Gemini Agent launches in private preview — with Claude support and consumption caps
Google Cloud launched a persistent, universal workplace agent on October 8, 2026 at Gemini at Work 2026 — with its own Workspace identity, sub-agents that work for days, Claude support and consumption caps. But pricing, general availability, and which agents get their own accounts remain unresolved.
The news
Google Cloud announced the new Gemini agent on Thursday, October 8, 2026, at the company's annual Gemini at Work 2026 event, presented by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a keynote. According to Google, the agent is an attempt to consolidate the company's enterprise AI offering — until now a collection of assistants and specialized tools — into a single platform that can take on entire work assignments, VentureBeat reports (d1d39340).
A Google Cloud spokesperson confirmed to VentureBeat that the agent is available from launch day in private preview for a select group of customers, with a promise of broader availability "soon" — but without a date (d1d39340).
One caveat: none of the available sources is Google's own documentation. All product descriptions below are based on secondary reporting of Google's announcement — that is, the company's own claims relayed through journalists, not independently verified testing.
How the agent works, according to Google
The most striking feature is the identity. Kurian's example, as reported by VentureBeat, is an "Event Planner Agent" that a manager can create with its own Workspace account — its own email address, calendar, Drive storage and presence in the company directory. Google has not, however, confirmed whether all agents get their own account, or only those configured as "coworkers" (d1d39340).
To carry out tasks, Gemini can create its own "sub-agents." Google describes them, as cited by CBS News, as "temporary, job-specific agents, each with their own identity," which can collaborate on goals over multiple days (244788dd). It is this persistent, days-long work that distinguishes the agent from traditional chat assistants.
In the blog post, as relayed by CBS, Kurian writes that the agent can function as a personal assistant or a team member — working on behalf of a group of people, such as a project manager on a team, or on behalf of a specific role in the organization, such as an analyst in the finance department (244788dd).
According to MarkTechPost, the agent maintains four types of memory (ca7a2f90):
- Session memory covers the current task, even when it spans multiple days.
- Semantic memory is a structured knowledge base the agent builds from documents and people.
- Procedural memory stores how jobs are performed — including skills the agent writes itself.
- Episodic memory records everything the agent has done previously.
Reach: into Microsoft 365 as well
According to Storyboard18, the agent supports integrations with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Git, BigQuery, Databricks, Postgres and Snowflake, and can connect to MCP servers (Model Context Protocol) both inside and outside the organization's network (811decbb). That a Google agent is meant to work directly inside rival Microsoft's office suite is among the most notable features of the launch.
Model support is also open: the agent uses Google's own Gemini models, but can already use Anthropic's Claude models, with support for more proprietary and open models planned, according to VentureBeat (d1d39340).
Governance and cost control
Days of continuous agent work mean continuous compute consumption — and this is what Google's governance tools are meant to capture.
According to Decrypt, each agent gets a cryptographically attested identity — a digital ID verified through cryptography — and all actions land in an audit trail attributed to the agent itself, not a person. The agents run in an Agent Sandbox environment with traffic routed through Agent Gateway (d4471ce9). Forbes author Janakiram MSV points out, however, that these controls have not run at scale outside early testers (78e29a61).
On the cost side, MarkTechPost describes three levers: multi-model orchestration, Smart Routing which assigns work tasks to the cheapest capable model, and real-time consumption caps. Teams set a hard project limit in the Cloud Billing Console; when the limit is triggered, the agent pauses for that project until someone resumes it (ca7a2f90).
Early users — and self-reported numbers
Sportswear brand On, e-commerce company Shopify and payments company PayPal were among the early testers. Google also names BNP Paribas, Bradesco, Merck, Orange Spain, Santee Cooper, SOMPO, Ulta Beauty and Wesfarmers as Gemini Enterprise customers, according to Storyboard18 (811decbb).
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai offered his own figures at the event, as relayed by The Register: he stated that nearly 80 percent of Google Cloud customers use the company's AI products — and use them intensely — and that nearly 500 enterprise customers have each processed over 1 trillion tokens on the platform in the past year (0af8343e). The figure is reported in the source as "over 1 trillion tokens" — that is, 10¹² tokens.
Google also reports that nearly 90 percent of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise. But these figures are company-reported and unaudited — and as Forbes points out, they count companies, not employees. They say little about how many people actually use the tools daily (78e29a61).
Three open questions
Pricing. The sources contradict each other. VentureBeat writes that Google says the agent is included at no extra cost where Gemini Enterprise is available, including through existing Workspace business and enterprise subscriptions (d1d39340). Yahoo and Decrypt, on the other hand, report that Google has not published pricing for agent use (78e29a61, d4471ce9). Both could be true — bundled for some plans, usage-based pricing elsewhere — but the sources do not settle the question. For an agent that works for days, this is more than a technicality.
Availability. VentureBeat writes that the agent is in private preview as of launch day; Decrypt reports no date for general availability, and Yahoo writes that it is not yet broadly available. Decrypt states that versions for finance and law are in preview, while public sector, healthcare and retail are listed as "coming soon" (d4471ce9).
Account provisioning. It is unclear whether all Gemini agents get their own Workspace account with Gmail, calendar and Drive, or only "coworker"-configured agents — and whether administrators can control individual services, and whether extra Workspace licenses are required (d1d39340).
What's missing before we know more
There is so far no independent testing of the agent and no customer references from the testers in the source material — only Google's own product description. With the launch just two days old, this is expected, but it means all claims about what the agent can actually accomplish in practice remain the company's own. The answers on pricing, availability and provisioning will determine whether the Gemini agent becomes a real tool for businesses — or an announcement to wait on.