Google reimagines Search and ships Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026
The company called it the biggest change to its Search box in over 25 years and introduced an agentic Gemini model.
At its I/O developer conference in May, Google unveiled what it described as the biggest upgrade to its Search box in more than 25 years, rebuilding it to accept text, images, files, videos and Chrome tabs as inputs. The company paired the redesign with Gemini 3.5 Flash, a model it says rivals larger flagship systems on coding and agentic benchmarks while running at Flash-tier speeds.
Google also introduced Gemini Spark, a personal agent meant to take actions autonomously, and Managed Agents in the Gemini API that provision a sandboxed Linux environment where an agent can plan, run code, manage files and browse the web.
Why it matters
Reworking Search is the highest-stakes move Google can make, since it touches the product that funds the company and the one most exposed to AI-native competitors. Pushing agents into the API, meanwhile, signals that the next battleground is software that acts on a user's behalf rather than just answering questions.
For developers and startups building on top of foundation models, including those in Austin's growing applied-AI scene, agentic tooling baked into a major platform lowers the cost of shipping software that does work autonomously.
Gemini 3.5 Flash delivers intelligence that rivals large flagship models at speeds expected from the Flash series.— Google, I/O 2026 announcement
Reported by Next in Austin. Based on reporting from Google.
