Google's Gemini Spark: Promising AI, but at What Cost?

Gemini Spark: A Promising but Costly AI Agent

Google recently introduced Gemini Spark, an artificial intelligence agent designed to handle complex tasks in the background. While its capabilities seem impressive, its high cost and privacy trade-offs raise questions.

Last week, I had the opportunity to test Spark, which Google presents as an assistant capable of managing multiple tasks while remaining under user control. Google emphasizes that Spark requires manual activation and checks with the user before making significant decisions, a precaution in response to growing skepticism towards AI.

Not knowing where to start, I decided to test Spark by performing tasks similar to those demonstrated by Google during the I/O event. Would it work as well in my home office as it did on the big stage?

Testing Gemini Spark

During I/O, Google’s vice president, Josh Woodward, showcased several examples. The first involved asking Spark to draft an email to a Google team, compile all information on the launches of Gemini Live and the "successes from last week," and use a special AI skill to make the email sound like him. I decided to push Spark a bit further.

I asked Gemini to draft an email to my wife compiling our average monthly grocery expenses for 2026. This test would allow me to check several things: could Spark identify my wife (without me providing her name), could it locate our budget sheet in Drive (which does not contain "budget" in the file name), and could it actually draft an email in Gmail?

When I received Spark's output shortly after, I genuinely said, "Wow, that's crazy." Spark found my wife's email address, extracted the correct information from our 2026 budget sheet, retrieved the monthly grocery totals, including incomplete data from May (which wasn't finished when I conducted the test), calculated the average totals, and put everything into a draft email in my Gmail. The email text mentioned my wife by her first name, even though her email address did not contain her first name. It even included a polite closing that we use just between us.

In his next example, Woodward asked for help planning a neighborhood party. I’m not planning a neighborhood party, but I asked Spark for assistance by posing the same questions he had asked. It didn’t go well. Spark created a table of friends and family as a "very realistic reference for who brings what," drafted an email in my Gmail mentioning a shared sign-up sheet that doesn’t exist, and created an unappealing presentation with slides detailing information about city permits.

To push Spark further, I asked it to create that missing sign-up sheet and add a link to the already drafted email. Although Spark took a few minutes to understand, this task worked; it created a spreadsheet and returned to the draft email to insert the link.

Woodward's final demonstration was undoubtedly the most impressive. He asked Spark to do several things: color his meetings with CEO Sundar Pichai bright pink on his calendar, draft a note to a new neighbor inviting them to his neighborhood party, and create a document to help with tasks for his children at the end of the school year. For my version, I asked it to create an event in the calendar each month before my wife’s birthday and make it bright pink, draft an email to my family to send them the first episode of the latest season of Taskmaster, and create a document with the key things my wife and I need to know to prepare our toddler for kindergarten.

I started this request at 3:35 PM PT on a Friday. During I/O, Woodward put on a little show by setting his phone down and promising to check the results later in the keynote, which he did. But after resolving a small issue—Spark wanted access to my contacts, which I denied—my task was completed about four minutes later.

Once again, I was somewhat impressed by the results, although they were imperfect:

• My Google Calendar now has events from 9 AM to 10 AM on the correct day of each month leading up to my wife’s birthday. The reminders are in what Google calls "flamingo," which isn’t exactly "bright pink," but close enough.

• Spark retrieved emails from my immediate family and put them into a draft email. (Strangely, it didn’t include my wife’s.) The email text correctly mentioned the name of the first episode of the latest season of Taskmaster, but linked to a trailer instead of the actual episode. The email also contained the term "loool," which I use in casual written conversations.

• Spark created a Google Doc in my Drive with a checklist for kindergarten preparation. However, it is only accessible to me; I asked Spark if it could grant access to my wife, but it replied that it currently could not.

Conclusion

Spark could be a powerful tool. But there are a few caveats to mention. Like all AI tools, you must always verify its results to ensure their accuracy, which could have higher stakes when it comes to personal information to share with people you know. Although Google presents Spark as something that can operate autonomously, I found myself constantly monitoring it or checking the notifications it sent to my phone. What’s the point of an assistant if you have to micromanage each of its moves instead of trusting it? And why should something I feel so uncertain about drain energy from a resource-hungry data center for relatively insignificant tasks?

Currently, Spark is only available to subscribers of Google’s AI Ultra plan, which starts at $99.99 per month, and only for users in the United States and in English. Google provided me with free access to test Spark, and I don’t think it’s good enough to justify these expensive plans. Especially when I could accomplish all the tasks I asked Spark to do by myself—they would just take longer.

Spark also works better if you are already well integrated into the Google ecosystem and have Personal Intelligence enabled. I’ve had a Google account for about two decades, so Spark has a lot of data it can use to inform its responses. But while Google promises that Gemini "does not directly train" on your Gmail inbox with Personal Intelligence enabled, you still have to trust Google to be a good steward of your data. For now, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost or the risk.