Google’s I/O Pitch: Cheaper Gemini, Smarter Search, AI That Acts For You

Google spent its annual developer conference doing two things at once: wooing the coders who build on its tools and the everyday users who type into its search bar. The pitch on Tuesday in Mountain View centered on a faster, cheaper Gemini model and a fresh batch of AI agents, all aimed at slowing down enterprise wins by rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.

Key Takeaways:

• Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash for coding and automation, with Gemini 3.5 Pro arriving next month, and cut its top AI Ultra plan to $200 a month while adding a $100 developer tier.

• New agents will autonomously buy products, watch for ticket availability, and build schedules, while Gemini Spark drafts reports by pulling data from Chrome, Gmail, and YouTube.

• Gemini now counts 900 million monthly users, AI Overviews reaches 2.5 billion, and Alphabet expects to spend $180–190 billion on AI infrastructure this year.

Alphabet recently edged close to Nvidia as the most valuable company on the planet, and the company leaned into that momentum. Beyond the new model, it doubled down on Search and YouTube by announcing agents that handle tasks on their own—making purchases, tracking when tickets free up, and arranging plans as conditions change.

The logic, according to Pichai, is simple. “When people use our AI-powered features in Search, they use Search more,” the Alphabet CEO said.

This was Google’s first big stage moment since last winter’s Gemini update clawed back ground in the AI race. The tone had shifted, too. At earlier conferences, executives looked rattled by the threat that chatbots and AI-native search startups posed to Google’s business. This time they spoke like a company writing the script rather than reacting to one.

Demis Hassabis, who runs Google’s DeepMind lab, reached for the grand framing. “When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity,” he said. “It will be a profound moment for humanity.”

Cheaper AI for the corporate crowd

The new Gemini 3.5 family anchored the announcements. Gemini 3.5 Flash, tuned for coding and automated work, went live Tuesday. Pichai said the more powerful 3.5 Pro lands next month.

On price, Google moved aggressively. It dropped the top-tier AI Ultra plan—which unlocks higher usage limits and the most capable models—to $200 a month, down from $250. A new $100 tier arrived alongside it, built for developers and other professional users.

The competition has tilted toward business customers who spend heavily, and Google wants to win on cost. “We’ve heard that many companies are already blowing through their annual token budgets, and it’s only May,” Pichai said, using the term for the chunks of data AI models churn through.

He put a number on the savings: heavy users like large companies could trim more than $1 billion a year by switching to Google’s models. In a press briefing beforehand, he said those models match the performance of other frontier systems at up to a third of the price.

OpenAI and Anthropic, both preparing for public offerings, have been chasing the same lucrative enterprise accounts. Google answered with a refreshed version of its coding assistant Antigravity, a direct rival to Anthropic’s Claude Code. The company had laid groundwork last year by hiring key people from Windsurf, a well-known startup in AI code generation.

Consumer reach as the engine

The announcements showed a company that has shaken off its earlier worries. For a while, the fear was that ChatGPT or search upstarts like Perplexity might erode Google’s dominance. Instead, Google turned its enormous user base into leverage, wiring Gemini into the personal data flowing through Chrome, Gmail, and YouTube.

Gemini Spark, introduced Tuesday, taps those apps to draft reports and juggle schedules. The numbers behind Gemini back up the confidence: 900 million monthly users now, up from roughly 400 million last May. AI Overviews in Search has reached 2.5 billion monthly users, and AI Mode sits near 1 billion.

Search itself is changing shape. It will now answer some questions with AI-generated visuals and code—explaining scientific ideas or whipping up small tools like a fitness tracker. Liz Reid, the vice president who heads the search team, framed it bluntly. “We’re entering the next chapter of Google Search, where incredible AI features aren’t just in search, Google Search is AI search, through and through,” she said.

Nick Fox, the senior vice president running Search and Ads, went further in an interview before the event, calling the overhaul the “biggest reinvention of the search box in 25 years.”

That box still pays the bills. Search drove most of Alphabet’s revenue in 2025, when the company posted $402.8 billion in total revenue. The infrastructure bill keeps climbing too, with capital spending projected at $180 billion to $190 billion this year.

Video, world models, and glasses

Google also showed Gemini Omni, a video model executives positioned as the heir to the Nano Banana image generator. Nano Banana had one of Google’s rare viral hits, drawing 13 million first-time users in four days last September.

Hassabis described Omni as a step toward a “world model” that can simulate how the physical world behaves. “Starting with video, but over time, Omni will be able to generate any output from any input,” he said.

Hardware made the list as well. Google set this autumn as the window for a revived smart glasses project, built with Samsung and eyewear makers Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.

Written by Vytautas Valinskas