Google’s AI models have a secret ingredient that’s giving the company a leg up on competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. That ingredient is your data, and it’s only just scratched the surface in terms of how it can use your information to “personalize” Gemini’s responses.

I attended Google I/O 2025 in Mountain View, and had a blast trying out all the new AI tools. Here are the coolest things I saw!

Artificial intelligence is now in everything Google touches, including its Android XR mixed-reality glasses, a revamped search experience, and Gemini’s new agentic capabilities.

The bad news is that Google still won’t let you turn off the widget, which is a mandatory part of the Pixel home screen, just like the Google search bar at the bottom. Making it smaller will at least go some way to appeasing Pixel owners who’ve long hoped for the same home screen flexibility as other Android phones.

I/O presentation, the company revealed AI assistants of all kinds, smart glasses and headsets, and state-of-the-art AI filmmaking tools.

Google used news from its I/O developer conference this year to show what NotebookLM can do. The AI-powered research and note-taking tool has been around for years, but the company has infused it with more and more features as its AI tech improved.

Google says the release version of 2.5 Flash is better at reasoning, coding, and multimodality, but it uses 20–30 percent fewer tokens than the preview version. This edition is now live in Vertex AI, AI Studio, and the Gemini app. It will be made the default model in early June.

At I/O, Google is starting to piece together where it sees Search going in an AI era.

Shopping in Google's new AI Mode integrates Gemini's capabilities into Google's existing online shopping features, allowing consumers to use conversational phrases to find the perfect product.

A lot of that vision rests on AI Mode in Google Search, which Google is starting to roll out to everyone in the US. AI Mode offers a more chatbot-like interface right inside Search, and behind the scenes, Google is doing a lot of work to pull in information instead of making you scroll through a list of blue links.