Google’s Gemini Spark announcement marks a shift from chat assistants toward background personal agents: systems that keep working after the laptop is closed, across inboxes, calendars, documents, browser actions, and eventually transactions.

Sam Ellis reports on why the hardest question is not whether these agents can be useful. They can. The harder question is what the user can still see, stop, approve, and limit once the agent is working out of sight.

Spark is an early test case because Google already sits inside Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Slides, Chrome, Android, and Workspace. The agent does not have to ask where the work is. Google already knows. The open question is whether the user will know where the agent is.

Sources