At I/O 2026, Google announced new AI agents for gathering information, planning events, summarizing your inbox and calendar, and more. The agents can run continuously in the background, and the company claims they’ll seamlessly integrate into Google’s own tools and external ones. It’s also expanding its developer tools and revamping Search with additional generative AI capabilities. Some are rolling out this week, and some will be available in the coming months, but the company’s strategy seems clear: adopt some of the features that have helped fuel OpenClaw’s success and amplify them with Google’s deep knowledge of our digital presence.

“Before this, I think AI agents were more of an idea in research,” Koray Kavukcuoglu, CTO of Google DeepMind and Google’s chief AI architect, told The Verge in an interview. This year, he hopes, they’ll be “really in our lives.”

AI agents have been a buzzword since just after ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, but they remained mostly a science-fiction concept until the rise of OpenClaw, which has gained millions of users since its launch last November. OpenClaw let people chat with their agents via everyday apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, and (as long as a laptop was open) the agents could run around the clock. They performed well enough to handle basic tasks reliably, albeit with some clear flaws.

It made all the AI labs immediately sit up and take notice, but OpenAI was one of the first players to take action, acquiring OpenClaw (though it remains open-source) in February and hiring its creator Peter Steinberger. But Google’s existing empire of services gives it a major leg up. Where OpenClaw drove adoption by integrating with tools people already used, Google can do this too via MCP — but it can also build deeper links into its in-house suite of products, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Photos, and Search. If anything, it’s surprising it took so long.