Google I/O primer: Alphabet's AI showcase is its chance to wow Wall Street

In this article GOOG Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT watch now Alphabet 's stock is up 140% over the past year, with a cloud business that is growing faster than Amazon's and Microsoft's. But 18 months ago, the Google parent looked like it had spent a decade preparing for the artificial intelligence era, only to watch OpenAI define the market. Now, Wall Street is valuing Alphabet like one of the few companies positioned to profit from every layer of the generative AI boom. Google I/O, which begins Tuesday, has always been its venue for showing developers where the company is headed. This year, the stakes are higher. Wall Street has already rewarded Alphabet for its AI comeback, but investors want to see whether that confidence is backed by a real product roadmap across key areas like search, cloud, Android, chips and enterprise software. "Google is probably the best-positioned company to monetize AI at scale because it controls almost every layer of the stack," said Lo Toney, founding managing partner of Plexo Capital and an early investor in Anthropic. "We've never really seen a company that has that complete vertical integration from top to bottom to be able to support AI." Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said the advantage in having that many layers of control is not just scale, but speed. "There is a benefit to owning the full stack in terms of the speed that you can innovate," Munster said. "When you're building on your own custom silicon, for example, that's an advantage of speed. When you have access to power, you can get data centers up more quickly. That's a speed advantage, which is important." Here are seven key areas investors are watching for at Google I/O What's next for Gemini The most closely watched announcement will be whether Google unveils a next-generation Gemini model. Reports ahead of I/O have pointed to a potential Gemini 4 debut, though analysts are not fully counting on it. Citi noted that with Gemini 3.1 Pro released in February, Google has been on a roughly three-to-four month launch cadence, making a Gemini 3.2 or 3.5 update more likely than a full generational leap. That makes the Gemini 4 question more than a version number. A step up would give Google a cleaner answer to OpenAI and Anthropic. Mizuho wrote that a Gemini 4 announcement "would push Google back up to the bleeding edge of the frontier," while just another generation 3 update would read more like catch-up. The broader Gemini ecosystem update will also be key. Mizuho analysts said they'll specifically be watching for progress on Project Astra, Google's universal AI assistant, along with deeper Gemini Live capabilities, screen sharing, video understanding and native tool use across Search, Gmail, Calendar and Maps. Updates to Gemma, Google's open-source model family, and Gemini Robotics are expected, as well. The usage numbers heading into the event are already stronger than they were a year ago. Paid Gemini Enterprise monthly active users grew 40% in the first quarter over the previous quarter. The Gemini app saw U.S. monthly active users grow 127% year-over-year in April, according to Citi data. Token consumption hit 16 billion per minute as of Google Cloud Next. watch now AI agents If there is one theme running through the I/O session lineup, it is agents. Google has sessions on agentic coding workflows, multimodal tools, media generation, robotics and AI agents. The goal is to position Gemini as not just a chatbot but more of an operating layer across Google's products, capable of understanding context and taking action. "It's who wins the office copilot market," Toney said. "If the bigger market becomes AI agents and orchestrating them — inference infrastructure, multimodal workflows, enterprise search — that's where we see a big opportunity for Google being able to drive Alphabet's future growth." Agentic coding is part of positioning Gemini as a response to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. That category has become one of the clearest proof points for AI's commercial value, especially in enterprise software. Agentic shopping Commerce may be the bigger opportunity. Google already has search, shopping, autofill and payments; now it wants Gemini to connect them into an agentic checkout experience. Google has been expanding its Universal Commerce Protocol, adding partners including Meta, Microsoft, Stripe, Klarna and Affirm in recent weeks. I/O is expected to further show how that infrastructure could enable end-to-end agentic checkout, where Gemini does not just answer a shopping query, but completes a transaction. Sameer Samat, president of Android Ecosystem at Google, described asking Gemini to plan a barbecue, build a menu, open Instacart, add ingredients to a Safeway cart and notify him when the task was done. "If you add that up multiple times a day across your week, that's a lot of time back," Samat said. "Those are the kinds of features that I think p