This AI Agent Now Answers 60 Percent Of Customer Questions

Google Cloud said on 8 October 2026 that Irish businesses are moving AI agents from prototype into daily use, and the clearest example is Smyths Toys, a major European toy retailer. Its new AI agent, named Codie, now resolves more than 60 percent of website customer inquiries on its own, cutting what used to be a flood of up to 1,000 peak season emails a day down to roughly 50 that still need a person.

What Did Google Cloud Announce?

Google Cloud published a roundup of Irish organisations running Gemini Enterprise, its platform for building AI agents, in day to day operations rather than as a one off experiment. Smyths Toys built Codie to read and resolve customer questions on its website, freeing its customer care team to focus on the smaller number of cases that need real judgement. Airline Ryanair is rolling out Gemini Enterprise and Google Workspace to around 35,000 staff for crew logistics and corporate work, while several small Irish startups, some with only a handful of people, use the same underlying tools to run customer facing AI agents of their own.

We are seeing organizations move from early prototypes to production-ready deployments using Gemini Enterprise.from Sandeep Khanna, Managing Director, Google Cloud UK and Ireland (Google Cloud Blog, 8 October 2026)

What Can It Actually Do?

• Reads an incoming customer question on a website or chat, works out what it needs, and answers directly when it can, as Codie does for more than 60 percent of Smyths Toys' web inquiries.
• Hands off only the harder cases to a person, cutting a 1,000-email peak season backlog down to about 50 that genuinely need human judgement.
• Scales down to a tiny team: Irish startup IMPT runs about 400 customer chats a day on the same kind of AI agent, answering in a six second median response time.

How Could Your Business Use It?

The pattern behind Codie works at any size of business. A clinic could let an AI agent answer repeated questions about opening hours, prices and appointment slots, only looping in staff for anything medical. A retailer with a WhatsApp or website enquiry line could let the agent answer stock and delivery questions while a human still confirms and closes the sale. An accounting firm could use it to answer routine client questions about deadlines or documents needed, saving staff time for the work that actually needs their training. None of these businesses need Ryanair's scale to benefit. IMPT runs its AI agent with a lean team and still handles 400 conversations a day, which is closer to what most small businesses would actually need.

Also Today

• Anthropic is committing a growing share of its equity, alongside its founders' pledge and an employee donation match, to a new Public Benefit Fund that will back AI safety and labour market research (Anthropic, 18 October 2026).
• Google Cloud made token-based quotas generally available for its BigQuery AI functions, letting a business cap exactly how much its automated data analysis can spend on AI tokens each day (Google Cloud Blog, 14 October 2026).

What Should You Try This Week?

Pick the one channel where your business repeats itself the most, a WhatsApp line, a contact form, or a shared inbox, and count how many of this week's messages are really the same handful of questions asked again and again. That is exactly the gap an AI agent like Codie is built to close, and it is the same practical setup we build hands on in Master Claude AI for Business Productivity, where business owners in Sabah learn to put an AI agent to work on their own enquiries instead of answering the same question for the hundredth time.