The Not So Secret Agents: What Every Decision Maker Should Know About Agentic AI
Back in April of this year, Google Cloud made over 228 announcements at their Next ‘25 event in Vegas. Three months on and it is still hard to fully absorb the scale of what Google is doing with cloud and AI, but without a shadow of a doubt one phrase has taken centre stage: Agentic AI.
A License to Build
One of the conceits of Ian Fleming’s novels was that James Bond would always announce himself, bold as brass, informing the villain exactly who he was and what he was up to. Back in April Google’s agents did the same thing on stage in Las Vegas. We were introduced to them and we got to learn exactly what they are and what their plans for our future are.
So let’s look at those agents and review their plans in a little more detail. Hopefully, we can help you understand why how you get things done has already started changing forever. But first of all, just exactly what is an AI agent?
According to Google, a good agent displays the following qualities;
- Reasoning: Understands context, analyzes data, makes smart decisions, and offers relevant advice (e.g., when sales are up, the agent reminds you to thank the new sales exec who brought new clients with him).
- Acting: Takes action and gets things done in the real world (e.g., it books the regular meetings with all those new clients).
- Observing: Gathers information through various senses and data (e.g., sees all the new customer data, deeply researches details, and provides insights).
- Planning: Strategizes based on the situation, anticipates problems, and suggests solutions (e.g., when your customer support gets stretched with the new customers, the agent prioritizes tasks and recommends training).
- Collaborating: Works with people and other agents to achieve goals, communicating and coordinating effectively (e.g., multiple agents track new sales’ impact across the entire business and share updates).
- Self-Refining: Learns from experience, adapts, and continuously improves. (e.g., next time a new sales exec arrives with new customers, prepare in advance the support she needs to shine!).
Agents are autonomous; they have a clearly defined role and persona, remember, and autonomously employ tools to work with. At the core of the agents, Large Language Models (LLMs) allow them to process and generate language, whilst other components provide reasoning and action.
Just like Bond against the villain in Casino Royale, Google went ‘all-in’ on Agentic AI with a slew of announcements in April. Here’s what has appeared in the days and weeks since then, and how you can benefit from it.
“Take a Letter, Miss Moneypenny”
So now we know what an agent is, let me introduce you to Gemini Enterprise. Gemini Enterprise is a platform for building and deploying AI agents that understand, reason, and act in the real world. Gemini Enterprise provides tools and infrastructure to create those intelligent assistants that can automate tasks, provide information, and collaborate with users in a dynamic and contextual way. Think of it as Google’s hub for unleashing the power of autonomous AI.
Gemini Enterprise agents act on your behalf, but they remain firmly under your control, and it is a truly liberating experience. What do I mean? Well, each week, I send out meeting requests for daily scrum gatherings, and organise weekly client updates and governance meetings. Before each meeting, I need to create an agenda; after the meeting, I should write up the minutes. All of that is a chore, and it takes time away from me being able to add value elsewhere. Gemini Enterprise allows me to offload the work to my digital double and get on with doing things elsewhere that create a greater impact for clients and customers.
The power of Gemini Enterprise lies not just in its ability to ‘do’, but also very much in its ability to ‘know’. Like every organisation on the planet, yours also keeps its knowledge in many disparate and almost certainly unconnected systems. You can hook Gemini Enterprise into all of them via ready-made connectors. And if a ready-made connector does not exist for your particular legacy system flavour, you (or a friendly coder) can build one. The agents in Gemini Enterprise can provide you with an in-depth overview of your organisation, one that you can interact with, one that you can ask questions of — and most importantly, one that is a unified, amalgamation of all your data, regardless of silos.
As well as apps, Google also offers NotebookLM as part of Gemini Enterprise. Google NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that helps you understand and synthesize information from your documents. It acts like a smart, personalized notebook that can answer questions, summarize key points, extract insights, and even suggest related topics, making research faster and more efficient. Not only does NotebookLM offer you written summaries, but it can also come up with audio content for you, creating a bespoke ‘podcast’ dedicated to the topic you are interested in. NotebookLM is your AI research sidekick for making sense of your notes and documents.
Google has positioned Gemini Enterprise and its other agent tools as competitors to Microsoft’s Copilot tooling – and has already established a lead over the competition. Out of the gate, Gemini Enterprise has a degree of autonomy that is missing elsewhere. Gemini Enterprise doesn’t just react to questions, it pre-empts them. It doesn’t just do things when you ask, it does things when you need them done. The competitors are playing catch-up right now.
With an Gemini Enterprise application or NotebookLM working on your behalf, you are better informed, you are in control and your time is freed up for all the other important things you have to do – all with the peace of mind that comes from knowing that Gemini Enterprise is backed by enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance controls.
“Now, pay attention, 007”
You might expect that getting things up and running could be tricky, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Right now, I just need to do three things to create a straightforward agent that can tell me about my customers and their history with my company.
#1 Create a data source – in this case, my company’s ‘sales’ folder in Google Drive – or any other storage container or application, it doesn’t have to be Google!
#2 Create an application that utilises both search and AI, linked to the data source I created in step one.
#3 Publish the URL for the app to those who want to use it.
Simple. Once I have done that, anyone in my company can interrogate the sales material, asking questions like “Can you summarise all the proposals to Acme?” and “Who was the guy from Universal Exports who ordered all the cigars?”.
And on the roadmap, new features to make things even simpler. Soon you will be able to issue a spoken prompt like this:
“Create an Gemini Enterprise agent that connects to the sales folder in Drive and can tell me about all the material there.”
Yes, that’s right, you can use AI to create AI agents. With that sort of power, the sky’s the limit – and you’ll probably find yourself thinking, “The World is Not Enough”.
Next time, we will look at some more agent news from Google, this time taking your customer engagement to the next level.
If you want to know more about Gemini Enterprise, contact me, Matthew Wooller at Codento, and let’s talk about how a not-so-secret agent of your own can make your life easier and more productive.
Matthew Wooller, Data and AI Strategist, Codento
Read Part 2 – Gearing Up For The Self-Driving Business – Google Takes the Lead on Agentic AI
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