What just happened? It's been impossible to avoid the impact that OpenClaw has had on the AI industry. Google knows all too well how popular the agentic personal assistant is proving, so it's announced a rival: Gemini Spark.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai revealed Spark at the Google I/O developer conference yesterday. He described it as "your personal AI agent in Gemini app that helps you navigate your digital life, taking action on your behalf and under your direction."
Google says Spark runs on dedicated virtual machines in Google Cloud, allowing it to keep working in the background 24/7 even after a laptop is closed or a phone is locked. It's powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash and the Google Antigravity harness, the same agentic framework Google is pushing into developer tools.
OpenClaw's appeal has been its ability to work across messaging apps and personal workflows, handling email, calendars, files, and other chores like a digital worker that never clocks off. Spark is Google's attempt to package the same idea inside Gemini and Workspace, but with the obvious advantage of deep native integration with services millions of people already use every day, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and Maps. Third-party integrations through MCP are also coming, starting with Canva, OpenTable, and Instacart.
Google gave examples of what Spark can do. The agentic is able to watch an inbox, summarize the most important weekly updates, create a prioritized to-do list, schedule calendar blocks, organize Drive files into a spreadsheet, or extract details from emails and log them into Sheets.
Spark can also be taught "skills," such as reading a user's last 50 emails to create a personalized writing guide for future drafts.
Google Labs VP Josh Woodward said during I/O that Spark can pull facts from emails, docs, sheets, and slides to write a status-update draft for a user's boss. He added that small businesses are using Spark to monitor inboxes so they don't miss customer questions.
Woodward also offered a description of how Google envisions Spark: "When you use it, it almost feels like you're tossing things over your shoulder."
There are obvious privacy and safety questions when an AI agent can live inside your inbox and documents. Google says Spark's app connections are off by default, users choose what it can access, and it will ask before carrying out actions such as spending money or sending emails.
At last year's I/O, Google showed Gemini smart replies that could mimic a user's writing style by analyzing previous emails and Drive files. Spark pushes that concept much further, from drafting suggested replies to letting an agent act across a user's digital life.
Gemini Spark is rolling out to trusted testers this week. A beta for US Google AI Ultra subscribers is scheduled for next week, with more features due over the summer, including the ability to email or text Spark, create custom sub-agents, use Chrome as an agentic browser, and operate through the Gemini app on macOS.