Twenty years ago this June, we welcomed one hundred geo developers to Google’s campus for Geo Developer Day 2006. Nobody knew it then, but that small gathering laid the groundwork and paved the way for what is now Google I/O. This week we gathered thousands of developers together at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California and millions online for I/O 2026. We’re excited to share our latest innovations from Google Maps Platform.
During the opening keynote we showcased Ask Maps within Google Maps, showing how people are turning to Google for help in new ways. AI Mode in Search also showed how Google Maps powers personal intelligence use cases in planning weekend activities. We also announced that we are bringing Street View imagery to DeepMind’s Project Genie, so you can anchor interactive worlds in reality. I/O attendees told us they were impressed with the quality of Genie worlds generated with Street View.
Building agents with real-world reasoning
We’re excited about the ways that Google Maps Platform can bridge the gap between large language models and the physical world. Last week we released our I/O Developer Session titled: Building agents with real-world reasoning. In this session, Ken Nevarez and Caio Moreira from our Developer Experience team help you understand how Maps Grounding Lite uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to make it easy to connect your AI applications with reliable real-world geospatial data directly from Google Maps.
To help you bring these grounded responses to life, we also announced that the Maps Agentic UI Toolkit (MAUI) is now broadly available in Experimental. This geospatial visualization layer gives your AI agents a "visual voice," effortlessly turning unstructured conversational text into interactive, rich maps in real-time.
Building agents with real-world reasoning developer session
Engaging directly with developers
Following the developer keynote, we showcased the recently announced Maps Imagery Grounding in the Real World AI demo. Attendees experienced hands-on demos showing how developers can anchor generative AI media in Google Street View. – and how Google LLMs can benefit from real world information to create more accurate AI visuals. Developers were enthusiastic about how Grounding with Google Maps can be used to enhance AI responses with one of the world's most trusted sources of Maps data and imagery.
The Google Maps Platform team at I/O 2026 in Mountain View, California
The Google Maps Platform team at I/O 2026 in Mountain View, California
The Google Maps Platform team at I/O 2026 in Mountain View, California
Thank you to everyone who joined us in person at I/O in Mountain View. The I/O keynotes and all technical sessions are also now online for you to explore. If you didn’t make it, we are excited to see many more of you in person at I/O Connect in Berlin and Bengaluru!
