Google's new Gemini Spark AI agent is shockingly capable but raises privacy questions

Google's new 'always on' AI agent Gemini Spark was assessed by The Verge's hands-on review last week as 'shockingly good at completing tasks in the background'. The reviewer, David Pierce, wrote that he had been among the first 200 users with access to the tool.

Gemini Spark is offered as part of Google's 'Gemini Ultra Agent' bundle and requires a 39-dollar-a-month subscription. Pierce wrote that the bundle is positioned as a rival to Apple Intelligence and OpenAI's Operator product. Spark requests deep access to Gmail, Google Drive and Chrome.

One concrete test in the review was a flight-booking task. Pierce gave Spark the instruction 'find the lowest-fare flight from Seattle to San Francisco for this coming Friday and complete the booking'. Within 23 minutes the system had selected an Alaska Airlines fare and reached the payment screen, noting 'I have left final confirmation to the user'.

Google's Spark page emphasises the assurances that Spark is 'always under your direction', that 'you choose to turn it on' and that 'it confirms with you before taking major actions'. Pierce said the enforcement of these guidelines was 'consistent' in testing, but Spark's actions were 'not fully reversible'.

Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy analyst Cooper Quintin, in his assessment for The Verge, said 'tracking which data an AI agent with full access to Gmail and Drive uses, and for what purpose, may be difficult for an average user'. Quintin described Spark's 'action log' feature as 'a good start but not sufficient'.

Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, speaking at the product launch event, said Spark was 'a further step in the realisation of Google's vision for AI agents'. Hassabis added that they project Spark to be running 1 billion tasks per day within the next 12 months.

In benchmark testing, Pierce wrote that Apple Intelligence took 38 minutes on the same flight-booking task and OpenAI's Operator completed it in 31 minutes. Spark's 23-minute completion was assessed as 'in practice the fastest result'.

The head of Google's privacy team, Marlon Nichols, told The Verge that the data-minimisation approach applied to Spark was 'above industry standard'. Nichols said Spark kept the data on which it acted 'isolated from Google's other advertising infrastructure'.

Forrester Research AI analyst Rowan Curran, in his comment on Spark's workflow integration, said 'Spark is the concrete form of the trend toward integrating AI agents into productivity software; it has to be placed alongside Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce'.

Pierce's review closed by saying 'Spark is a real step in the AI agent category; but the 39-dollar price tag and privacy trade-offs put it outside the decision range for an average user'. The piece said Spark's global launch was scheduled for July, with a first wave covering 47 countries including Turkey. This article is not a product purchase recommendation.