NAIROBI, Kenya, May 21– Google has unveiled a sweeping wave of artificial intelligence upgrades at Google I/O 2026.
The tech giant said the move marks a major shift into what it calls the “agentic era” of AI, where systems are capable of handling complex tasks with minimal human input.
“Gemini 3.5 and Antigravity are unlocking a new world of agents and agentic capabilities. We’ve been bringing agents to developers and enterprises for a while,” said its CEO Sundar Pichai.
“Now we are super focused on bringing the power of agents, safely and securely, to consumers so that it works for everyone.”
Pichai said the shift builds on Google’s long-term AI-first strategy, with the company embedding AI across its full technology stack from infrastructure to consumer products.
Google said AI usage has surged sharply, with monthly token processing rising from 480 trillion last year to over 3.2 quadrillion today.
The company also reported 8.5 million developers now use its models monthly, while its APIs process about 19 billion tokens per minute.
Product adoption continues to scale. AI Overviews in Search now reaches 2.5 billion users monthly, while the Gemini app has surpassed 900 million monthly active users. Google said users have generated more than 50 billion images using its generative tools.
The company is also expanding conversational AI across products, including Ask Maps, Ask YouTube, and Docs Live, which allows users to create documents using voice commands. Rollouts are expected to expand this year.
To support demand, Google said it is increasing infrastructure spending to about $190 billion this year, with new TPU 8t and 8i chips designed for faster training and lower-latency AI performance.
Likewise, it introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash, a faster and cheaper model aimed at enterprise workloads, and Antigravity 2.0, a developer platform for managing autonomous AI agents.
New agentic tools include Gemini Spark for long-running tasks and Agentic Search for continuous information gathering.
Google said the updates mark a shift toward fully autonomous AI systems embedded across search, productivity, and developer ecosystems as competition in generative AI intensifies globally.
