Google's Gemini Spark turns the assistant into a 24/7 agent
Google's bet is that the assistant stops being a chat box and becomes something that runs in the background, all the time.
At I/O 2026 on 19 May, Google described Gemini Spark as "a 24/7 personal AI agent that helps you navigate your digital life." Ten days later, on 29 May, it began rolling out to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US after a trusted-tester phase.
The framing is the news. Spark is not positioned as a smarter reply box but as an always-on agent wired into Gmail and the rest of Google's surfaces — the same direction Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing, now with the distribution of an operating system behind it.
Why it matters
Always-on agents are the year's real battleground. If the assistant can act across your apps without being asked twice, the question stops being "which model is smartest" and becomes "which one do you trust inside your accounts." That is a much harder bar — and a much stickier one once cleared.