As AI agents arrive, Google wants a plan to manage them all

Gone are the days of 2022, when we brought our biggest questions to one giant, occasionally hallucinating platform like ChatGPT.

Cloud vendors are increasingly offering “agents,” or AI tools that perform very specific tasks, like booking a flight or turning $10 into $1,000 through investment—those are two examples that Matt Wood, PwC global and US commercial technology and innovation officer, shared with CNBC this month. Google’s new platform Agentspace aims to help enterprise users get their questions answered from the array of today’s agentic AI.

“In addition to the applications we’ve been using for years, enterprises now feel like they need to leverage new generative AI tools and technologies just to stay competitive. So, switching across multiple apps to find and stitch together data can slow productivity,” Raj Pai, VP of product management for cloud AI at Google Cloud, said last week in a press conference before the release of the product on December 13. “Every time a new tool is added, we introduce more risk from a privacy and data leakage perspective.”

With an employee prompt, Agentspace provides info across multiple connected enterprise systems, with pre-built connectors to agents from third-party applications like Microsoft SharePoint, ServiceNow, and Jira.

“It’s finding the most relevant results across those data sources with the access controls and permissions so I can only see search results that I am authorized to see,” Kalyan Parmathy, group product manager for generative AI and search, told reporters on the prelaunch call.

Agentspace currently comes with a 90-day free trial “followed by a per user, per month subscription price,” Katie Camacho, head of AI innovations team for external comms wrote to IT Brew.

You’ll have to talk to my agent. A November 2024 survey of over 1,000 US-based, young adult knowledge workers, conducted by the Harris Poll and commissioned by Google Workspace, found that 82% of respondents are “already leveraging AI tools in their work.”

Companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, and now Google have offered new AI agents in the latter half of 2024.

“Any given company might have hundreds of AI agents that are performing different tasks. And so the problem becomes, how do you manage it all? Because now there isn’t just one place to go to get this. There’s all of these things happening, and that’s exactly what Agentspace is trying to solve,“ Dave McCarthy, research VP of cloud and edge services at market intelligence firm IDC, told IT Brew, adding that the platform is helping users “navigate this complex world that’s now getting built in the background.”

“Agentspace is probably one of the first cohesive experiences doing this,” McCarthy said, while noting that today’s big cloud vendors are often “leapfrogging” each other to be AI standouts. “I don’t think it’ll be the last.”