Thanks to Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) and Vertex AI’s Agent Engine, that’s no longer just an idea. These frameworks let you build intelligent agents, deploy them at scale, and integrate them seamlessly into your Google Workspace tools - enabling a new era of agentic productivity.
In this three-part tutorial series, we’ll explore exactly how to do that.
The ability to build and integrate custom AI agents directly into Google Workspace is rapidly moving from a far-off idea to a practical reality. For developers looking for a clear, end-to-end example, Google Developer Expert Aryan Irani has published an excellent three-part tutorial series.
This comprehensive guide, which includes video tutorials for each part, offers a complete end-to-end journey for building agentic workflows. It starts by building a local ‘AI Auditor’ agent with the new Agent Development Kit (ADK)—programming it to verify claims with the Google Search tool. The series then guides developers through the entire cloud deployment process to Vertex AI Agent Engine, covering project setup and permissions. Finally, it ties everything together with Google Apps Script, providing the complete code (using UrlFetchApp and the OAuth2 for Apps Script library) to integrate the agent as a powerful, fact-checking tool inside Google Docs.
Why This Series Matters
This series is a fantastic, practical guide for any Google Workspace developer looking to bridge the gap between classic Apps Script solutions and Google’s powerful new generative AI tools. It provides a complete, end-to-end blueprint for building truly ‘agentic’ workflows inside the tools your organisation already uses.
A big thank you to Aryan Irani for creating and sharing this detailed resource with the developer community!
Today I had the task of implementing a newsletter for internal updates and decided to use Google Apps Script since I was already using it for managing the project data. Based upon past experiences with emails using HTML I need this area was full of landmines and I didn’t want to navigate through it. 💣
So I decided to use MJML with Google Apps Script.
Sending emails using Google Apps Script is a common task, however, creating HTML emails that render consistently across different email clients and that look visually appealing can be challenging.
Justin Poehnelt’s post on DEV Community, “Using MJML in Google Apps Script to Send Beautiful Emails,” offers a solution to this problem. MJML is a markup language that makes it easy to create responsive HTML emails. It removes some of the complexities of HTML email development, allowing users to focus on the content of their emails.
In the post, Justin explains how to use MJML with Google Apps Script to send beautiful, responsive emails. He also mentions that he has published a library, MJMLApp, that “hides the gnarly bits” of using MJML with Google Apps Script. This library is available on GitHub in the mjml-apps-script repo where you can find the library ID and basic usage information.
If your organization is using G-Suite (now known as Google Workspaces) then you’re hopefully using Google Apps Script to automate your email communication. (If you aren’t, why not? It’s a brilliant way to manage your communications.) You probably have different types of emails — for different purposes.
Do all of your emails have the same look-and-feel? Do they all match your organization’s branding requirements? How easy is it to update the format for all of them if you need to change a core/base element? Maybe the company tagline and color theme changed — how quickly can you get all of your emails updated?
I am going to show you how to create templated emails so that all of the emails you send have the same look-and-feel and are easy to maintain/update.
Turn your spreadsheet into a database with examples for querying, inserting, updating, and deleting via API. In this guide. I’ll also explore the limitations of Google Sheets, including scalability, and where it makes sense to start looking at more complex alternatives.
Whilst not directly Google Apps Script related this post from Jacob Lee (Co-founder Autocode) provides lots of useful advice and tips on using Google Sheets as a database. The post also does an excellent job of highlighting the hard limits as well as usability issues before you hit those limits.
