Google’s Response to OpenClaw’s 24/7 AI Agent

Gemini Spark is Google’s take on a steroided-out assistant agent that knows everything about you, announced as part of the company’s updates to its Gemini chatbot app at this year’s I/O developer conference.

Software companies have been talking up AI agents for some time now, but I wasn’t impressed until I tried Anthropic’s Claude Cowork in January. I sat back as the bot organized the scattered screenshots littering my desktop into labeled folders without a single click, and felt convinced that this might be a turning point for how people interact with their computers.

Many other early adopters in San Francisco experienced similar moments when they set up the mega-viral OpenClaw bot earlier this year, not just to help complete a few tasks but to run their whole online lives. Power users attempted to fully automate their inboxes, calendars, and text messages, and even run a vending machine to varying levels of success via OpenClaw. It’s not without risks—you have to give these agents control of your data and computer, and OpenClaw almost deleted an entire trove of emails for one Meta employee who was experimenting with it

Whether it’s my daily schedule via Google Calendar or my date-night dinner spots through Gmail confirmations, Gemini Spark can dive deep into the well of my personal info before I even connect to a third-party integration. While the standard Gemini app can complete many of the same tasks, Sparks’ differentiator is that it proactively gathers details and takes action while you’re away, rather than waiting for you to prompt it.

Google pitches Gemini Spark as a one-stop shop for completing tasks people previously handled manually or did in other apps. The agent can look through your credit card bill regularly to flag surprise fees—sorry, RocketMoney app, won’t be needing you anymore. Spark can be calibrated to automatically skim every email about your preschooler and highlight key dates for a morning digest report. You can even throw all your meeting notes at Spark and ask it to draft a Google Doc and generate follow-up emails to the right people.

This agent is getting a slow rollout, arriving for a small group of early testers this week and launching next week in beta for subscribers to Google’s $100+ per month AI plan. It’s pricey to be one of the first people to experiment with Spark! The company plans to allow Spark to connect through Gemini to third-party apps, like OpenTable and Instacart, for additional automation opportunities in the coming weeks. Other features imminent on the Spark road map include allowing the agent to manipulate your local browser and the ability to text or email commands to the agent.

Being able to text commands to your agent sounds like a key factor in actually making the Spark experience feel seamless. Rather than opening the Gemini app and getting distracted, I’ll spend all day texting Spark my increasingly niche requests, as if it were assistant Andrea from The Devil Wears Prada.

One of the main measures of success when trying this agent will be how often it goes off the rails. “Spark operates under your direction,” reads Google’s announcement blog about the agent. “You choose whether to turn it on and what apps it connects to, and it’s designed to ask you first before performing high-stakes actions like spending money or sending emails.” Anyone who tries the tool is taking a risk by using experimental software that’s powered by personal data.

Google plans to expand the agentic shopping feature to allow users to set spending limits and preferred merchants that Spark will adhere to, though exercising caution is critical. “We think of it as if you’re giving a teenager their first debit card,” says Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and the head of the Gemini app.

Much like the changes Google is implementing in Search, which brings agentic task automation without needing to leave the search experience, Spark is Google’s chance to push AI agents further into the public zeitgeist. Let’s see if it has the necessary spark to pull it off.