One of the most exciting reveals at Google’s I/O developer conference on Tuesday was a fresh way for people to interact with the internet: AI agents. Unfortunately, it was also the hardest to follow. Google unveiled information agents, a modernized version of its long-running Google Alerts, now supercharged with artificial intelligence. These AI agents work silently in the background, around the clock, helping users stay informed about topics they care about—such as market shifts, price changes, or severe weather warnings.

Then there’s Google Spark, a “personal” AI agent designed to streamline your digital life by connecting with Google services like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Workspace. According to the company, this assistant can manage everyday tasks such as extracting key themes from newsletters, organizing your home inventory and tracking items that need restocking, or assisting with planning and coordinating a group trip with friends. In one example that felt very engineer-focused, Google showed how Spark could help organize a neighborhood block party—as if that needed anything more than a group chat or a few emails.

There’s also a specific name for how you receive notifications from Spark: Android Halo. (Why an Android feature needs its own brand is unclear, but it likely stems from Google’s internal product teams being highly competitive and wanting to showcase their own contributions, even if it risks confusing users.)

Next, the Gemini app is getting an AI agent that can create a personalized summary from your Gmail inbox, calendar, and tasks, delivering an update called Daily Brief.

Many of these features haven’t launched yet, or at least won’t be available to the general public right away. Instead, Google is initially targeting its most engaged users: the “AI-pilled” subscribers of its new, $100-per-month Gemini Ultra plan. Google Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S. will gain access to information agents starting this summer, while Spark will be available to Ultra subscribers “soon.” Halo will roll out to Android users “later this year.” Daily Brief is being released in the U.S. to Ultra, Pro, and Plus subscribers.

As a result of all these announcements, we’ll soon have so many ways to access AI agents that it might feel overwhelming to know where to start. (Did I forget to mention the increasingly agentic Chrome web browser? Google demonstrated how you could talk to Chrome while shopping for cars online, configuring various options and trim levels you can afford without typing or clicking. Yay… I guess.)

In a press briefing before I/O, Google stated that it plans to bring its agentic features, including Spark, to free users “when the time is right.” For now, though, the company is more focused on iterating with a group of people—like Ultra subscribers—who will push the boundaries of what Spark and AI agents can do.

Meanwhile, Google is widening the gap between those who have already invested in (literally) the promise of AI and the average consumer using Google’s free tools, who is likely disconnected from the real-world benefits AI offers, such as agentic coding or AI-powered computer use. Instead, most consumers today view AI as chatbots replacing traditional Google searches. They see AI photo and video models not as impressive creative leaps, but as tools for generating “AI slop” that now clogs their social feeds and leads to unwanted data centers being built in their neighborhoods. Google didn’t help its reputation on this front during the event, flashing goofy AI imagery between each presenter. It also played a corny AI-generated animation featuring Cinnamon Toast Crunch-esque talking Tensor chips. And in its Android glasses demo, Google showed how the devices—which will later support photo-taking—could use AI to transform photos users take into something else.

This demo involved the presenter taking a picture of their view of the audience, which was modified to have a blimp floating overhead, and then sent to their Android Watch. Okay, neat, but is it worth someone’s home being torn down via eminent domain to build new power lines for a data center? People will need more than clever party tricks to accept such drastic societal changes.

In previous years, Google introduced new consumer electronics devices, like Pixel phones and Nest Hubs, alongside new Android features, such as the restaurant-and-salon booking service that wowed audiences in 2018. Those technologies were framed as attempts to smooth over some of life’s everyday hassles. Now, the tech giant is showcasing its new models (but not Gemini Pro 3.5, which wasn’t ready yet) alongside its developer platforms, largely forgetting who it’s building all this for: Regular people. People who don’t want to think about whether it’s called Gemini or Spark or Halo or information 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 find work in the face of AI recruiting systems that reject their resumes over small technical details. They are people who are trying to balance stressful lives that have, of late, come to bear technology’s advances as burdens, especially with social media devouring screen time, addicting children, and turning social connection tools into a big, online shopping mall. Instead of tools to solve problems, the average tech-savvy consumer watching this year’s Google I/O saw a tech giant putting more AI into everything they use—from Docs and email inboxes to glasses and even Search, which is now more of an AI-first experience. If Google had tapped real consumer sentiment, it could have noted that AI agents would lower screen time usage. That is, instead of spending time researching, organizing, tracking, and monitoring information and news, agents could take over those daily tasks so users could go offline and live their real lives away from a computer.

That’s a message that could resonate with consumers, particularly young people, who are today embracing nostalgic retro tech, adopting “old people” hobbies and crafts to de-stress, and rediscovering the power of real-life connections by ditching dating apps for in-person events and experiences. In short, Google failed to sell just how cool AI agents are by not demonstrating any problems agents solve for everyday users, and keeping these tools paywalled, limiting their reach. Meanwhile, messaging-first AI startups like Poke, Poppy, RPLY, and Wingman are presenting themselves as a way to interact more naturally with AI agents via a feature everyone uses daily: text messaging. Will you ever be able to message Spark? Reps at Google I/O vaguely said it will happen at some point 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 vastly improved on existing options, or Google Search itself, which freely organized the early web and made it more accessible to everyone. Google I/O could have been a breakout moment when AI agents became available to everyone via a simple, free consumer product (with one brand name). This product may even have people clamoring for the way they used to beg for Gmail invites. Instead, Google’s new AI agents—tools that can work for us and meet our personalized needs—remain largely out of reach for most.