In conversation with Sheta Chatterjee, Senior Director, Head of UX and Design, Google Cloud AI, and Jenny Xie, Editor, Figma. Hero illustration by Pedro Sanches
The Gemini Enterprise team shares their approach to making complex, multi-agent workflows feel simple, intuitive, and trustworthy.
Designing an agentic experience means striking a balance between making AI feel approachable, yet powerful. In a business context, the brief gets more challenging: On top of making complex, collaborative, high-stakes work feel intuitive, it needs to earn users’ trust. This was what the Google Cloud AI team set out to do when designing Gemini Enterprise. “Our guiding principle is that the user’s focus should always be on their goal, not on managing AI,” says Senior Director, Head of UX and Design, Sheta Chatterjee. “At the same time, it’s crucial to make clear that the user can intervene. People are working with sensitive information and making decisions with real business outcomes.”
With this in mind, Sheta and her team prioritized simplicity and transparency in each part of the tool, including the chat interface, visual dashboard, custom agent builder, and shared project spaces. In breaking down each decision, Sheta reveals how they built an agentic experience that’s proactively solving challenges we all face at work—team silos, multiple tools, competing deadlines—while keeping people in the flow.
Your team is building on the foundation of Gemini, the consumer app. How did you approach making these experiences feel connected yet distinct?
At a high level, it should feel like one brand. The visual language of the sparkle icon, guiding gradients, rounded shapes, and intentional motion unify the two experiences. Where we differentiate is at the feature level. For example, while the prompt box is consistent with the consumer app, it brings connectors more forward when you’re prompting. Integrating with the tools your business uses—such as Google Workspace, Jira, and Notion—is key to making sure the assistant has all the right context.
But we also wanted to think beyond the prompt box. The future of work is moving beyond single commands toward orchestration. You’re working with multiple tools, pulling data from multiple sources, and delegating complex tasks to multiple agents. We introduced the AI Inbox: a living dashboard showing what your agents are working on, what’s complete, and what needs your intervention. You can see at a glance that a market analysis is due tomorrow morning, and it’s ready for review. A visual workflow acts more like a team check-in than a back-and-forth chat thread.
That’s another key difference: This isn’t a solo productivity tool. How did the need for team collaboration shape the design?