abril 02, 2025
Google’s recent release of Agentspace is a turning point for agentic AI in the enterprise. It’s a single, unified platform that gives employees secure access to generative AI for search, assistance, and agent-based actions without compromising access controls across fragmented enterprise systems and data.
That last part is key. Because one of the hardest challenges in deploying agentic AI at scale isn’t building smart agents. It’s navigating the mess of identity, permissions and access to siloed enterprise data.
The rise of scattered agents and growing complexity
Over the last few years, many of us have been building agents to solve high-value use cases: enterprise search, chatbots, summarization, content generation. But each of these agents often lives in its own world, built as standalone RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) apps or tied to a specific platform. The result is a sprawl of disconnected generative AI tools.
On top of that, if your agent needs access to anything beyond public or shared enterprise data, you're immediately into the weeds of identity and access management. While these problems can be solved, doing so repeatedly across multiple enterprise sources adds significant complexity.
We’ve experienced this firsthand. Building and maintaining a bespoke agentic platform — or bolting AI capabilities onto legacy enterprise search or knowledge management tools — no longer makes sense.
We’ve seen this before
Two decades ago, our search team worked extensively with Autonomy’s Portal-in-a-Box (PIB). It enabled secure enterprise-wide search, expertise location and summarization.
Its standout feature was a connector library and bit-mapped security model built into the core engine (IDOL). It ingested data from multiple enterprise systems into a single corpus (search index), along with requisite access control lists (ACLs). Employees could search across systems but only see what they were entitled to access.
It worked horizontally across departments, automatically and securely, all in one place.
Rebuilding the hard way
When clients started moving off Autonomy, we faced a problem: no modern search product offered the same out-of-the-box security model. That's when we rebuilt it ourselves in Elasticsearch.
We recreated federated identity management and won a global award for the work.
But the real takeaway is — you no longer have to build this yourself. Google has solved it with Agentspace.
What makes Agentspace different
Agentspace isn’t just a better search interface or a GenAI tool. It’s a platform-level solution that:
-
Democratizes access to enterprise data while respecting identity and access policies
-
Includes two-way connectors, allowing agents to both read from and act on source systems
-
Eliminates the need for custom security models, so teams can focus on use cases, not plumbing
Solving the real security problem
In traditional enterprise search, authorization is relatively simple. You’re answering questions like:
-
Does this user have read access to this document?
-
Can they view these fields?
Even that’s complex when you’re dealing with multiple identity models. We’ve solved it. It’s not trivial.
Agentic systems introduce a far broader set of actions that must be authorized:
-
Can an agent write to this table?
-
Can it update a system’s configuration?
-
Can it close an HR ticket in ServiceNow?
Now multiply those questions across every system in your stack. The complexity increases exponentially.
In the real-world, hybrid environments that agentic systems must operate in, this level of complexity can’t be avoided. And building a federated security model from scratch is no longer realistic. Google has done the hard work and they’ve done it right.
What this means
Instead of spending time on infrastructure, access models and integrations, your teams can now:
-
Build agents on a unified, secure data corpus
-
Ingest and reuse agents from other systems
-
Enable multimodal, conversational interfaces across your enterprise
Most importantly, you can do it quickly and securely.
What’s coming next
We’re excited about what Agentspace enables today and what’s ahead. Google is evolving this into a full platform for autonomous, agentic workflows.
When we first saw the announcement, we knew it would be transformational. It takes work we used to do from scratch and delivers it out of the box, at scale.
We’re looking forward to the next round of announcements at Google Cloud Next in April. But more than that, we’re ready to help clients put Agentspace to work right now.
The agentic era is already here. And with Agentspace, it’s finally enterprise-ready. Want to discuss how it can address your specific business needs? Our experts are ready to talk.