Google wants its Chat app to become the main interface for office workers to interact with AI agents within its Workspace suite.
“We’re making Chat the centerpiece through which people talk, not just with other people, but with all their agents, whether they are in Workspace or built on our platform,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a briefing on the company’s plans.
The Ask Gemini in Chat feature — generally available now — also allows Workspace users to interact with third-party tools such as Asana, Jira, and Salesforce, Google said in a blog post. Ask Gemini in Chat provides a “daily briefing” that highlights action items, unread message threads, and tasks to complete. It can also act on behalf of a user, generating documents and slides, scheduling meetings, and retrieving files, for instance.
Irwin Lazar, principal analyst at Metrigy, said the addition of Ask Gemini in Chat highlights Google’s efforts to compete more directly with Microsoft Teams. “Today, chat is the primary interface for employee engagement as email has fallen by the wayside,” he said. “Ideally, I’d like to see the AI interface be equally accessible across all apps, so one could access it in Gmail, Docs, etc.”
