GoKawiilAs part of its slate of Google Cloud Next announcements on Wednesday, the company shared plans to bring “auto browse” agentic capabilities to Chrome users in the enterprise, along with enhanced security measures.
With auto browse, Chrome users can take advantage of Gemini to understand the live context in their open browser tabs, and then use the AI to handle various tasks like booking travel, inputting data, scheduling meetings, and others related to web-based work.
Image Credits:Google
Google suggests the tool could be used for things like inputting information in the company’s preferred CRM system based on content in a Google Doc, comparing vendor pricing across tabs, summarizing a candidate’s portfolio before an interview, pulling key data from a competitor’s product page, and more.
The company notes that its workflows will still require a “human in the loop,” meaning that the user will have to manually review and confirm the AI’s input before any final action takes place.
However, the idea is to help speed up these types of more tedious tasks to free up people to focus on what Google refers to as more “strategic work.”
Image Credits:Google
This is the larger promise from AI advocates: that you’ll get your time back by using this new technology. But in practice, studies have shown that AI isn’t reducing work – it’s intensifying it. It remains to be seen how this will play out at the enterprise level as AI becomes a standard part of the workflow. Presumably, that could mean managers will expect that people can get more tasks done in less time.
Google says the new feature will initially be available to Workspace users in the U.S., as a part of Google’s push to infuse its AI into one of its most-used apps in the workplace, the web browser nearly everyone uses. It can be enabled via a policy, and Google states that an organization’s prompts won’t be used to train its AI models. (A disclosure that is increasingly necessary these days, given that Meta is even using its own employees’ keystrokes to train its AI).
Like the consumer-facing version of the feature, Workspace users will be able to save their most common workflows for later use. These “Skills,” as they’re called, can be pulled up by either typing a forward slash (” / “) or by clicking the plus sign to access the needed Skill.
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