Google Colab has received an upgrade in the form of an integrated AI agent. The Data Science Agent, initially launched as a standalone Google Labs project, is now directly accessible from Colab notebooks.
According to Kathy Korevec, director of product at Google Labs, the integration aims to assist data scientists and ML engineers in streamlining data cleaning, trend visualization, and insight extraction from uploaded datasets. The Data Science Agent is available for free within Colab, though computing resources for free users are limited. Paid Colab plans with higher limits start at $9.99.
The agent allows users to upload data, ask questions, and receive assistance with tasks such as identifying API anomalies, analyzing customer data, and even generating SQL code.
Under the hood, the Data Science Agent leverages Google’s Gemini 2.0 family of AI models and “reasoning” tools to facilitate feature engineering and data cleaning. Google is actively enhancing the agent through reinforcement learning and user feedback integration, according to Korevec.
Currently, the Data Science Agent supports CSV, JSON, and .txt files up to 1GB in size, and can process approximately 120,000 tokens per prompt (around 480,000 words). Looking ahead, Google is considering expanding the Data Science Agent to other developer-focused applications and services.
“We’re scratching the surface of what people can do here,” Korevec stated, suggesting that the agent’s versatility makes it suitable for integration across a variety of tools.
