• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Advertisers expect Google, Microsoft and others to develop sophisticated agentic technology, but next week at one of Google’s major conferences, the company could demonstrate what its developers have accomplished.

At one of Google's major events scheduled for next week, the company is likely to announce a software AI agent that will have visual features like Pinterest -- intended to inspire users when they think about topics related to fashion, design, travel, and more.

Google has reportedly demonstrated the tool to employees and select third-party developers ahead of the company’s annual conference, according to a report by The Information, which suggests it could become a competitor to Pinterest.

The two major annual conferences that will take place next week include Google's developer I/O conference and Google Marketing Live focused on advertising and marketing. 

Google I/O typically announced Google’s latest advancements in technology and provides developers with insights into the future. 

Insights, for example, related to multimodal, which combines or integrates multiple methods like text, video, audio, and other inputs, has been a major focus for Google. A Pinterest-like features would become more visually engaging search experience.

The report said Google is testing voice-enabled interactions powered by its Gemini AI on upcoming XR devices.

Microsoft last week said it has embraced Google’s recently launched open protocol for allowing agentic agents to communicate with each other, and that it will support Google’s Agent2Agent (A2A) specifications, which Google released in April, to two of its AI development platforms, Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio.

The protocol powers semi-autonomous software programs to work together across clouds, apps and services. Microsoft also joined the A2A working group on GitHub to contribute to the protocol and tooling, the company explained in a blog post.

AI technology will continue to have an impact on search-related APIs. Bing in August will retire its search API, the company said. It applies to Microsoft partners still using "the F1 and S1 through S9 resources of Bing Search, or the F0 and S1 through S4 resources of Bing Custom Search," the company wrote in a blog post. 

Microsoft also suggested that its customers consider "grounding with Bing Search" that allows Azure AI Agents to incorporate real-time public web data when generating responses with a large language model (LLM).