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.” 

Other AI-related updates to Workspace apps announced at Google Cloud Next include the ability to build and edit spreadsheets in Sheets via natural language prompts; Gemini can orchestrate “multi-step construction” and combine data from various sources such as a user’s files, emails, and chats, as well as the web. Gemini in Docs is getting an upgrade, too, with the ability to create infographics grounded in business data.

Underpinning some of the Gemini features is a new work graph, Workspace Intelligence, that connects data held across emails, chats, files and the web to improve the accuracy and relevance of outputs from Gemini agents. Workspace Intelligence “understands complex semantic relationships” between a user’s data and apps, helping to personalize these outputs by learning past work and communication patterns,” Google said.

Customers’ Workspace Intelligence data is not reviewed by Google staff, sold to advertisers, or used to train Google’s AI models, unless the customer gives permission to do so, the company said.

Work Intelligence is similar to tools such as Microsoft’s Work IQ, said Lazar. “The basic idea is giving employees an AI agent that has visibility into both their own activities as well as company knowledge, enabling them to be more efficient in managing work,” he said. “The challenge for any of these tools is that to be truly useful, they need to be able to pull in data from external sources such as CRM, ERP, project management, etc.”

It’s also important to function in multi-vendor environments now common for customer organizations, such as “mixed Google-Microsoft-Zoom-Cisco-Slack shops,” he said. “The third-party integrations are still coming, but I’m not sure if/when we’ll see multi-vendor integration.”