Google unveils 24/7 AI agent that works for you even when your laptop is closed
Google has revealed that there is a major upgrade coming to its Gemini platform that means the AI agent will work even when your laptop is closed.
This news was unveiled at the Google I/O 2026 event, with the update being described as a 24/7 agent known as Gemini Spark.
On the Google website, it explained: “Gemini Spark helps you navigate your digital life. Give it a task and it works in the background 24/7, even if your phone and laptop are turned off. It operates autonomously, but always under your direction. You choose to turn it on and it's designed to check with you before taking major actions.”
Google has claimed that the system is capable of handling recurring jobs, organizing inboxes, summarizing meetings and even creating full workflows automatically.
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One example shared by the company showed Spark scanning credit card statements each month to identify hidden subscription charges, while another demonstrated the AI monitoring school emails and sending parents a daily digest of important deadlines.
Google stated that the long term goal is to create a ‘universal assistant’ that is personal, proactive and powerful enough to help users manage everyday life with minimal effort.
The tech giant went on to say: “Multi-step tasks are no match for Gemini Spark. It can handle the heavy lifting from start to finish. With Personal Intelligence, you can choose to connect apps and let Gemini Spark connect the dots across your digital ecosystem to take action where it matters most. Whether you watch it work or let it run in the background, it’s always under your direction.”
However, Gemini Spark isn’t the only new addition to Google as the company also announced the new Gemini 3.5 Flash model, which has been described as combining ‘frontier intelligence’ with faster performance speed.
This new AI model is set to become the default one, both on the Gemini app and AI Mode.
Google went on to add: “Gemini 3.5 Flash delivers intelligence that rivals large flagship models on multiple dimensions, at the speeds you have come to expect from the Flash series. It’s our strongest agentic and coding model yet, outperforming Gemini 3.1 Pro on challenging coding and agentic benchmarks like Terminal-Bench 2.1 (76.2%), GDPval-AA (1656 Elo) and MCP Atlas (83.6%), and leading in multimodal understanding (84.2% on CharXiv Reasoning). When looking at output tokens per second, it is 4 times faster than other frontier models.”