Google this week announced the next logical evolution for AI Mode: the ability to link to and interact with users’ apps. This is meant to extend AI Mode’s functionality beyond answering questions to completing tasks across users’ apps. In other words, it brings AI Mode from answers to agent.
Backing up for context, AI Mode is Google’s AI modality that lets users ask multi-part questions. Questions can build on each other while answers factor in a longer-term memory for past questions, behavior, preferences, and persona. It’s increasingly taking over as a front-end UI for Google Search.
Elsewhere, Claude and ChatGPT excel at personal productivity due to their ability to operate in your environment and integrate with your apps. For example, using MCP-enabled connectors, Claude’s possibilities grow exponentially while not forcing users to use new apps or leave their desktop.
Combine these factors and you have AI-Mode’s latest capability. To be fair, Gemini’s desktop app can accomplish such app integrations, but bringing an app-agnostic principle to AI Mode extends functionality and utility across Google’s broader AI surface area. This is where the battle will be fought.
Competitive Battleground
So what does this look like, and what are AI Mode’s integration capabilities? Limited to a handful of apps at launch – including Instacart, Canva, OpenTable and YouTube – users can prompt AI Mode to complete app-centric tasks. Again, the idea is to both extend functionality and do so in users’ own environments.
One goal of this move is for users to not just see AI Mode as an informational tool but a place to do tasks like shopping and planning. The former is what AI Mode does now, but the latter – which is basically agentic AI – is where the AI world is moving, and where most of the competition will take place.
The example Google offers is planning a barbecue. Users can use AI Mode to create a grocery list – something they might have previously done on AI Mode. But where things extend to the next level is connecting one’s Instacart account to automatically populate a shopping cart and transact on the fly.
Beyond UX and convenience, that last part of the process is what Google is salivating over. By owning the user interaction for the full funnel, Google positions itself as a measurable source of tangible local business revenue… which answers the persistent question of how it will monetize AI as it disrupts itself.
Meanwhile, all the above is rolling out in AI Mode immediately with a limited set of compatible apps and to U.S. users. Other countries and regions to follow. More importantly, the list of compatible apps will grow as AI Mode’s utility will be tied to the comprehensiveness of app integrations that are possible.
The API is the New UI
Backing up, one through line in all the above is the drive towards bringing AI to users’ environments. Rather than expect users to show up at Google’s front door to launch AI Mode, it wants to bring AI Mode to users. In this case, it means bringing its functionality to the familiar apps they already use.
This bring AI to users principle plays out in varied ways across the competitive landscape, but is a clear trend as the industry’s competitive standards continue to ratchet up. Claude is demonstrating this principle with the greatest success so far, judging by its market-share growth for AI productivity.
This also traces back to something Mark Benioff said recently: The API is the New UI. Echoed in our recent discussion with Yext Chief Data Officer Christian Ward, the idea is that you can boost engagement by being more permeated in users’ environments, rather than expecting them to always come to you.
This means redesigning workflows and the current drive towards getting users to log in to a given software product as much as possible. If done right, it will engender more user engagement, not less. Meanwhile, the exodus from logins as a KPI means redefining what success looks like in the agentic age.
“The marks of success for software will be that, one: users can’t live without it,” said Ward, “and two: they never log in.”
