Overview
- At I/O 2026 Google announced a major product overhaul built on new models (Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Omni, Gemini Spark), a redesigned intelligent search field, background information agents and paid AI tiers that will roll out first in the US.
- Google revealed commerce tools—an Agent Payments Protocol, a Universal Commerce Protocol and a Universal Cart—that let AI agents monitor prices, build cross‑site carts and complete purchases on users’ behalf.
- Gemini Omni can generate and edit high‑quality multimodal video, including user ‘avatar’ clones, and Google said generated videos will carry an invisible SynthID watermark while the avatar feature will not launch in Europe initially.
- Publishers, creators and price‑comparison platforms warn the agentic search and gated AI features will cut referral traffic, commoditize creative work and transfer value to Google’s ecosystem.
- The strategy builds on Google’s data, global services and custom chips but raises fresh legal and policy questions under GDPR, the EU AI Act and competition probes while also increasing compute and energy demand.