Another artificial-intelligence agent has entered the chat.

Google on Thursday unveiled the Gemini agent, a digital assistant that can work independently across Google Workspace apps, such as Gmail and Docs, rather than just responding to prompts like a traditional chatbot.

Shares of Google parent Alphabet rose 0.2% in late-morning trading, surrendering most of their earlier gains. The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.3% and 0.4%, respectively.

The agent intensifies Google's competition with OpenAI, which last week released a business-focused agent called Dots, and Microsoft, which revamped its own agentic offering last month. With Meta Platforms' agent, Muse, also gaining traction on the consumer side, the battle of the AI agents is well underway.

If anything, the stock's muted reaction indicates Wall Street thought it was only a matter of time before Google threw its hat in the ring.

Gemini can generate software code, create images and media, schedule tasks, and access a user's data and tools, including non-Google software. Google also announced plans to release industry-specific Gemini products for finance, law, government, healthcare, and retail. The company describes Gemini almost as a new employee.

"Gemini can function as your personal assistant or as a team member, where it works on behalf of a group of people, like a project manager within a team, or on behalf of a specific role in an organization, like an analyst in your finance department," Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post Thursday.

The business focus makes sense. Nearly 80% of all Google Cloud customers use the company's AI products, and almost 90% of Fortune 100 firms Gemini Enterprise, Google says.

But companies rarely have just one suite of software products.

Anthropic has made its hay selling its Claude AI models and an array of AI productivity tools to businesses. (Google's new Gemini agent can also run on Claude models, making Anthropic both a collaborator and a potential competitor.)

Microsoft's Office software, meanwhile, is embedded in businesses across the world, making its own agent a potential hurdle to Google's efforts to gain market share.

And while businesses can integrate Gemini with Salesforce and ServiceNow, these platforms and many others also allow customers to build and deploy agents.

"In our view, the industry is moving toward AI systems that coordinate specialized workers to complete tasks rather than simply respond to prompts," Ralph Schackart, an analyst at William Blair, wrote in a research note Thursday.

"While near-term monetization remains an open question, we believe continued progress in agent capabilities can help Google defend its productivity and cloud franchises while expanding the opportunity for premium AI services."

Schackart reiterated an Outperform rating on Alphabet stock.