Google launches Agentspace to combine AI agents and enterprise search

Google's LLC's cloud division today announced the launch of Agentspace, a centralized tool for providing knowledge and expertise for employees, powered by generative artificial intelligence agents that can also take actions on their behalf.

The search and data giant focused heavily on how AI agents could use knowledge of enterprise data to deliver information no matter where it's hosted. According to the company, employees spend a great deal of time using multiple tools to answer questions, switching among them to gather knowledge and finally to collect their thoughts.

"Google Agentspace makes your employees highly productive with a single prompt -- it helps them accomplish complex tasks that require planning, research, content generation and actions," said Saurabh Tiwary, vice president and general manager of cloud AI at Google.

Agentspace works to deliver this information as a conversational interface, like any other generative AI chatbot. It can provide conversational assistance, answer multipart questions and make proactive suggestions based on employee needs. Beyond normal chatbot capabilities, it can also take actions on behalf of users.

For example, an employee could use Agentspace to create a press release using a prompt. Under the hood, the system would use AI agents to do deep research into the company's previous releases to get a template to format it and bring in information from enterprise sources that the employee has access to such as Confluence, Google Drive and Microsoft Sharepoint.

Once the press release is written, the user can review it and they can ask Agentspace to email it to their marketing team. Since Agentspace can access their enterprise team contacts, it can bring up an email form directly in the interface, populate addresses, attach the document and allow the user to hit send.

There are many potential use cases for this feature across various teams. Another example includes business analysts asking the agent to examine business trends to create a data-driven presentation, including graphs and charts. Human resources could use it to assist with employee onboarding, including complex cases such as 401k selection. Google added that given Gemini's capability with writing computer code, software engineers could benefit from Agentspace agents assisting with identifying and resolving bugs.

This release follows a trend known as "agentic AI," where companies such as Microsoft Corp., Salesforce Inc., HubSpot Inc. and others have integrated AI agents into their platforms and services. OpenAI, best known for its ChatGPT chatbot, recently announced plans to launch an AI agent capable of performing web browser-related tasks in January.

Google added that Agentspace can also uncover insights from NotebookLM, an AI-powered note-taking and research application that allows users to make sense of complex information sources. The company is bringing this capability to enterprises, too: With NotebookLM Plus, employees can upload large documents, images, videos and other complex data and engage with it like talking to a research assistant. NotebookLM can also provide a podcast-like audio overview to make unfamiliar topics easier to understand.