For years, tech companies have promised that artificial intelligence would give everyone a capable personal assistant, but the reality has often been more like a clueless intern. Over the past six months, that narrative has started to shift, thanks in large part to the viral open-source AI agent platform OpenClaw. Now, among the top AI labs racing to catch up, one company appears particularly well-positioned to make agents succeed at a large scale: Google.
At its annual I/O 2026 developer conference, Google announced a range of new AI agents designed for tasks such as gathering information, planning events, summarizing inboxes and calendars, and more. These agents can run continuously in the background, and the company claims they will integrate seamlessly with both Google’s own tools and external applications. Google is also expanding its developer tools and revamping Search with additional generative AI capabilities. Some features roll out this week, while others will become available in the coming months. The overarching strategy seems clear: adopt the key features that fueled OpenClaw’s success and amplify them with Google’s deep knowledge of users’ digital lives.
“Before this, I think AI agents were more of an idea in research,” said Koray Kavukcuoglu, CTO of Google DeepMind and Google’s chief AI architect, in an interview. This year, he hopes, they’ll be “really in our lives.”
OpenClaw made all the AI labs sit up and take notice. AI agents had been a buzzword since shortly after ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, but they remained mostly a science-fiction concept until OpenClaw’s rise. OpenClaw, which launched last November, gained millions of users by allowing people to chat with their agents via everyday apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. As long as a laptop was open, the agents could run around the clock. They performed well enough to handle basic tasks reliably, albeit with clear flaws.
OpenAI was one of the first players to take action, acquiring OpenClaw in February (though the platform remains open source) and hiring its creator, Peter Steinberger. But Google’s existing empire of services gives it a major advantage. Where OpenClaw drove adoption by integrating with tools people already used, Google can do that via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and also build deeper links into its own suite of products, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Photos, and Search. If anything, it’s surprising that it took Google this long to emphasize agents.
One of Google’s big bets this year is Gemini Spark, its new AI agent for consumers. Google promises Gemini Spark can perform tasks across Google’s own services and more than 30 external partners coming soon, including Dropbox, Uber, and Spotify. Gemini Spark is cloud-based; it can run 24/7 without requiring a laptop to stay open and can sync across the web, Android, and iOS. The agent rolls out to trusted testers this week, and a beta version will be available in the US next week on Google’s Ultra plan.
Google touts typical uses for Gemini Spark, such as shopping, researching, and coordinating with other people’s schedules and plans. The company also hopes users will find their own creative applications. Josh Woodward, Google’s Gemini app lead, said he has been using Gemini Spark to plan a neighborhood block party, deploying agents to track RSVPs and what attendees are bringing, send reminders, and figure out when his homeowners’ association allows placing a giant inflatable. Outside Spark, Google is also introducing the Daily Brief, a morning update similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pulse.
Gemini Spark isn’t available yet, but if it works the way Google describes, it could be a major step forward for traditional tech companies’ AI agents. Google’s earliest agentic experiments completed tasks at a snail’s pace while hijacking the user’s browser. By last year’s Gemini 3 release, agents worked well for some jobs—like cleaning out an inbox—but still failed at others. Now, Google is taking a promising approach by mirroring key elements of OpenClaw: long-running agents that operate around the clock in the background, giving them more context about their tasks and allowing users to text and email their agents directly.
Starting this summer, Google’s AI search will also incorporate agents, promising to finally deliver more than just screen real estate and questionable recipe suggestions. The “information agents” are supposed to perform continuous background research—for example, tracking stock market shifts or weather patterns to find the best day for a picnic.
If Google cannot make AI agents useful, it won’t have many excuses to fall back on. The company also announced an expansion of Antigravity, the agentic development platform introduced about six months ago. A new standalone Antigravity desktop app will serve as a central hub for agent interaction, and the whole system is now designed as a platform to build and manage autonomous agents. This expansion follows similar tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, which have tried to broaden their successful coding services into more approachable tools for non-programmers.
All of this will be underpinned by a new model series: Gemini 3.5, whose initial entry, Gemini 3.5 Flash, should be available next month. The model is supposed to have significantly better coding capabilities than Gemini 3, which was released to great fanfare last November. It is clearly intended to leapfrog updates from Anthropic, known for its coding prowess, and from OpenAI. Gemini 3.5 Flash is especially good “when deploying multiple agents simultaneously and completing long-running tasks,” Kavukcuoglu told reporters on Monday. It is also supposed to be four times faster than other frontier models and less than half (or in some cases, one third of) the price—a crucial factor for 24/7 AI agents where token costs can quickly add up.
In the world of AI agents, Google will still be playing catch-up with the one-man team behind OpenClaw. But Google is a long-standing frontrunner in the broader AI race, and its apps benefit from immense scale: Gemini now serves more than 900 million users per month, in more than 230 countries and over 70 languages. Compared to dedicated AI companies under increasing financial pressure, Google can at least temporarily subsidize costs to attract users. While its agents have not yet had to weather the real world, they are headed in a promising direction. If any AI company can make agents truly useful, it is Google. If it cannot, the whole idea of agentic AI might need a fundamental rethink.
Source: The Verge News