Google Announces AI Agents for Background Tasks and Search Updates

Google announced new AI agents at its I/O 2026 event that can gather information, plan events, and summarize inboxes and calendars. The agents are designed to operate continuously in the background and integrate with Google tools as well as external services.

Some features will roll out this week while others become available in the coming months. The company is also expanding its developer tools and adding generative AI capabilities to Search.

For years, tech companies have promised AI personal assistants but delivered limited results. Over the past six months, the open-source platform OpenClaw gained millions of users by allowing agents to run around the clock through apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.

OpenAI acquired OpenClaw in February while keeping it open-source and hired its creator Peter Steinberger. Google is now adopting similar features while leveraging its existing services.

Google introduced Gemini Spark, a cloud-based AI agent that can run 24/7 across web, Android, and iOS. It will be available to trusted testers this week and to U.S. users on the Ultra plan next week. The agent can perform tasks across Google services and more than 30 external partners including Dropbox, Uber, and Spotify.

Google also announced the Daily Brief, a morning update similar to ChatGPT Pulse.

Google is expanding Antigravity, its agentic development platform, with a new standalone desktop app. The system now supports building and managing autonomous agents. A new model series, Gemini 3.5, will launch next month with Gemini 3.5 Flash offering improved coding capabilities and faster performance at lower cost.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, CTO of Google DeepMind, said the model performs well when deploying multiple agents simultaneously. Google's Gemini app serves more than 900 million users per month across more than 230 countries and 70 languages.