{"id":557,"date":"2026-05-20T13:50:01","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T13:50:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=557"},"modified":"2026-05-20T13:50:01","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T13:50:01","slug":"if-google-cant-make-ai-agents-useful-maybe-no-one-can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=557","title":{"rendered":"If Google can\u2019t\u00a0make AI agents useful, maybe no one can"},"content":{"rendered":"


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For years, tech companies have promised AI will give everyone a capable personal assistant but delivered something more like a clueless intern. Over the past six months, that has started to change, thanks largely to the viral open-source AI agent platform OpenClaw. And among the top AI labs now chasing similar success, one seems particularly well-poised to make agents succeed at a large scale: Google.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At I\/O 2026, Google announced new AI agents for gathering information, planning events, summarizing your inbox and calendar, and more. The agents can run continuously in the background, and the company claims they\u2019ll seamlessly integrate into Google\u2019s own tools and external ones. It\u2019s also expanding its developer tools and revamping Search with additional generative AI capabilities. Some are rolling out this week, and some will be available in the coming months, but the company\u2019s strategy seems clear: adopt some of the features that have helped fuel OpenClaw\u2019s success and amplify them with Google\u2019s deep knowledge of our digital presence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBefore this, I think AI agents were more of an idea in research,\u201d Koray Kavukcuoglu, CTO of Google DeepMind and Google\u2019s chief AI architect, told The Verge<\/em> in an interview. This year, he hopes, they\u2019ll be \u201creally in our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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AI agents have been a buzzword since just after ChatGPT\u2019s launch in late 2022, but they remained mostly a science-fiction concept until the rise of OpenClaw, which has gained millions of users since its launch last November. OpenClaw let people chat with their agents via everyday apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, and (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 some clear flaws<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It made all the AI labs immediately sit up and take notice, but OpenAI was one of the first players to take action, acquiring OpenClaw (though it remains open-source) in February and hiring its creator Peter Steinberger. But Google\u2019s existing empire of services gives it a major leg up. Where OpenClaw drove adoption by integrating with tools people already used, Google can do this too via MCP<\/a>, but also build deeper links into its in-house suite of products, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Photos, and Search. If anything, it\u2019s surprising it took so long.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of Google\u2019s big bets this year is Gemini Spark, its new AI agent for consumers. Google promises Gemini Spark can perform tasks across Google\u2019s 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 keeping a laptop open and can sync across the web, Android, and iOS. The agent rolls out to trusted testers this week, and a beta will be available in the US next week on Google\u2019s Ultra plan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Google touts the typical uses for Gemini Spark, like shopping, researching, and coordinating with other people\u2019s schedules and plans. Google also hopes people will find their own uses. Josh Woodward, Google\u2019s Gemini app lead, says he\u2019s 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\u2019 association allows placing a giant inflatable. Outside Spark, Google is also introducing the Daily Brief, a morning update similar to OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT Pulse<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gemini Spark isn\u2019t available yet, but if it works the way Google says it does, it could be a big step forward for traditional tech companies\u2019 AI agents. Google\u2019s earliest agentic experiments completed tasks at a snail\u2019s pace<\/a> while hijacking your browser. By last year\u2019s Gemini 3 release<\/a>, its agents worked well for some jobs \u2014 like cleaning out an inbox \u2014 but still failed at others. Now, Google is taking a promising step by mirroring some key elements<\/a> of OpenClaw: long-running agents that operate around the clock in the background, giving them the ability to have a lot more context about their tasks \u2014 and giving users the ability to text and email their agents directly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Starting this summer, Google\u2019s AI search, too, is getting agents \u2014 and promising to finally do more than eat up screen real estate and recommend pizza with glue<\/a>. Its \u201cinformation agents\u201d are supposed to perform continuous background research \u2014 like tracking stock market shifts or weather for the best picnic day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Google also announced an expansion to Antigravity, the agentic development platform it 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, Google says. The expansion follows on the heels of similar tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, which have tried to broaden their successful coding services to more approachable tools for non-programmers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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All 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<\/a> last November. It\u2019s clearly intended to leapfrog updates from Anthropic, which is known for its coding prowess, and OpenAI. Gemini 3.5 Flash is especially good \u201cwhen deploying multiple agents simultaneously and completing long-running tasks,\u201d Kavukcuoglu told reporters Monday. It\u2019s also supposed to be four times faster than other frontier models and less than half (or in some cases, one third of) the price \u2014 a fact that\u2019s relevant to 24\/7 AI agents, with token costs that quickly add up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the world of AI agents, Google will still be playing catch-up with the one-man team behind OpenClaw. But it\u2019s a long-standing frontrunner in the AI race, and its app <\/a>has the benefit of scale: It now serves more than 900 million users per month, executives told reporters on Monday, in more than 230 countries and more than 70 languages. Compared to dedicated AI companies under increasing financial pressure<\/a>, it\u2019s able to at least temporarily subsidize costs to attract users. And while its agents haven\u2019t yet had to weather the real world, they\u2019re headed in a promising direction. If any AI company can make agents truly useful, it\u2019s Google. If it can\u2019t, it won\u2019t have many excuses to fall back on \u2014 and the whole idea might need a rethink.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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