* Google to unveil Gemini AI upgrades and new consumer

features at I/O conference

* Focus on developers with coding assistant Antigravity,

following Windsurf acquisition

* AI agents seen as key to monetizing AI, per CEO Sundar

Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

By Kenrick Cai

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, May 19 (Reuters) - Alphabet

CEO Sundar Pichai will kick off Google's annual

developer conference on Tuesday where the tech giant is expected

to reveal a flurry of artificial intelligence upgrades for

consumers and coders.

This year's I/O conference in Mountain View, California -

traditionally Google's flagship event for showcasing the cutting

edge of its consumer-facing products - will be the company's

first since last winter's major update to its Gemini AI model

helped it regain ground in the AI race.

Google parent Alphabet recently came within striking

distance of Nvidia ( NVDA ) as the world's most valuable

company. It may seek to fortify its standing on Tuesday with a

refreshed version of Gemini, plus new products and features

built with the model's capabilities.

Google has pushed to turn its vast consumer reach into an

edge in AI, connecting Gemini to personalized user data across

its suite of products that includes Chrome, Gmail, and YouTube.

The company is embedding generative AI into its traditional

search engine and seeking to amass users on its chatbot that is

also called Gemini and competes with ChatGPT.

Search was Alphabet's biggest revenue driver in 2025, when

it reported $402.8 billion in total revenue. The company is

ramping up spending on AI infrastructure, expecting $180 billion

to $190 billion in capital expenditures this year.

Advertising revenue, including from search ads, has

continued to burnish Google's growth in recent quarters,

assuaging investor fears that AI could disrupt Google's products

and soften its market dominance.

AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic have been gearing up for

IPOs, focused on capturing lucrative enterprise customers.

Google is also expected to dedicate time at the conference to

focus on businesses, particularly software developers who have

been a primary source of enterprise AI revenue.

In 2025, the company hired key staff from popular AI code

generation startup Windsurf in a $2.4 billion deal to bolster

its efforts around coding assistant Antigravity, which competes

with Anthropic's market-leading Claude Code software development

tool.

Google is increasingly positioning digital assistants it

calls agents, which can do complicated tasks without a prompt,

as the linchpin of its ​strategy to monetize AI. Pichai and

other executives spoke about this at a business-oriented cloud

computing conference last month.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said at the time the company

was saving the bulk of its coding-related announcements for the

I/O conference.