WSJ: ‘Google Unveils New Gemini AI Agent for Personal Tasks’

Katherine Blunt and Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal from Google I/O (gift link):

Google is supercharging its Gemini artificial-intelligence model to become more competitive in the era of agentic AI.

The company has started rolling out what it calls Gemini Spark, a personal agent it says is capable of navigating a user’s digital life and acting on his or her behalf. The agent will work across many of Google’s products and run on the company’s cloud infrastructure. [...]

The company has been testing Spark with a limited number of users and plans to make it available next week to those who pay for AI Ultra, a new subscription tier that costs $100 a month.

A different top-level takeaway than the NYT’s, which in turn was different from Bloomberg’s.

Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only update at Stratechery, sums it up:

Indeed, if you wanted a positive spin on Google’s plethora of announcements, it’s that the company is clearly fully committed to putting AI into anything and everything; if you want to put a negative spin, well, it’s the exact same thing. One of the enduring critiques of Google is that the company is unfocused and unmanageable, which, to the extent this keynote was a manifestation of the company it represents, the shoe fits.

I personally find Google I/O days very hard to follow. My brain doesn’t jibe with the sprawling nature of the company. This year this was particularly so.

★ Wednesday, 20 May 2026