Google I/O 2026 just wrapped up (May 19–20), and it’s clear we’ve moved past the initial hype of simple chatbots. The main keynote and developer sessions made one thing abundantly clear: we are now firmly in the era of the agentic workflow.
Instead of writing isolated prompts and waiting for static responses, the industry is shifting toward orchestrating autonomous AI agents that can plan, execute, debug, and run in the background.
The Gemini 3.5 Series & Gemini Omni
At the core of these updates is the new Gemini 3.5 family, featuring Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Pro. These models bring substantial improvements in speed, context processing, and reasoning capabilities.
But the standout development was Gemini Omni, a new native multimodal model. Omni doesn’t just translate text or identify objects in an image it natively processes and generates text, audio, video, code, and physics simulations concurrently. This opens up entirely new paradigms for building interactive, real-time applications and is a significant move towards AGI.
Antigravity 2.0: Agent-First Development
The developer keynot focused on the announcement of Antigravity 2.0. Google has rebuilt the Antigravity developer environment to be agent-first, which I will have to test for myself after a previously having a lackluster experiance with the platform.
Google Claw?
Another interesting launch was Google’s competitor to Open Claw Gemini Spark—a 24/7 personal agent that runs in the cloud on virtual machines. Unlike current tools that pause when you close your browser or lock your laptop, Spark continues working in the background to handle long-running data processing, testing, or system administration tasks.
Revisiting Google Glass
Google also teased their new intelligent XR eyewear in partnership with Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker. I remember the excitment around Google glass 13 years ago which ultimately sputted out in the face of public opposition and lackluster technical performance from a device that was a real moonshot product. Technology and society have moved on significatly in this time so it will be interesting to see if the idea sticks this time around.
What it Means for Developers
The role of developers is shifting from delivery to design. With agents executing the workflows a human in the driving seat adds value by joining up the dots and adding the creative insight that AI still lacks.