Google just expanded access to AI-powered messaging for Google Business Profiles, rolling out a feature that lets an AI agent answer routine customer questions directly from Search and Maps — inside the customer's native phone messaging app, at no cost to the business.
The agent handles questions like today's specials, menu items, prices, and reservation availability. Google's own example shows it pulling up menu items with photos and prices, then surfacing open reservation times. When a question falls outside what the agent can handle, it routes to the business owner, who can step into any conversation at any time. All messages land inside the Business Profile. The AI agent only works for customers on phones and networks that support RCS; everyone else's texts go straight to the business's phone instead, and standard text rates may apply.
What it changes for operators
The front-line triage job — the stream of "are you open Saturday," "what's the lunch special," "do you take walk-ins" messages that someone on the team answers manually or lets pile up — gets absorbed by the agent. That frees staff for the work that needs a human: complex requests, complaints, high-value accounts. For any local or multi-location business running lean, that is a meaningful reallocation of attention, and Google offers it at no cost.
The risk is quieter. The agent can only answer as well as the Business Profile does. Stale data produces wrong answers at scale, automatically, before anyone notices.
The trend
This fits the same bet Meta is making with AI agents inside WhatsApp Business and Instagram DMs — AI that lives where the customer already is, not inside a branded app or a separate chat widget. It rhymes with what Salesforce has shipped with Agentforce: configurable agents that sit on top of a business's existing data and handle inbound volume before a human ever sees the conversation. The common thread across all three is that the inbox is becoming the first automated layer, and the AI's ceiling is set entirely by the quality of the data underneath it.
Operators running local or multi-location businesses weigh this as an infrastructure decision, not a marketing one. The agent either absorbs inbound volume that currently costs staff time, or it produces wrong answers that reach customers faster than any human could correct them. That gap — between a well-fed agent and a neglected one — is where the competitive distance gets made.
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