A few years ago, Google was synonymous with AI. In November 2022, ChatGPT relegated the Mountain View company to the role of an outsider. But all this could soon change. On May 19, 2026, during its I/O 2026 conference, Google counterattacked by rolling out a comprehensive strategy. While OpenAI and Anthropic are selling AI, Google is strengthening its ecosystem, which is already at the heart of the digital habits of billions of users.
The most visible demonstration of this is the redesign of the search engine. For the first time since 2001, Google has redesigned the dimensions of its search bar: larger, more interactive, and soon capable of displaying photos, videos, long-form questions, and conversational follow-ups. A chatbot is now integrated into it.
The same logic applies to shopping. Users can now add items to a cart directly from a Google search or a YouTube video, without leaving the platform. The AI recommends discounts, flags product incompatibilities, and more.
On the pricing front, the company is also focusing on volume and accessibility. Subscriptions are available in Morocco: Google AI Plus for 60 dirhams per month, AI Pro for 240 dirhams, and AI Ultra for 990 dirhams. The most competitive option in our opinion—and one that might make you cancel your ChatGPT or Claude subscription—is the Pro plan: for this price, users get four times the Gemini usage limit compared to the free version, video generation, 1,000 credits for Google Flow, 5 TB of cloud storage, unlimited NotebookLM, and YouTube Premium Lite (ad-free). A deliberately aggressive positioning against Claude and ChatGPT in the same market segments.
Beyond these integrations into the ecosystem, the conference was also an opportunity to present several tools that deserve a detailed explanation.
Gemini 3.5 Flash: Fast and Affordable
The conference’s first flagship tool: Gemini 3.5 Flash. The model’s promise can be summed up in three words: fast, powerful, and economical. According to Google, it consistently outperforms Gemini 3.1 Pro on the most demanding benchmarks, is four times faster than competing models of the same tier, and is available for less than half their price.
For companies comparing the operating costs of large-scale AI models, this is a killer argument. In the same vein, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, also confirmed the imminent arrival (next month) of Gemini 3.5 Pro, which is said to be even more powerful. Wait and see.
Gemini Omni: Reality Reinvented
Second major announcement: Gemini Omni. Whereas Google’s previous video generation tools (led by Veo) converted text into moving images, Omni takes it a step further. It is “multimodal,” meaning it accepts any input format (text, audio, images, videos) and produces video content as output. Users can provide a personal photo or video to generate an AI avatar—complete with a voice—and insert themselves into any generated scene.
Google DeepMind’s CTO (Chief Technology Officer), Koray Kavukcuoglu, describes Omni as a model capable of “creating from any input.” The platform reportedly allows users to generate 10-second videos of Hollywood-quality, edit their own videos through simple conversation, modify the setting, visual style, or characters in an existing scene, and more.
Omni officially replaces Veo and is available to Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers via the Gemini app, Google Flow, and YouTube Shorts. At the time of writing, it had not yet been rolled out to our account for testing.
Gemini Spark: Google’s Agent-Based AI
Google positions this personal agent as a direct alternative to competing solutions. Available for free via the Gemini app, it will be deeply integrated into Android by the end of the year.
Its unique feature is how it operates in the background: Spark runs continuously in the cloud, 24/7. It accesses Gmail, Docs, and other Google Workspace tools, learns the user’s habits, orchestrates complex tasks, and can even make online purchases on your behalf. It can turn meeting notes scattered across email threads into a consolidated document, or draft automatic replies, and more. Google is also announcing Antigravity 2.0, an update to its AI coding platform powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, designed to reduce the costs of large-scale data processing for businesses.
And tomorrow?
What Google presented at I/O 2026 is actually less of a technological leap than the methodical expansion of an empire in which nearly all of us operate. It’s easy to forget, but the Gemini app already boasts 900 million active users—on par with ChatGPT! The underlying logic of the Mountain View giant? AI summaries generate more searches; longer, more personal questions yield more user data; new shopping features connect customers and advertisers without anyone leaving the platform, and so on.
AI doesn’t replace Google’s advertising engine; in reality, it expands it. For businesses, the cost savings and integration into the ecosystem are a major plus. For the general public, the Pro plan—which includes ad-free YouTube and the full version of Gemini—already offers a serious alternative to ChatGPT or Claude.
