On this week's pod, Vik and I asked why Meta looks better positioned than Google to orchestrate agents at the edge. Google has the phones, the TPUs, the models, and the people.
My answer is that Google should ship a Gemini agent on every Android phone by default. That means an agent with OS-level permissions that reads the school email, moves Thursday soccer practice onto the family calendar, and fills out the field trip permission form. Microsoft ran this play in the '90s with Windows and Internet Explorer. Netscape had the better browser and lost anyway, because most people use whatever ships on the machine.
The usual objection is that agents eat search. If the agent completes the task, nobody sees a results page, and the results page is where Google gets paid.
I think that has it backwards. The agent is a new ad surface, and a better one than search.
A search ad reaches someone who is still looking. An agent ad reaches someone who has already decided and handed off the task. Say the agent sees that basketball sign-ups open Monday and my son needs new shoes before the first practice. It picks where to order the shoes from. It suggests a carpool app for the practices that overlap with my daughter's piano lessons. It might even surface a summer camp when the school calendar shows June is open. Each of those suggestions is inventory. Intent doesn't get much higher than "handle this for me.”
Google already sells this kind of placement. It runs ads inside AI Overviews and has been testing them in AI Mode. An on-device agent would take the same auction out of the browser and into every app on the phone.
Distribution decides who owns that inventory. Android runs on more than three billion active devices. Being the default on that base is the IE advantage, and this time it comes with an ad business attached.
That's also why Meta is moving. Meta is an ads company, and it looks at an agent and sees ad inventory.
Two things could still slow Google down. The first is antitrust. A federal court already found that Google maintained its search monopoly partly through default placement deals. A default agent that sells placement is that case again, with a bigger target. The second is Samsung. It's the largest Android OEM, and it ships its own One UI layer and its own Galaxy AI. An agent needs deep OS hooks, and the OEMs decide how deep they go.
Neither is a business-model problem. Both are legal and execution risks, and Google already carries both.
Will Google ship a default agent on Android before Meta gets one onto a device people carry all day?
From the Editor: Austin Lyons
Google Should Run the IE Play
This approach is absolutely the right one but I think overestimates Gemini’s capabilities in computer and browser use.
Meta went above and beyond both in pre-training spend and RL environment dev to get Muse to be capable as a personal agent.
Not to say Google can’t get there, but they need a company-wide effort to improve model capability to execute to this strategy.