According to every product demo from the last four years, planning a trip is a killer use case for AI. Just tell it where you’re going, they all promise, and your chatbot / agent / other buzzword will exhaustively search travel options, read up on all the fun things to do, check all the local hotspots, and offer you a fully fledged itinerary. So far, I’ve found this to work only in the most generic ways: If you want to do the six most obvious things in any city on planet Earth, AI has you covered, but that’s about as far as it goes.

I had a very different experience using Spark, Google’s new always-on AI agent. Spark is a hugely ambitious thing: Google intends it to be the interface through which you can use external apps, and over time even operate your computer. (“OpenClaw with better internet access” is a not-wrong way to describe it.) Spark is currently rolling out to Google’s $99 / month AI Ultra plan, but Google allowed me to try it early. I tested some simple action-oriented stuff, like having Spark go through my Gmail inbox and suggest a bunch of things I should unsubscribe from and having it comb my Google Docs for old tasks I still haven’t finished. In both cases, it did a fine job, even creating me a nicely organized document with a bunch of links to quickly unsubscribe from various marketing emails.

Then I gave Spark a simple trip-planning job. “I’m going to be in Hershey PA with my wife, two kids, and dog the weekend of July 18th. Can you make a plan for the whole weekend, including places to stay, eat, things to do, and everything else?” I left out a few salient details, like the concert tickets I have for that Saturday night, but figured I’d start with the six most obvious things to do in Hershey and go from there.

A few minutes later, Spark pinged me back. “I have created a comprehensive, family-friendly, and dog-friendly weekend itinerary for your trip to Hershey, PA, from Friday, July 17 to Sunday, July 19, 2026.” It shared a link to a Google Doc it had made me, and a couple thousand words of shockingly detailed, useful itinerary.

To begin with, it offered driving directions from my house, an address that of course Google knows but I had not offered. It included a few hotel options, including their pet fees, and some dog-friendly activities that Frida might like. I never told Google my dog’s name is Frida; my only guess is that Spark found it through emails from my vet.

Spark also casually noted that my son Lewis will get into Hershey Park for free, because he’s not a year old yet, but that because Arthur is three, he’ll need a ticket. I don’t know if Spark was guessing what time Lewis naps in the afternoon, or if it knew it somehow, but it was right to schedule nap time for 1:30PM.