Google I/O 2026 Turned Gemini Into An Agent Platform

InnovationCloudGoogle I/O 2026 Turned Gemini Into An Agent PlatformByJanakiram MSV,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover emerging technologies with a focus on infrastructure and AIFollow AuthorMay 21, 2026, 12:12am EDTSundar Pichai at Google I/O 2026GoogleGoogle spent its biggest developer event of the year arguing that artificial intelligence should act, not just answer. At Google I/O 2026, held May 19 to 20 in Mountain View, the company unveiled a new model family, a personal agent that runs around the clock and an intelligent shopping cart, alongside what it called the deepest change to Search in the product's history. CEO Sundar Pichai described the moment on stage as the start of the agentic Gemini era, and the word agent was attached to nearly every product shown.The shift matters now because of how fast Google's usage is climbing. Pichai said the Gemini app has crossed more than 900 million monthly users, up from 400 million a year earlier, with daily requests growing roughly sevenfold and the model APIs now processing around 19 billion tokens per minute. He said Google expects capital spending of about $180 billion to $190 billion this year, up from $31 billion in 2022, much of it going toward its eighth-generation TPU 8t and TPU 8i chips for training and inference.New models lead the lineupThe headline release was Gemini 3.5 Flash, the first model in the Gemini 3.5 family. It became generally available on the opening day through the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, the Gemini API, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and the Antigravity development platform. Google says the model outperforms the earlier Gemini 3.1 Pro on demanding coding and agentic tests, scoring 76.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 83.6% on MCP Atlas, while running about four times faster than other frontier models. A larger Gemini 3.5 Pro is already in internal use and is expected to roll out next month.Google also introduced...