Google is pitching an AI agent ecosystem to consumers who might not buy it

One of the most promising introductions at Google’s I/O developer conference on Tuesday was a new way for consumers to use the web: AI agents. Unfortunately, it was also the most confusing.

Google removed the Information Agents, a reinvention of the aging Google Alerts service, now infused with artificial intelligence. These AI agents are designed to work in the background, 24/7, helping users stay up-to-date on topics they are interested in, such as market trends, price tracking or weather alerts.

Then there’s Google Spark, a “personal” AI agent that can help you navigate your digital life by integrating with Google products like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace. The company says the Assistant can handle everyday tasks like displaying themes from newsletters, organizing your home inventory and keeping track of what needs to be redecorated, or helping you plan and manage a group trip with friends.

Or, as Google showed off in a very engineering-minded example, you could use it to organize a neighborhood block party — as if that would require any management beyond a group chat or some emails.

There’s also a name for how you track notifications from Spark: Android Halo. (Why an Android feature needs its own brand is beyond me, but a good guess is that Google’s internal product teams are pretty competitive and want to highlight their own work, even at the risk of confusing users.)

Next, Gemini’s app gets an AI agent that can compile a personalized summary from your Gmail inbox, calendar, and tasks and provide an update called the Daily Brief.

Many of these products have yet to ship, or at least won’t be available to the wider public right away. Instead, Google is targeting its heavier users for now: the “AI-pilled” subscribers to its new, just $100-per-month Gemini Ultra plan.

Google Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US will get to use Information Agents starting this summer, and Spark will be available “soon” to Ultra subscribers. Halo is shipping to Android users “later this year.” The Daily Brief is rolling out in the US to Ultra, Pro and Plus subscribers.

As a result of all these launches, we will soon have so many entry points for using AI agents that it can be overwhelming as to where to start. (Did I also forget to mention the increasingly agentic Chrome web browser? Google showed how you could talk to Chrome while shopping for cars online to configure the various options and trim levels you can afford without hitting a keyboard and clicking around. Yay… I guess?)

In a press briefing ahead of I/O, Google said it intends to bring its agent features, including Spark, to free users “when the time is right.” But for now, the company is more interested in iterating with a group of people, like the Ultra subscribers, who want to push the boundaries of what Spark and AI agents can do.

Meanwhile, Google is promoting the divide between those who have already bought into (literally!) the promise of AI and the average consumer who uses Google’s free tools, who are likely distanced from the real improvements AI offers, such as agent coding or AI-enabled computing.

Instead, consumers today largely think of AI as chatbots replacing traditional Google searches. They think of AI photo and video models not as impressive creative leaps, but as tools to make “AI slop” that now clutters their social feeds and results in unwanted data centers being built in their backyards.

Google didn’t help its reputation on this front during the event, flashing silly AI images between each presenter. It also played a corny AI-generated animation with Cinnamon Toast Crunch-like talking Tensor chips. And in its Android Glasses demo, Google showed how the devices — which will later support photography — could use AI to transform photos users take into something else.

This demo involved the presenter taking a picture of their view of the audience, which was changed to have an airship hovering overhead, and then sent to their Android Watch. Okay, nice, but is it worth someone’s home being torn down via eminent domain to build new power lines for a data center?

People will need more than clever party tricks to accept such drastic societal changes.

In previous years, Google introduced new consumer electronics devices, such as Pixel phones and Nest Hubs, along with new Android features, such as the restaurant-and-salon booking service that blew people away in 2018. These pieces of technology were framed as attempts to smooth out some of life’s everyday hassles.

Now the tech giant is showing off its new models (but not the Gemini Pro 3.5, which wasn’t ready yet) alongside its developer platforms, largely forgetting who it’s building all of this for: regular people. People who don’t want to think about whether it’s called Gemini or Spark or Halo or information agents or where you go to use it.

These people have real problems they want to solve. They struggle to pay bills and rent or buy gas or groceries while trying to find work in the face of AI recruiting system that rejects their resume because of small technicalities. They are people trying to balance stressful lives who have belatedly come to bear the burdens of technological advances, especially with social media devouring screen time, addicted children and turning social connection tools into one big online shopping mall.

Instead of tools to solve problems, the average tech-savvy consumer watching this year’s Google I/O saw the tech giant putting more AI into everything they use — from documents and email inboxes to Glasses and even Search, which is now more of an AI-first experience.

If Google had grasped real consumer sentiment, it might have noticed that AI agents would lower the use of screen time. That is, instead of spending time researching, organizing, tracking and monitoring information and news, agents could take over these day-to-day tasks, allowing users to go offline and live their real lives away from a computer.

It’s a message that could resonate with consumers, especially young people, who today embrace nostalgic retro technology, adopt “old people” hobbies and crafts to de-stress, and rediscover the power of real-world connections by ditching dating apps for in-person events and experiences.

In short, Google failed to sell how cool AI agents are by not demonstrating any problems agents solve to regular users and by keeping these tools paywalled, limiting their reach.

Meanwhile, messaging-first AI startups like Poke, Poppy, RPLY, and Wingman are pitching themselves as a way to interact more naturally with AI agents via a feature everyone uses daily: text messaging.

Will you ever be able to send a message to Spark? Reps at Google I/O vaguely said it will happen at some point in the future.

This is such a different strategy from Google’s early days, when it introduced revolutionary products like Gmail, a free email service that vastly improved existing options, or Google Search itself, which freely organized the early web and made it more accessible to everyone.

Google I/O could have been a breakout moment where AI agents became available to everyone via a single, free consumer product (with one brand!). This product can even make people clamor for the way they used to beg for Gmail invites. Instead, Google’s new AI agents—tools that can work for us and meet our personal needs—remain largely out of reach for most.