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Sources · 3 min · Oct 21, 2026

Google wants Gemini to combine chat, tasks and scheduled work

Sundar Pichai

CEO, Google and Alphabet

  • Alex HeathHost · Founder & host, Sources

    Left The Verge to start Sources in 2025; it has made over $1M since, mostly from sponsors.

About this segment

Pichai says consumer and enterprise agents share a model, harness and runtime, with enterprise security controls informing consumer tools. Gemini is moving toward one interface for chat and tasks.

From “Sundar Pichai on Gemini 4 and the AI compute crunch”, Oct 21, 2026. Watch the full episode

“between enterprise and consumer, it's the same model, same harness, same runtime.”
Sundar Pichaiat 36:28 · Sources36:28

Takeaways

  1. Google is building consumer and enterprise agents on the same stack.
  2. Agents can run tasks persistently or on a schedule.
  3. Google plans to broaden access beyond Pro and Ultra users.
Watch 3:08 from 35:30

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 22:47Google justifies AI spending with demand and capability signals6:53
  2. 8:30Pichai expects a productivity leap from AI agents in 20274:18
  3. 47:26Waymo is scaling through partnerships and broader deployments3:03
  4. 1:44Google pairs model access limits with runtime safeguards3:51
  5. 15:32DeepMind's frontier work has become an all-consuming operation4:22

  6. 35:30Google wants Gemini to combine chat, tasks and scheduled work3:08

  7. 38:31Pichai sees protocols as a more scalable path for agents5:23Up next
  8. 43:47Orbital data centers could address future energy and space constraints3:22

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 35:35

    Yeah. I'm curious what you make of this personal agent race that the industry is now in with Muse, which is a great product instinct. I remember at the last IO, you guys showed Gemini Spark. Yeah. And I'm curious, you know, do you think Google needs to do more here on consumer? I know you just had the Gemini workspace where you're giving an agent an email, a workspace identity, all that. But in the consumer race, when you look at it, it's early.

  2. 36:00

    But I imagine you want Google to have even more of a stake in that. Well, it's a huge area of focus. In fact, the goal we set out for Gemini, how we call it, we want it to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. So it's a core part of what we are trying to do with Gemini. And you are right, in I.O., with Spark, I think that's the direction we are doing. We obviously spoke more about it in our enterprise event in the context of the Gemini agent.

  3. 36:31

    To be very clear, between enterprise and consumer, it's the same model, same harness, same runtime. It is just the context of what you have in a business or your personal context is different. And everything we announced in the event, because we're building it for enterprise, has world-class security governance. Every task there, we are provisioning essentially a micro VM to go complete the task, running securely 24-7 with real-time monitoring, et cetera, and providing enterprises with the governance and control and auditability of those agents.

  4. 37:11

    We're bringing all that to consumers as well. So already you saw, you know, you have chat and task now in Gemini. Our vision, you know, in the near future is, it's one box and, you know, it's a content of, what is a chat, what is a task, you know, which of those need to be persistent, which of those need to be scheduled, how does it come back to you? I think we view it as a natural opportunity. Empirically, when we look at what people are doing in Gemini, if you were to go back and classify it, we see the trend already, right? So the percentage of, if I were to call queries, which are more agentic has been steadily increasing over time, right?

  5. 37:58

    And we're going to make all of that more widely available as we go through the next few months. And we mainly launched all of this to Ultra and Pro users. And so we're going to make it more widely available. The newer Argonne models deliver a huge step change. But you will be able to, again, as a consumer, you know, talk to Gemini, not just in the app, but in the context of like, you know, maybe from Gmail or you can call, you know, so we are focused on it, you know, from search and we're focused on