As part of a series of Google Cloud Next announcements on Wednesday, the company shared enhanced security measures as well as plans to bring an “auto-browse” agent feature to Chrome users in the enterprise.
With AutoBrowse, Chrome users can leverage Gemini to understand the live context of open browser tabs and use AI to handle a variety of tasks related to booking travel, entering data, scheduling meetings, and other web-based work.
Google suggests that the tool could be used to populate a company’s preferred CRM system based on Google Docs content, compare vendor prices across tabs, summarize a candidate’s portfolio before an interview, pull important data from a competitor’s product page, and more.
The company says workflows still require “humans in the loop.” This means that the user must manually review and confirm the AI’s input before the final action is taken.
But the idea is to speed up these kinds of tedious tasks, freeing up people to focus on what Google calls “strategic work.”
This is a bigger promise from AI advocates. That means you can get your time back using this new technology. But in reality, research shows that AI is intensifying jobs, not reducing them. It remains to be seen how this will play out at the enterprise level as AI becomes a standard part of workflows. Perhaps this could mean that managers expect employees to complete more tasks in less time.
Google said the new feature, which will first be available to Workspace users in the U.S., is part of Google’s efforts to bring its AI to the web browser that nearly everyone uses, one of the most used apps in the workplace. This can be enabled through policy, and Google says your organization’s prompts will not be used to train AI models. (That disclosure is becoming increasingly necessary these days, given that Meta uses the keystrokes of its own employees to train its AI).
Similar to the consumer version of this feature, Workspace users can save their most common workflows for later use. These ‘skills’, as the name suggests, can be viewed by typing a slash (‘/’) or by clicking the plus sign to access the skill you want.
In addition to bringing AI to Chrome, Google is touting the ability to detect unauthorized AI tools in the workplace through Chrome Enterprise Premium. We are now extending these capabilities to help IT teams look for compromised browser extensions and other AI services, especially “anomalous agent activity.”
Google is right to position this as a security feature, but there are other benefits as well. The tech giant is essentially leveraging corporate IT to shut down other AI agents that may be taking root organically in the corporate world. A few years ago, employee-driven Enterprise 2.0 brought many web services to the workplace for the first time during a rush to adopt new technologies such as cloud storage, collaborative documents, and file sharing.
The new feature, which Google has rather ominously dubbed “Shadow IT Risk Detection,” gives IT teams visibility into sanctioned and unsanctioned Gen AI and SaaS site usage across their organizations.
IT teams will also receive a Gemini Summary of Chrome Enterprise release notes and other AI-powered suggestions. This will reveal breaking changes, new policies, upcoming deprecations, and recommendations for configuring new settings, reviewing managed browsers, and more.
The company also announced that it has expanded its partnership with Okta to secure agent workplaces with additional capabilities to mitigate session hijacking and other protections. We’re also upgrading security controls for extensions and introducing Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) integration to help organizations enforce consistent security policies.
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