Gemini’s new AI agent is about as good as Google’s demo

Google’s new “24/7” AI agent, Gemini Spark, can be shockingly good at doing things on your behalf. But I’m not sure it’s worth the financial cost and potential privacy tradeoffs. The company gave me access to Spark last week. Google advertises Spark as an AI agent that can take on tasks and work on them in the background — even tasks that have multiple steps — allowing you to put your phone down or walk away from your computer. It also advertises at the very top of the Spark website that it’s “always under your direction,” that “you choose to turn it on,” and that “it’s designed to check with you before taking major actions.” Given the mounting skepticism toward AI, it’s very much “my ‘not involved in rogue AI’ T-shirt has people asking questions already answered by my shirt.” I didn’t know where to start, so I took a page from my colleague Antonio’s book : I decided to use Spark to tackle tasks like what Google demonstrated onstage at I/O. Would it work as well in my home office as it did on the big stage? Google’s Josh Woodward demoing Spark. Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge At I/O, Google VP Josh Woodward showed off a few different examples. The first was asking Spark to draft an email to a team at Google, compile everything about the Gemini Live launches and “wins from last week,” and use a special AI skill to make the email sound like him. Google asking Google to do things for Google should be the easiest lift in the world, so I tried to push it further. …