and storage. Finally, the model is a choice distinct from the agent: Gemini chooses, for each task, between Gemini models and Anthropic's Claude models, with other models expected to follow.
Three building blocks make it useful: a tool registry, with connections to any MCP server; a skill registry, global, departmental, or personal; and four memories (session, semantic, procedural, episodic). Within Workspace, Gemini operates in Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Chat, and Calendar, as a personal assistant, through proactive delegation, or as a team-member agent with its own account.
On the data side, new skills serve data and ML engineers (PySpark code, notebooks, training, pipeline fixes) and business teams (saved operational reports, executable at no token cost). They rely on the Knowledge Catalog, which defines business terms once, on Smart Storage, which enriches unstructured data in place, and on the Borderless Lakehouse, which queries S3, Azure, and Iceberg tables without copying. Bloomberg Media reports a 63% gain in SQL query accuracy. Specializations exist in preview for financial services and legal, inheriting permissions and ethical walls from document platforms.
Governance is reduced to four questions: identity, permissions, traceability, and what the agent must never touch. Each agent has an attested identity, minimal rights, an audit log under its own name, a network sandbox, and a mandatory pass through Agent Gateway, a firewall that enforces the organization's policies. For costs, Google offers multi-model orchestration, intelligent routing, and per-project spend caps. It cites a 98% drop in price per token since 2024 and an 80% gain in price-performance from the TPU 8i.
The rest of the post lists deployments by region (Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, North America) and three commitments: removing friction, eliminating complexity through an integrated stack, and keeping data with the customer.