One of the most promising introductions at Google’s I/O developer conference on Tuesday was a new way for consumers to use the web: AI agents. Unfortunately, it was also the most confusing.

Google took the wraps off information agents, a reinvention of the aging Google Alerts service, now infused with AI. These AI agents are designed to operate in the background, 24/7, helping users stay up to date on topics they’re interested in, like market trends, price tracking, or inclement weather warnings.

Then there is Google Spark, a “personal” AI agent that can help you navigate your digital life by integrating with Google products, like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Workspace. The company says the assistant can handle everyday tasks like surfacing themes from newsletters, organizing your home inventory and keeping track of what needs restocking, or helping you plan and manage a group trip with friends.

Or, as Google showed off in a very engineering-minded example, you could use it to organize a neighborhood block party — as if that would require any management beyond a group chat or some emails.

There’s also a name for how you track notifications from Spark: Android Halo. (Why an Android feature needs its own brand is beyond me, but a good guess is that Google’s internal product teams are fairly competitive and want to highlight their own work, even at the risk of confusing users.)

Next, Gemini’s app is getting an AI agent that can compile a personalized digest from your Gmail inbox, calendar, and tasks, and provide an update called Daily Brief.

Many of these products have not yet shipped, or at least won’t be available to the wider public right away. Instead, Google is targeting its heavier users for now: the “AI-pilled” subscribers of its new, only $100-per-month Gemini Ultra plan. 

Google Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S. will get to use Information agents starting this summer, and Spark will be available to Ultra subscribers “soon.” Halo will ship to Android users “later this year.” Daily Brief is rolling out in the U.S. to Ultra, Pro, and Plus subscribers.

As a result of all these launches, we’ll soon have so many entry points for using AI agents that it may be overwhelming as to where to start.  (Did I forget to mention the increasingly agentic Chrome web browser, too? Google showed off how you could talk to Chrome while shopping for cars online to configure the various options and trim levels you can afford without tapping on a keyboard and clicking around. Yay…I guess?)

In a press briefing ahead of I/O, Google said it intends to bring its agentic features, including Spark, to free users “when the time is right.” But for the time being, the company’s more interested in iterating with a group of people, like the Ultra subscribers, who will push the limits of what Spark and AI agents can do.

In the meantime, Google is furthering the divide between those who have already bought into (literally!) the promise of AI, and the average consumer using Google’s free tools, who’s likely distanced from the real-world improvements AI offers, like agentic coding or AI-enabled computer use. 

Instead, consumers today largely think of AI as chatbots replacing traditional Google searches. They think of AI photo and video models not as impressive creative leaps, but as tools for making “AI slop” that now clutters their social feeds, and result in unwanted data centers being built in their backyards.

Google didn’t help its reputation on this front during the event, flashing goofy AI imagery between each presenter. It also played a corny AI-generated animation featuring Cinnamon Toast Crunch-esque talking Tensor chips. And in its Android glasses demo, Google showed how the devices — which will later support photo-taking — could use AI to transform photos users take into something else.

This demo involved the presenter taking a picture of their view of the audience, which was modified to have a blimp floating overhead, and then sent to their Android Watch. Okay, neat, but is it worth someone’s home being torn down via eminent domain to build new power lines for a data center?

People will need more than clever party tricks to accept such drastic societal changes.

In previous years, Google introduced new consumer electronics devices, like Pixel phones and Nest Hubs, alongside new Android features, like that restaurant-and-salon booking service that blew people away in 2018. Those pieces of technology were framed as attempts to smooth over some of life’s everyday hassles.

Now, the tech giant is showcasing its new models (but not Gemini Pro 3.5, which wasn’t ready yet) alongside its developer platforms, and largely forgetting about who it’s building all this for: Regular folks. People who don’t want to think about whether it’s called Gemini or Spark or Halo or information agents, or where you go to use it.

These people have real problems they want to solve. They struggle to pay bills and rent, or buy gas or groceries, as they try to find work in the face of AI recruiting systems that reject their resumes over small technical details. They are people who are trying to balance stressful lives that have, of late, come to bear technology’s advances as burdens, especially with social media devouring screen time, addicting children, and turning social connection tools into a big, online shopping mall.

Instead of tools to solve problems, the average tech-savvy consumer watching this year’s Google I/O saw a tech giant putting more AI into everything they use — from Docs and email inboxes to glasses and even Search, which is now more of an AI-first experience.

If Google had tapped real consumer sentiment, it could have noted that AI agents would lower screen time usage. That is, instead of spending time researching, organizing, tracking, and monitoring information and news, agents could take over those daily tasks so users could go offline and live their real lives away from a computer.

That’s a message that could resonate with consumers, particularly young people, who are today embracing nostalgic retro tech, adopting “old people” hobbies and crafts to de-stress, and rediscovering the power of real-life connections by ditching dating apps for in-person events and experiences.

In short, Google failed to sell just how cool AI agents are by not demonstrating any problems agents solve for everyday users, and keeping these tools paywalled, limiting their reach.

Meanwhile, messaging-first AI startups like Poke, Poppy, RPLY, and Wingman are presenting themselves as a way to interact more naturally with AI agents via a feature everyone uses daily: text messaging.

Will you ever be able to message Spark? Reps at Google I/O vaguely said it will happen at some point in the future.

This is such a different strategy from Google’s early days, when it introduced revolutionary products like Gmail, a free email service that vastly improved on existing options, or Google Search itself, which freely organized the early web and made it more accessible to everyone.

Google I/O could have been a breakout moment when AI agents became available to everyone via a simple, free consumer product (with one brand name!). This product may even have people clamoring for the way they used to beg for Gmail invites. Instead, Google’s new AI agents — tools that can work for us and meet our personalized needs — remain largely out of reach for most. 

When the founders of a mental health app for men called Mental saw that one feature — AI interactive audio — was resonating wildly with their users, they knew they were onto something.

And so the idea for a new, and hopefully safer, kind of AI therapy app was born, which they called The Path, co-founder and CEO Anson Whitmer tells TechCrunch. 

Then famed author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins grew so enamored with this startup; he scooched in as a co-founder. 

The Path has now raised $14.3 million in seed funding led by Prime Movers Lab (where Robbins is a partner), with participation from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, boxer Deontay Wilder, and Designer Fund. 

After Prime Movers invested, Robbins began chatting with Whitmer and co-founder Tyler Sheaffer on small stuff like branding, but as his enthusiasm and ideas for the app grew, they offered to bring him in as a co-founder. The author has since helped shape The Path into a therapy-plus-coaching app that taps into Robbins’ popular self-improvements methods. 

Whitmer, formerly an early employee at meditation app Calm alongside Sheaffer, says his pursuit of mental health tech was born out of tragic experiences: When he was 19, a beloved uncle committed suicide. 

That inspired Whitmer to get a PhD in psychology, and he planned to go into research after graduation. But while he was in college, a cousin left a voicemail. “I didn’t realize until it was too late. It was also a call for help, and he killed himself,” Whitmer recalls. 

That spurred a change of course towards work that could bring science’s findings to the masses. Working at Calm was a natural first step, as the research on how meditation improves mental health is solid. Still, after working at Calm until 2021, Whitmer felt he could do more.  

“Even though we did have a big impact, it’s not really a big enough impact,” he said. “The issue is, people’s problems are just too idiosyncratic. They’re too personal. They’re unique.” 

Plus, everyone will never have access to individual therapy or coaching. There just aren’t enough therapists in the world for that. 

Whitmer sees LLMs and AI as the bridge spanning that gap. “What’s exciting and game-changing is that, for the first time in my career, I’ve seen that there’s actually this possibility for every single person to have the personalized sort of access and care that they need to really get the help,” he said. 

In fact, such a thing is already starting to happen. OpenAI has said that at least 900 million people use ChatGPT for mental health-related queries every week. 

However, the problem with using consumer chatbots for mental health is that they are “optimized for engagement,” Whitmer says, and that is the opposite of what therapy and coaching should do. 

Consumer chatbots try to solve problems quickly for users, and also engage in “reinforcement” of ideas, to keep users coming back for more. “But therapy/coaching doesn’t work that way. You’re trying to understand the problem deeply,” he said. The idea is to dig out assumptions and then help the person discover their own solutions.

Whitmer says The Path’s AI is trained “to set up structure, so that later on, you can get to a place where there is resolution,” but from a place of understanding. 

To that end, Whitmer says the startup’s specially trained AI model has scored a 95 on the mental health safety AI benchmark, Vera-MH. This compares to a top score of 65 for the consumer bots.

“It’s meant to challenge you. It’s not just meant to agree with you,” he says. In fact, he says the app’s model is post-trained from open source models, so it doesn’t use the major consumer LLMs at all, meaning it is not simply a wrapper over them.

The Path, which lets users choose from 11 virtual AI therapists and customize their preferences for directness and other details, is currently free as it gains users. Eventually, the startup plans to charge $40 a month.

What will it take to launch the first must-have AI consumer product? Maybe $700 million.

At least according to Hark, an AI lab building models and hardware for an AI personal assistant, which said on Thursday that it had raised that much in a Series A round that values it at $6 billion post-money.

The mega round was led by Parkway Venture Capital, and included Align Ventures, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Brookfield, Greycroft, Intel Capital, Prime Movers Lab, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Tamarack
Global. (Phew!)

Perhaps what’s most notable about the fundraise is how little Hark has revealed about what it is building. Founder and CEO, Brett Adcock, also the entrepreneur behind robotics company Figure.AI and electric aircraft builder Archer, launched Hark in late 2025 with $100 million of his own money to develop an agentic AI system that serves as a universal interface with the digital world.

Hark expects to release its first multi-modal models this summer, which it says will power a personal AI platform that works with existing products and services. The company expects to follow that with hardware devices built specifically for those systems.

The fresh cash will be spent on recruiting top talent for hardware, product design and AI research, and on securing compute and components. The company currently has 70 employees, and runs a data center with Nvidia B200 GPUs.

Abidur Chowdhury (pictured above in a promo video), a former Apple product executive, is Hark’s director of design. He declined to reveal new details of what he’s working on when TechCrunch peppered him with questions this week, but said investors were impressed by a series of demos from his team.

“I haven’t seen anything that feels like something that will really help like the normal person,” Chowdhury said, speaking of the AI products on the market. “People are really building things to help people make software, and it’s working, and it’s really impactful, but we haven’t really seen that for the normal person yet.”

He noted that while Anthropic is prioritizing coding tools and OpenAI is moving in the same direction ahead of its IPO, few companies are focused solely on building interfaces and native hardware the way Hark is. “With this focus, with this great team that we have, and this round that we’ve raised, I think we can make something really special in this space,” Chowdhury said.

Still, there are more questions than answers. One challenge will be providing the context of a customer’s life to an AI assistant without making the people around the user uncomfortable or violating their privacy. Wearables like Meta’s existing glasses or the forthcoming Android spectacles don’t seem to have solved this problem. When asked how he might square this particular circle, Chowdhury only smiled.

“Sounds like that would make a great product.”