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Gemini agent announced at Gemini at Work 2026 [October 8, 2026, private preview]
Google Cloud introduced the Gemini agent last Thursday, and the detail I can't stop thinking about is the email address.
Google calls it a universal agent for work. You hand it a task in one prompt box, anything from research to a draft to code. It plans the work, picks tools and skills, and returns finished work in the documents, inbox and developer environments you already use. Google says it chooses the best model for each job.
The identity setup is where it gets interesting for us. According to one detailed breakdown, each agent gets its own identity. A "coworker agent" can even get a full Workspace account with an @agents.company.com address, and it only sees what people share with it. Subagents spun up for a job get their own identities too. Actions go into an audit trail under the agent's name, not a person's.
That matches how Google already treats agents in IAM. The Agent Identity docs describe an ID based on SPIFFE that you grant roles to directly, and they call it a more secure principal than a service account. There's a gotcha worth knowing. Redeploying an agent creates a new agent ID, so IAM grants on the old principal don't carry over. Google suggests project-wide bindings for baseline permissions.
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Cost control got a mention too. Admins can set spend caps per project, and the agent pauses when it hits one. I'd test that before trusting it. The same breakdown points out that Google's Billing docs describe monthly caps that aren't instant, and it's unclear whether the agent uses that same mechanism.
Now the fine print. As far as I can tell, this is in private preview for enterprise customers only. The Google press page doesn't give availability, and coverage says there's no GA date or pricing yet. Whether coworker accounts need extra Workspace licenses is still an open question. And since I couldn't find the audit log details in Google's own docs, I'd treat the delegation-chain question (who approved what) as unanswered.
Google also had customer news that day. Orange Spain plans to deploy over 1,000 custom agents on Gemini Enterprise, and Balyasny Asset Management is running agentic research across more than 200 investment teams. Those are Gemini Enterprise deployments, so don't read them as Gemini agent customers.
Add it up and you get the same pattern from all three clouds this fall. AWS rebuilt the runtime, Microsoft added Routines and Hooks, and now Google is giving agents names, mailboxes and budgets. The question each vendor is racing to answer is who the agent is when it acts.
If you're studying for a Google Cloud or Azure AI cert, learn the difference between an agent acting as itself and an agent acting on behalf of a user. It's the same split as Foundry's creator identity versus agent identity from a few weeks back, and exam writers love that kind of scenario.
And if you run agents today, check which identity they use right now. If the answer is a shared service account, that's your first fix.
Keep Learning and Building.