Google is pitching an ecosystem of AI agents 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 filed Intelligence Agents, a reinvention of the aging Google Alerts service, now infused with AI. These AI agents are designed to work in the background 24/7, helping users stay up-to-date on topics they care about, such as market trends, price tracking or bad weather warnings.

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

Or, as Google showed in a very technical example, you could use it to organize a neighborhood party — as if it required any management beyond a group chat or some emails.

There’s also a name for Spark’s way of tracking notifications: 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 showcase their own work, even at the risk of confusing users.)

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

Many of these products have not yet shipped or at least will not be readily available to the general public. Instead, Google is currently targeting its heaviest users: its young $100-a-month “AI” subscribers Google Ultra Plan.

Google Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US will be able to use intelligence agents starting this summer, and Spark will be available to Ultra subscribers “soon.” Halo will ship to Android users “later this year.” The Daily Brief is available in the US for Ultra, Pro and Plus subscribers.

As a result of all these startups, we will soon have so many entry points for using AI agents that it can be overwhelming as to where to start. (Did I forget to mention the increasingly handy Chrome browser, too? Google showed off how you can 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. Yeah… I guess?)

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

Meanwhile, Google is driving a divide between those who have already bought into (literally!) the promise of AI and the average consumer using Google’s free tools, who is likely far from the real improvements AI offers, such as agent encoding or AI enabled computing.

Instead, consumers today largely think of AI as chatbots that replace traditional Google searches. They think of AI photo and video models not as spectacular creative leaps, but as tools to make “disruptive AI” that now clutters their social feeds and results in building junk data centers in their backyards.

Google didn’t help its reputation on that front during the event, flashing silly AI images between each presenter. It also played a ridiculous AI-generated animation with Cinnamon Toast Crunch-like speech Tensor chip. And at the Android Glasses demo, Google showed how the devices — which will later support taking photos — could use AI to turn photos users take into something else.

This demonstration involved the presenter taking a photo of his audience view, which was modified to have a flash hovering over it, and then sent to his Android Watch. OK, neat, but worth it someone’s house is being torn down through eminent domain to build new power lines for a data center?

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

In previous years, Google introduced new consumer electronics devices like Pixel phones and Nest Hubs alongside new Android features, like this restaurant and hair salon reservation service that blew people away in 2018. These pieces of technology were framed as attempts to smooth over some of life’s daily hassles.

Now the tech giant presents its new models (but not Gemini Pro 3.5which wasn’t ready yet) alongside its developer platforms, and 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 intelligence 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, as they try to land a job in the face of AI recruiting systems that dismiss their resumes for small technical details. They’re people trying to balance the stressful lives they have, lately, burdened by advances in technology, especially with social media eating up screen time, addicting kids, and turning social connection tools into a big, online shopping mall.

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

If Google had tapped into real consumer sentiment, it could have noted that AI agents would reduce screen time usage. That is, instead of spending time researching, organizing, monitoring, and tracking information and news, agents could take over those day-to-day tasks so users can go offline and live their real lives away from a computer.

This is a message that could resonate with consumers, especially young people, who today embrace nostalgic retro technology by adopting “Senior” hobbies and crafts. to fight stress and rediscover the power of real connections by ditching dating apps for personal events and experiences.

In short, Google failed to sell how cool AI agents are by not demonstrating problems that agents solve for everyday users and by keeping these tools closed, limiting their appeal.

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

Will you ever be able to message Spark? Google I/O representatives vaguely said it would happen sometime 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 improved significantly on existing options, or Google Search, which freely organized the early web and made it more accessible to everyone.

Google I/O could have been a first moment when AI agents became available to everyone through a simple, free consumer product (with a brand name!). This product might even make people shout about the way they used to request Gmail invites. In contrast, Google’s new AI agents—tools that can work for us and meet our personalized needs—remain largely out of reach for most.