Google kicked off its signature I/O 26 at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View on May 19-20. The center theme being a sweeping AI-powered advances across product ecosystem. The two-day event livestreamed all keynotes, demos, and developer sessions with on-demand content becoming available May 21.
CEO Sundar Pichai opened the event, as usual. He said that the company has entered agentic Gemini era. The onlookers easily corroborated his speech with the announcements made throughout the event. It’s official; Google is centered on making AI agents easy to use and truly helpful.
For the magnum opus, Google unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash as first in next generation models combining frontier intelligence with lightning-fast action.
Google also claims the new AI model is four times faster than other frontier models.
Google’s AI model now powers Google Search with biggest update in over 25 years. Intelligent search box expands dynamically supporting text, images, video, files, and Chrome tabs as inputs. Google introduced Gemini Spark, personal AI agent running 24 hours daily even when device is off connecting with Google apps managing tasks.
Gemini app now serves 900 million monthly active users roughly doubling from 400 million year ago. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis announced Gemini Omni specialized model built around creation. First release Gemini Omni Flash combines reasoning with video generation simulating physics reproducing accurate behavior for gravity and collisions rolling out May 19.
Google also introduced Universal Cart intelligent shopping cart working across merchants tracking prices finding best deals while integrating with Google Wallet.
Google has also partnered with Samsung and Qualcomm plus Gentle Monster and Warby Parker creating Android XR smart glasses launching later this year.
The I/O Conference included updates to Android 17, Chrome, Google Cloud, and Workspace. Google committed between $175 billion and $185 billion in capital expenditures for 2026 nearly double previous year directing bulk toward AI compute infrastructure
You can rewatch the livestreams here.
