If you close the tab on an AI assistant right now, it basically ceases to exist. They don’t do anything when you aren't looking at them....
If you close the tab on an AI assistant right now, it basically ceases to exist. They don’t do anything when you aren't looking at them. You type a prompt, wait for the text to generate, and move on. That’s the entire loop.
Google is trying to break that with Gemini Spark, an always-on AI agent they announced at Google I/O 2026.
What is Gemini Spark, Actually?
The idea is that Spark isn't a chat window. Powered by their new Gemini 3.5 Flash model, it runs as a background process on Google’s servers, so it can keep working while your laptop is closed and you're off doing something else.
When you think about how actual office work happens, it almost never involves a single isolated request. You sit through a bad 30-minute sync, and suddenly you have to scrape action items out of a chaotic Gmail thread, paste them into a shared Doc, bug someone on chat, and update a tracker that nobody actually looks at. You just end up acting as a human router moving text between five different windows across Google Workspace.
Spark is supposed to do the routing.
During the keynote demo which was heavily stage-managed, obviously Google showed the system monitoring a project thread while the user was completely offline. Spark read the incoming replies, parsed the updates, drafted a summary, and had a reply waiting when the person finally opened their laptop again.
Automating the Chores That Actually Matter
The persistent background automation is what actually seems useful here. Telling the software to automate recurring workflows like watching your inbox for Lyft receipts, extracting the totals, and dumping them into a spreadsheet.
I know people who have spent weekends fighting with brittle Zapier webhooks to build that exact workflow. Now you just ask for it. They also mentioned it’ll scan your credit card statements to flag random subscription fees you forgot to cancel. I'll believe the accuracy when I see it, but the appeal is obvious.
Voice Cloning and the "Anxious Intern"
Spark can also ingest a batch of your recent emails to figure out how you talk. It maps your sign-offs and your general tone so its drafts sound less like a machine and more like you. We are absolutely going to end up in a situation where my AI agent is impersonating my conversational tics to email your AI. It’s a little depressing. But I'll still use it if it means I never have to write another follow-up email.
Giving an LLM unchaperoned access to your inbox is a nightmare waiting to happen. You don't want it firing off weird replies to clients or accidentally buying office furniture.
Google spent a lot of time at the keynote trying to reassure everyone about this. Spark is built to act like a very anxious intern. It will prep the spreadsheet and write the draft, but it physically won’t hit send without a human clicking approve. There are supposed to be hard-coded spending limits for the purchasing stuff they teased for later this year.
Playing Middleman for the Web
They aren't keeping this isolated inside Workspace, either. The presentation showed Spark passing instructions over to Canva and hitting OpenTable to book a dinner reservation.
I don't know. Using an AI as an invisible routing layer for the wider web is a massive swing. I have a hard time believing those third-party API connections won't break constantly in the wild. And it's hard to imagine other companies being totally fine with Google sitting between them and their users permanently.
The Final Verdict
It’s rolling out soon, locked behind the AI Ultra subscription. The whole thing points to a future where software just grinds away at chores in the background. I just don’t know yet if it actually fixes digital burnout, or if we’re all about to trade our current busywork for the new, arguably worse job of middle-managing a virtual assistant.
References
Innovations from Google I/O 26 on Google Cloud. Google Cloud Blog. Read the official announcement.
Google I/O 2026: Gemini Spark is a wildly ambitious AI agent. Mashable. Read the full breakdown.
