Google's Gemini Spark Runs 24/7 to Book, Order, and Design for You

Google's Gemini app just got a lot more hands-on. At Google I/O 2026, the company announced that Gemini can now connect to Canva, OpenTable, and Instacart through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), letting the assistant move beyond answering questions and actually take action inside third-party apps. Book a restaurant, add groceries to a cart, or spin up a design , all without leaving Gemini.

This is part of a much larger shift Google is calling the "agentic Gemini era." The connected app expansion is the most immediately accessible piece of it, but it's really the on-ramp to something bigger: Gemini Spark, a 24/7 cloud-based AI agent that keeps working even after you close your laptop.

The Numbers Behind the Push

Last year at I/O, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today, Google has surpassed 900 million , more than doubling in a year , and in that same time, daily requests have grown over seven times. That kind of growth gives Google serious leverage to pull third-party services into its orbit, and that's exactly what the new MCP integrations are designed to do.

Google is now processing more than 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, a massive jump from 480 trillion tokens per month at Google I/O 2025. The infrastructure is clearly ready. The question was always about the product layer on top of it.

What MCP Actually Means Here

MCP , the Model Context Protocol , is an open standard originally developed by Anthropic that defines how AI agents communicate with external tools and APIs. Think of it as a universal adapter: instead of Google writing a custom integration for every app, any service that builds an MCP-compliant server can plug directly into Gemini.

Because MCP is an open, cross-platform standard now adopted by Anthropic, Google, and other major AI platforms, any developer that builds an MCP-compliant server can make their product accessible to Spark without writing custom integration code for Google specifically. That's a big deal for the ecosystem , it means MCP compliance is quickly becoming a distribution strategy, not just a technical checkbox.