Google’s I/O 2026 keynote focused on fixing the repetitive work your team still does by hand every week.

AI Mode in Search just crossed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter. Liz Reid, who runs Search, described what’s happening as ‘the era of Search agents,’ and said Google’s new information agents run in the background, performing repetitive work and notifying users when something changes.

What an AI agent does

An agent has four moving parts:

It perceives an input.
It reasons through what to do.
It acts in your tools.
It remembers what happened, so the next run starts smarter.

Chat does the first two. Agents do all four.

Chat changed how quickly you can think and draft. Agents now manage what gets done while you’re working on something else.

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Why Google’s version isn’t the one your team needs

Google packaged these capabilities for consumers, but the packaging is messy. Google now has Gemini as the model, Gemini Spark as a personal assistant, Android Halo as a notification system for Spark, Information Agents inside Search, and Daily Brief as a morning digest. Five products under one company, each with its own brand, each doing a slightly different version of the same job. A consumer trying to figure out which one to use for which task is doing work Google should have done before the keynote.

The combination of a $100-a-month entry price and five overlapping product names means a team lead trying to put an AI agent into a workflow this month has to first decode which Google product to buy, then justify the spend, then hope the consumer-facing version maps onto a work task. None of that is how teams adopt new tools.

Agents are a genuine new capability. The consumer-facing version Google led with at I/O is built for personal life. Google’s enterprise agent products, such as the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Agentic Data Cloud, operate on the Cloud side and target large organizations with platform teams and procurement cycles. Neither one helps a small operations team that wants an agent to triage their inbound support emails or pull their weekly numbers from three tools into one report.

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Your team’s first AI agent is closer than a Google subscription

You can put one agent on one recurring job your team already does, this week, without waiting for Google.

A data scientist can put one into a pipeline. A team lead can put one into a recurring workflow. A head of ops can put one into a standard process. The underlying parts (perception, reasoning, action, memory) are the same even when the job changes.

The skill that’s becoming valuable for every team isn’t knowing how to pay for a subscription.

This Wednesday, May 27th, at 8:30 AM ET, I’m running a live build: How to Build an AI Agent for Your Team. We’ll put a working agent together in real time using n8n.

🚀 Thursday’s post is the full write-up with the build and deploy steps. Get it here now.

Build Your Own AI Agent Before Google Ships…