Google Workspace features announced as part of Google Cloud Next ’26 sustain the positive momentum Google has generated in the team collaboration space, and the inclusion of a contextual AI-driven feature keeps the company current with one of the latest and most impactful trends.
Gregg Willsky, principal analyst, enterprise technology and services at GlobalData, comments: “The bulk of the announced features reflect the diverse ways that Google, like other vendors, is supplying AI capabilities that assist workers in their daily activities. However, the one feature that stands head and shoulders above the crowd is ‘Workspace Intelligence’, an AI ‘engine’ which is both agentic and contextual.”
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
Agentic AI is noteworthy because it stretches beyond merely generating content, featuring agents that can perform simple or complex tasks on behalf of users. Agentic AI can act autonomously, make decisions, and take actions with or without human intervention. It can adjust its approach based on new information or changing circumstances.
Contextual AI is beginning to make a splash on team collaboration platforms. Contextual AI uses real-time data, including enterprise data, factors such as the user’s past actions and preferences, and environmental aspects to deliver responses that are more personalised, more tailored, and timelier.
‘Workspace Intelligence’ completes straightforward and complex tasks independently, as opposed to simply generating content. It pulls together real-time data and grasps the meaning and intent of the user’s request. It comprehends the user’s past work, communication patterns, and what is most important to them. Workspace Intelligence synthesises artefacts such as emails, documents, chats, and calendar events across a user’s work domain; aggregates recent, cross-application interactions; and marries internal enterprise knowledge with external information harnessed via Google Search.
Willsky adds: “Bottom line, Workspace Intelligence reflects a beneficial side of AI – the ability to execute essential tasks and produce outputs that are highly relevant, allowing users to get meaningful work accomplished.
“The bulk of the new capabilities, especially Workplace Intelligence, reflect an evolving trend in the team collaboration space. Specifically, the use of AI is moving from silos to being leveraged on a far grander scale – across vendor platforms, connecting parts of organisations, and linking organisations with external partners, suppliers, and the like. AI is serving as connective tissue, threading sections of vendor platforms such as meetings, chat, and calling; establishing links between those platforms and third-party applications used in various parts of the business; and integrating platforms from different vendors.”
The common theme among these scenarios is the distribution and exchange of data regarding operations, customers, suppliers, partners and similar groups. AI bots or agents often act on that data, performing tasks and orchestrating workflows. These agents are still in the early stages of deployment but are increasingly proliferating, often created with relative ease by non-developers using low-code or no-code tools.
Willsky concludes: “The expanding reach of AI comes with a heavy price. Compliance, confidentiality, and security issues, among others, multiply when platforms are intra- and inter-connected with data flowing across boundaries and AI agents manipulating and disseminating that data. Vendors have made assurances regarding the integrity of their platforms, but there remains a sense that these issues have not been adequately addressed. Vendors need to take a much deeper look.”
