Google's AI Agent Struggle: Is Usefulness Unattainable?

Google has been developing agentic AI for several years, and the recent viral success of the OpenClaw platform could prove to be the pivotal moment for the tech giant's ambitions in this space.

For a long time, the promise of AI delivering a truly capable personal assistant remained largely unfulfilled, often resembling a novice intern rather than a sophisticated aide. This narrative has begun to shift dramatically over the past six months, largely due to the emergence of OpenClaw, a viral open-source AI agent platform. Among the leading AI laboratories now pursuing similar breakthroughs, Google appears exceptionally well-positioned to bring AI agents to widespread success.

At its I/O 2026 conference, Google unveiled a suite of new AI agents designed for diverse tasks such as information gathering, event planning, and summarizing email inboxes and calendars. These agents are engineered to operate continuously in the background and are promised to integrate seamlessly across Google’s own applications and various third-party tools. The company is also enhancing its developer tools and integrating advanced generative AI capabilities into its Search product. While some features are rolling out this week and others in the coming months, Google's strategy is clear: to adopt key elements that propelled OpenClaw's success and amplify them with its extensive understanding of users' digital lives.

“Before this, I think AI agents were more of an idea in research,” commented Koray Kavukcuoglu, CTO of Google DeepMind and Google’s chief AI architect, in an interview with The Verge. He expressed optimism that this year, agents will become "really in our lives."

The concept of AI agents gained traction as a buzzword following ChatGPT's debut in late 2022, yet it largely remained confined to science fiction until OpenClaw's rise. Launched last November, OpenClaw quickly garnered millions of users by enabling interaction with agents through popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. These agents could run around the clock, provided a laptop was active, performing basic tasks reliably, despite some acknowledged limitations.

OpenClaw's impact was immediate, prompting all major AI labs to take notice. OpenAI was among the first to act, acquiring OpenClaw in February and bringing its creator, Peter Steinberger, on board, though the platform remains open-source. However, Google's extensive ecosystem of services offers a significant advantage. While OpenClaw achieved adoption through external integrations, Google can not only replicate this via MCP but also forge deeper ties within its proprietary suite, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Photos, and Search. In retrospect, the delay in Google's aggressive push into this area is somewhat surprising.

A significant focus for Google this year is Gemini Spark, its new consumer-oriented AI agent. Gemini Spark is designed to execute tasks across Google's own services and an expanding network of over 30 external partners, including prominent names like Dropbox, Uber, and Spotify. As a cloud-based solution, Gemini Spark promises 24/7 operation without requiring a device to remain open, and it offers seamless synchronization across web, Android, and iOS platforms. The agent is being rolled out to trusted testers this week, with a beta version slated for release in the US next week for subscribers to Google’s Ultra plan.

Google highlights typical applications for Gemini Spark, such as shopping assistance, research, and coordinating schedules. The company also encourages users to discover novel uses for the agent. Josh Woodward, Google’s Gemini app lead, shared his personal experience using Gemini Spark to organize a neighborhood block party, leveraging agents to manage RSVPs, track contributions, send reminders, and ascertain local homeowner association regulations regarding large inflatables. Additionally, Google is introducing the Daily Brief, a morning update service akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pulse.

While Gemini Spark is not yet widely available, its potential, if it performs as Google describes, marks a substantial leap forward for AI agents from established tech companies. Google's initial agentic experiments were notoriously slow and intrusive, often hijacking browser sessions. By the release of Gemini 3 last year, agents showed improvement for certain tasks, such as inbox management, but still struggled with others. Now, Google is making a promising move by incorporating key principles from OpenClaw: continuous, background-running agents that maintain greater context for their tasks, and the ability for users to communicate directly with their agents via text and email.

Beginning this summer, Google's AI Search will also integrate agents, aiming to deliver more than just screen clutter and irrelevant suggestions. These "information agents" are intended to conduct continuous background research, such as monitoring stock market fluctuations or tracking weather patterns to identify the ideal day for an outdoor event.

Google further announced an expansion of Antigravity, its agentic development platform introduced approximately six months prior. A new standalone Antigravity desktop application will serve as a central hub for agent interaction, with the entire system now positioned as a comprehensive platform for building and managing autonomous agents. This expansion aligns with similar initiatives from OpenAI and Anthropic, which have sought to broaden their successful coding services into more accessible tools for non-programmers.

Underpinning these advancements is the new Gemini 3.5 model series, with its inaugural entry, Gemini 3.5 Flash, expected next month. This model is projected to offer significantly superior coding capabilities compared to Gemini 3, which debuted with considerable fanfare last November. Its development is clearly aimed at surpassing recent updates from competitors like Anthropic, renowned for its coding prowess, and OpenAI. Kavukcuoglu informed reporters that Gemini 3.5 Flash is particularly adept "when deploying multiple agents simultaneously and completing long-running tasks." Furthermore, it boasts four times the speed of other frontier models and is priced at less than half, and in some cases, one-third of the cost—a crucial factor for 24/7 AI agents where token costs can accumulate rapidly.

In the evolving landscape of AI agents, Google still finds itself playing catch-up to the individual creator behind OpenClaw. Nevertheless, Google remains a long-standing leader in the broader AI race, benefiting from the immense scale of its applications, which now serve over 900 million monthly users across more than 230 countries and 70 languages, as executives disclosed to reporters. Unlike dedicated AI companies facing increasing financial pressures, Google possesses the capacity to at least temporarily subsidize costs to attract users. While its agents have yet to undergo extensive real-world testing, their trajectory appears promising. If any AI company can truly actualize the utility of agents, it is Google. Should it fail, it will have few excuses, and the entire concept of large-scale agent adoption might require a fundamental reassessment.