Google’s new “24/7” AI agent, Gemini Spark, might be surprisingly good at working on your behalf. But I’m not sure it’s worth the financial cost and potential privacy compromises.
The company gave me access to Spark last week. Google advertises Spark as an AI agent that can take tasks and work on them in the background — even tasks that take multiple steps — allowing you to put down your phone or step away from your computer. It also advertises On the top of spark website That it is “always under your direction,” that “you choose to turn it on,” and “It is designed to check in with you before taking major action.” Given the growing skepticism towards AI, it’s pretty much “my ‘Don’t engage in evil AI’ t-shirt that has people asking questions that are already answered by my shirt.”
I didn’t know where to start, so I took a page from my colleague Antonio’s book: I decided to use Spark to tackle the tasks, as Google demonstrated on stage at I/O. Would it work as well in my home office as it did on the big stage?
At I/O, Google VP Josh Woodward showed a few different examples. The first was asking Spark to draft an email for a team at Google, compiling everything about the Gemini live launch and “last week’s wins” and using a special AI skill to tailor the email to its needs. Google is asking Google to work for Google Needed It might be the easiest lift in the world, so I tried to push it further.
I asked Gemini to draft an email to my wife that compiled our total monthly average grocery spending in 2026. I thought this test would tell me a few things: can Spark find out who my wife is (without telling Spark her name), can it determine where our budget spreadsheet is in Drive (which doesn’t have “budget” in the file name), and can it actually draft an email in Gmail?
When I got the results from Spark shortly after, I literally said: “Wow, this is really crazy.” Spark found my wife’s email address, pulled the right information from our 2026 budget spreadsheet, took monthly grocery totals including incomplete data from May (which wasn’t even finished when I ran the test), averaged the totals, and put it all into a draft email in my Gmail. The text of the email addresses my wife by her first name, even though her email address does not contain her first name. It also includes a sign-off that we use just for each other.
In his next example, Woodward asked for some help planning a block party. I am Not planning a block party, but I asked Spark for help using the same questions she asked. It didn’t go well. It created a table of friends and family as a “highly realistic reference for who’s bringing what,” drafted an email mentioning a shared sign-up sheet in my Gmail that doesn’t exist, and created an ugly deck with slides giving information about city permits.
To promote Spark, I asked him to create that missing sign-up sheet and add a link to a pre-generated email. Although it took Spark a few minutes to figure it out, the job was done; It created a spreadsheet and went back to the draft email text and inserted the link.
Woodward’s final demo was arguably the most influential. They talked to Spark about doing several things: adding their meetings with CEO Sundar Pichai to their calendars in pink, writing a note to a new neighbor to invite to their block party, and creating a document to help with tasks for their kids at the end of the school year. For my own version, I drafted an email about sending the first episode of the latest season to my family, asking them to create a calendar event every month before my wife’s birthday and make it hot pink. inspectorAnd create a document with the top things my wife and I want to know about preparing our child for preschool.
I started this request on Friday at 3:35pm PT. During I/O, Woodward made some show of promising to put his phone down and check the results later in the keynote, which he did. But after resolving one issue — Spark wanted to access my contacts, which I declined — I was done about four minutes later.
Once again, I was a little impressed with the results, although they were imperfect:
- My Google Calendar now has events from 9-10am on the correct day of every month before my wife’s birthday. The reminders are in what Google calls “flamingo”, which isn’t exactly “hot pink”, but close enough.
- Spark took my immediate family’s emails and put them into a draft email. (Surprisingly, this did not include my wife.) The text of the email contained the name of the first episode of the latest season. inspector Correct, but linked to the trailer instead of the actual episode. The email also contains the word “lool”, which is what I write in casual written conversation.
- Spark created a Google Doc in my Drive with a preschool readiness checklist. However, it is only available to me; I asked Spark if he could give me access to my wife, but he said he was not able to do that at the moment.
Spark can be a powerful tool. But there are a few caveats I should mention. Like all AI tools, you’ll still need to check its output to make sure it’s accurate, there may be more risk when it’s pulling from personal information to formulate things you’d share with people you know. Although Google presents Spark as something that can work on its own, I found myself constantly looking at it or checking notifications sent to my phone. What’s the use of an assistant if you have to micromanage their every move instead of trusting them? And why should I feel so uncertain about draining power from a resource-hungry data center for relatively unimportant tasks?
Currently, Spark is only available to customers of Google’s AI Ultra plan, which starts at $99.99 per month, and is available only to users in the US and only in English. Google let me test out Spark for free, and I don’t think it’s enough to be the only reason to switch to those more expensive plans. Especially when I could do all the tasks I asked Spark to do myself – they would just take longer.
Spark also works best if you’re already deep into the Google ecosystem and have Personal Intelligence turned on. I’ve had a Google account for almost two decades, so Spark has a lot of data it can use to inform its answers. But while Google promises that Gemini is not “directly trained” on your Gmail inbox when Personal Intelligence is turned on, you still have to put your trust in Google that it will be a good steward of your data. For now, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost or risk.
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