Google's new Gemini agent for work can run as a coworker with its own work email address, calendar, file storage and a place in the company directory. It is in private preview for Gemini Enterprise customers only, so most teams cannot try it yet. The idea behind it is already useful for anyone planning to hand work to an AI: the agent gets what you give it, the way a new colleague does.
An agent with its own account is not you
An assistant that works through your login can do anything you can do. If you can open the payroll sheet, so can it. A coworker agent has its own account instead, and it can only use the information that you or your teammates give it. Its actions go into audit logs, so a manager can look back at what it did and when.
Microsoft is building the same arrangement for its own agents: an account that works like a digital worker, with its own mailbox. So the habit is worth learning whichever office suite your company uses. You can also reach the Gemini agent from Microsoft 365 and Slack, not only from Google's apps.
What a team could do with one
Take a purchasing team of four at a small distributor. Each buyer spends about 45 minutes a day writing to suppliers whose deliveries are late. The team creates an agent called Order Chaser. They share one spreadsheet of open orders with it, copy it on supplier threads, and tell it in chat which orders matter most this week. Each morning it writes to the late suppliers, and if the admin allows outside email, it can send those messages itself. It posts the replies back in the team chat.
The old cost was three hours a day across the team, about 15 hours a week, nearly two working days. Most of that goes to the agent. The buyers keep the calls that need judgment, such as deciding whether to switch supplier.
Suppliers will also see who they are dealing with. The agent's address sits on a separate agents domain, such as name@agents.company.com, so the other side knows it is software. It is also easy for the company's email rules to treat that address differently from a person's.
Sharing becomes the real security setting
Once the agent has its own account, the control is no longer a setting in an AI product. It is the folder permissions and email lists the company already has. That is good news, because managers understand them. It is also a warning. A folder shared with "everyone in the company" years ago is now a folder the agent can read, and so is every old thread someone forwards to it.
The practical rule is the one for a temp worker on a first day. Make one folder for the agent, put in only what you would hand to that temp, and add more when it has earned it. A team that does this gets most of the time back and keeps the payroll sheet where it was.