AI Teammates are coming to your workplace

At Google I/O 2024, Google has announced a new AI feature within its Google Workspace ecosystem called AI Teammate. The idea is simple: create an AI agent and make up a job for it within your organization. This AI Teammate, powered by Gemini, will be able to act within your virtual office just like any other teammate would, and can be given a name and asked questions.

As shown in the demo, you can grant it full access to a range of Google apps, Spaces, meetings, chats, and documents within your workplace — and give it a job. In the demo, this AI Teammate was given a description, as well as a variety of jobs and instructions, including monitoring and tracking specific projects, analyzing data, and facilitating team collaboration.

Google talked about it as a “collective memory of work together,” allowing you easily recall things, ask it questions, or summarize the current state of a project. In one example, the AI Teammate even responded to a chat, mentioning some conflicting decisions based on previous meetings.

It feels like the early days here, and Google said it even plans to open up AI Teammates to third-party companies that can build these agents for specific purposes within a company or organization. It’s not hard to imagine companies doing much more with this in the future, creating more capable AI agents that can do work on their behalf.

The idea of an AI Teammate sounds innocuous enough, but in a world where there are increasing anxieties about AI replacing jobs, having it there as a virtual teammate only emphasizes this reality.

AI Teammates is part of the larger expansion of Gemini into Google Workspace, including some new features in Gmail mobile.

Google did not state when AI Teammates would be rolling out, only saying “stay tuned.”