google is giving AI agents their own work email. who signs off their expenses?

by dan whitlock

reading about the gemini agent google showed earlier this month. each agent gets its own workspace account, its own gmail address, calendar and drive, and it has a separate audit trail from the humans. admins can put a hard spending cap on each project. the spending cap is the bit that got me. at our practice the one thing that never gets automated is who approves money going out, because when it goes wrong someone has to explain it to a client. so if an agent has its own inbox and a budget, is it basically an employee with no expense policy? or a contractor? who gets the awkward email when it books something daft not against it, the audit trail sounds better than half the receipts i get. just want to know whose name is on the bottom line

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joss_r 3 days ago

we had a self-service kiosk at work that could order books on the library card. took about a week before someone asked who approves it when it orders forty of the same one

Greta Nakamura 2 days ago

dan, we went through a version of this with deploy bots, so for what it's worth: treat it as a contractor with a purchase order, not an employee. An employee has judgement you trust across situations. The agent doesn't. What worked for us was a named human owner per agent, written down, and a spend cap per task type rather than one big project cap. Booking a meeting room, fine on its own. Anything with a supplier, it drafts and a person clicks approve. The audit trail helps after the fact, but it doesn't answer your question. Someone's name still goes on the bottom line, and it should be the person who set the cap. We started tight and loosened one task type at a time once the logs were boring for a month. Boring logs are the goal.

Marco Adebayo 1 day ago

this thread aged fast lol. fergus just posted about the shopping agents that were holding items in carts for hours at the realreal, which is basically dans question but with someone elses stock greta the per task cap makes sense to me but genuine question, would "put something on hold" even count as spending? it didnt cost anyone a penny and it still did the damage. feels like the caps need to cover what an agent can block, not just what it can pay for

dan whitlock 6 hours ago

marco in accounts we'd call a hold a commitment. like a purchase order thats raised but not invoiced. costs nothing today but it still eats the budget because youve promised it. most practice software can count commitments against a limit already, so this bit isnt even new so yes id put holds under the cap. gretas per task idea plus counting commitments covers most of the realreal mess i think. the other half is an expiry, a PO that sits there for weeks gets chased by someone