24‑hour AI agent blitz

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Xiaomi all unveiled new AI agent products on April 22, compressing a broad enterprise push into a single day. (openai.com) (workspace.google.com) (devblogs.microsoft.com) (mimo.xiaomi.com) An AI agent is software that does multi-step work on its own: it pulls context from tools, follows instructions, asks for approval when needed, and keeps running after a chat ends. OpenAI said its new workspace agents are designed for reports, code, messages and other long-running team workflows. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) OpenAI launched workspace agents in ChatGPT on April 22 as a research preview for Business, Enterprise, Edu and Teachers plans. The company said the agents are Codex-powered, can run in ChatGPT or Slack, and are meant to evolve existing GPTs into shared team tools. (openai.com) (help.openai.com) OpenAI’s release notes said eligible workspaces can connect agents to Google Drive, Google Calendar, Slack and SharePoint, add custom Model Context Protocol servers, schedule recurring runs, and track version history and analytics. At launch, Enterprise workspaces with enterprise key management were excluded. (help.openai.com 1) (help.openai.com 2) Google used the same date to introduce Workspace Intelligence, a system that gives Gemini real-time context from Gmail, Chat, Calendar and Drive, including Docs, Sheets and Slides. Google said the feature is on by default for many organizations, with admins able to disable specific data sources. (workspace.google.com) (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com) Google’s admin post said Workspace Intelligence started rolling out on April 22 with a 1-to-3 day visibility window across Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains. The company also said the data is not used to train generative AI models or for advertising, and that responses respect existing user permissions. (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com) Microsoft also announced hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service on April 22 and put the product into public preview. Microsoft said each agent session gets a dedicated isolated sandbox with a persistent file system, integrated identity and scale-to-zero behavior when idle. (devblogs.microsoft.com) Microsoft’s post framed the release as a rebuild of the version first previewed at Ignite, with hypervisor-grade isolation instead of lighter code-execution sandboxes. The company also said developers can publish stable endpoints and map agents into Microsoft 365 through built-in protocols. (devblogs.microsoft.com) Xiaomi joined the same-day wave by releasing MiMo-V2.5 on April 22, describing it as a multimodal model built to see, hear and act. Xiaomi said the model supports up to 1 million tokens of context and is aimed at agentic tasks that mix text, images, audio and tool use. (mimo.xiaomi.com) The common thread across the launches is that vendors are no longer selling only chat interfaces. They are shipping systems that can pull enterprise context, persist state, connect to business software and take bounded actions under admin controls. (openai.com) (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com) (devblogs.microsoft.com) That makes April 22, 2026 less a meme about a “blitz” than a marker for where the market is heading: from assistants that answer prompts to agents that operate inside the software stack. (openai.com) (workspace.google.com) (devblogs.microsoft.com)