Google I/O 2025: AI Founder Essentials

Good morning! Welcome to today’s edition of First AI Movers Pro—your daily digest of AI’s latest moves. Today is a special edition. We are going to look back at the Google I/O conference and highlight a few important and underrated releases from Google. Let’s get started!

Have you ever watched a big tech keynote and thought, “This is cool… but how does it help me build my startup tomorrow?” If you tuned into Google I/O 2025, you probably felt a mix of excitement and overwhelm at the parade of AI announcements. Beyond the buzzwords and demos, there’s a deeper story here for those of us in the trenches of AI innovation. Google isn’t just flexing its tech muscles — it’s handing AI builders a new toolkit that could fundamentally change how we build products. Let’s unpack the most practical, game-changing updates and what they mean for you as an AI founder or developer.

Gemini 2.5 Pro: A Model That Thinks Harder for You

Google’s latest flagship AI model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, took the I/O stage with a clear message: it’s smarter, more thoughtful, and ready to tackle complex problems. How so? Enter Deep Think mode — an experimental feature that allows the model to consider multiple approaches before answering. In plain terms, Gemini can essentially “think out loud” behind the scenes, double-checking itself on tough questions instead of blurting out the first answer that pops up. Google describes Deep Think as an enhanced reasoning mode for highly complex tasks like advanced math and coding. For anyone who’s wrestled with AI that sometimes goes on tangents or makes silly mistakes, this is a big deal.

From a founder’s perspective, a model with better reasoning is like having a team member who not only answers questions but also shows their work. It unlocks the confidence to delegate more complex tasks to AI, whether it’s debugging a gnarly piece of code, analyzing intricate data patterns, or handling a multi-step customer query. I/O 2025’s message is that raw model power is now being coupled with judgment. Gemini 2.5 Pro is effectively saying, “I can handle the hard stuff now,” and that means you can push the boundaries of what features your AI-driven product offers. Even better, Google is making these advanced brains more accessible (with API access via Vertex AI and pricing that won’t require a VC round to afford, as Sundar Pichai noted that model costs are dropping along with improved performance). In short, the AI “engine” at your disposal just got a serious upgrade in both IQ and reliability — and that can translate to more ambitious ideas making it off the whiteboard and into reality.

Gemini Code Assist: AI Pair Programming Goes Mainstream

Building software is as much about the journey as the destination, and for years, we’ve dreamed of an AI pair programmer to make that journey smoother. This year, Gemini Code Assist graduated to General Availability, meaning Google’s AI coding assistant is officially open for business (and notably, free for individual developers). If you’ve been holding out on trying AI coding tools, this is a friendly nudge to try. Code Assist integrates directly into your development workflow (think suggestions as you type, similar to GitHub Copilot, but now powered by Google’s latest model). It can autocomplete chunks of code, flag errors, and even suggest improvements in real time. In fact, Google announced at I/O that Code Assist is now generally available on both individual and enterprise tiers, with Gemini 2.5 powering its advanced coding capabilities. Google even shared that developers at Wayfair saw environment setup tasks completed 55% faster when using Code Assist, and after testing similar tools, I believe it.

The practical impact for a scrappy startup? It’s like adding a junior dev who’s read the entire internet’s open-source code and StackOverflow answers. You’ll spend less time on boilerplate and hunting down syntax issues, and more time focusing on your product’s unique logic. Writing a new function or API integration feels less like slogging through mud and more like having an eager assistant finish your sentences. Because Code Assist is now generally available, you don’t have to jump through hoops or waitlist sign-ups — you can plug it in today and instantly level up your coding efficiency. For founders trying to ship features on tight timelines, that’s transformative. It’s a signal that AI-driven development isn’t a futuristic concept; it’s here, in your IDE, ready to help you build faster and smarter.

Jules: Your New Developer Who Never Sleeps (Async Coding Agent)

Of all the I/O 2025 announcements, one that genuinely made me grin was Jules — an asynchronous coding agent that feels like a glimpse into the future of software development. If Code Assist is a helpful sidekick while you code, Jules is more like an autonomous teammate who you can hand tasks to and trust they’ll get done (or at least attempted) by morning. Think of those moments when you wish you could “give this to someone else to handle” — fixing a bunch of bugs, writing unit tests, or scaffolding a new feature you’ve outlined. Jules is built to tackle that kind of busywork in the background.

Here’s how it works: you assign Jules a task (say, “refactor the payment module for better error handling” or “build a simple blog page for our app”), and then Jules goes off to work asynchronously. It will clone your code repository, start crunching on the task using its Gemini 2.5 Pro-powered brain, and eventually come back with results, often as a pull request ready for your review. Essentially, it’s an AI developer who clones your repo, writes or modifies code on its own branch, and then asks for your approval before merging. All while you were focusing elsewhere (or getting some well-earned sleep). As a founder, the idea of progress happening without me actively at the keyboard is both thrilling and a bit uncanny, in a good way.

Jules is currently in public beta (with free usage limits while Google fine-tunes it), and it might not have grabbed headlines like the flashy consumer AI demos, but it could be a secret weapon for developers. Bug bash coming up? Offload some fixes to Jules. Prototype needs a new feature by tomorrow? Let Jules draft it out overnight. Sure, you’ll need to review and polish its work — it’s not magic — but even having a first draft or a proposed solution waiting for you is a huge productivity boost. According to reports, Jules can craft code, fix bugs, and run tests on GitHub repos autonomously, with no human oversight until it’s time to merge. It’s like having an intern who works tirelessly and writes decent code, all powered by state-of-the-art AI. For anyone building a product with a small team (or solo), Jules might just become your favorite “hire” from Google I/O.

Firebase Studio: From Idea to App at Lightning Speed

Every AI founder knows that building a great AI model is only half the battle — you also need to build the app around it. Enter Firebase Studio, a new cloud-based AI development environment that’s all about accelerating the journey from idea to a full-stack application. Announced at I/O 2025, Firebase Studio feels like walking into a high-tech workshop where a lot of the grunt work is already handled. Front-end, back-end, deployment — you name it, this workspace is trying to automate or assist with it.

Imagine this: you sketch out a UI idea in Figma (or even on a napkin), and instead of spending days translating that into code, you import it into Firebase Studio’s Prototyping agent. Within minutes, you have a working interface and the back-end set up — database, authentication, cloud functions, and all. Backend? Handled. Need some sample images or icons? There’s integration with Unsplash and even an AI image generator, so your prototype doesn’t look like a lorem ipsum wasteland. Basically, Firebase Studio combines the ease of Firebase’s backend-as-a-service (hosting, data, and auth) with the power of generative AI to write code and configure resources for you. As the Firebase team put it, “with a single prompt you can create a fully functional app… lean on AI assistance throughout, or jump into the code thanks to the full power of a customizable IDE and underlying VM”. In other words, the platform helps scaffold the boring but necessary parts of the app for you, even letting you import your Figma designs directly into a working project and easily swap placeholder images with real ones from Unsplash.

For AI startups, this means you can spin up a minimum viable product ridiculously fast. You can focus on your special sauce (be it a novel AI model or a unique user experience) while the platform helps assemble the rest of the app around it. It’s even conversational and agentic — you can literally chat with the studio, telling it what you want (“Build me a simple app where users can upload a photo and an AI model gives a fun caption”), and it will assemble the pieces. It won’t replace mindful software architecture or clever engineering, but it will handle much of the heavy lifting for you. The takeaway: Google is smoothing out the engineering glue-work that often slows us down. In a world where speed to market can make or break an idea, having a toolbox like Firebase Studio means more iterations, faster pivots, and less time scratching your head over boilerplate code.

Project Mariner: Giving AI Agents the Ability to Act

You might have heard the term “AI agents” tossed around, the idea that AI doesn’t just chat with us, but can take actions on our behalf, like a digital assistant actually executing tasks. Until now, that’s mostly been the stuff of geeky experiments (remember those autonomous agent demos that ordered pizzas or tried to book flights, often hilariously fumbling along the way?). Google’s Project Mariner is their answer to making agentic AI not only real, but also reliable and safe. Announced as part of I/O 2025’s developer updates, Mariner is essentially an infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. It provides under-the-hood APIs and systems so that an AI can use tools, browse the web, and perform multi-step tasks in a controlled, safe way.

In practical terms, Project Mariner and its new APIs (for things like “Computer Use” — yes, that’s an API for letting AI drive a web browser or other apps) mean you can start to build products where the AI isn’t just a brain, but also a pair of hands. For example, instead of just recommending the best flight options, an AI powered by Mariner could go ahead and navigate a travel site to actually book the flight for you (with your permission). It could handle a bunch of tasks concurrently, too. In fact, Sundar Pichai revealed that a Mariner-based agent can juggle up to 10 simultaneous tasks at once. This is huge for productivity tools, automation software, or any startup idea where you’d love the AI to just “take care of it” rather than giving the user a to-do list.

Crucially, Google is focusing on teachability and reliability here. Rather than expecting a magically omniscient AI, you can teach a Mariner agent new skills (perhaps by demonstration or natural language instructions), and it learns to repeat them. Pichai highlighted a “teach and repeat” feature: “You can show it a task once, and it learns a plan for similar tasks in the future.” It’s like training a new team member, except this one can scale to thousands of users once it learns the task. And because it’s built on Google’s infrastructure, it benefits from all the guardrails and safety research Google has baked in (which, let’s face it, you really want when your agent is clicking around the web on your behalf). Project Mariner is being opened up to developers via the Gemini API (with trusted partners like Automation Anywhere and UiPath already experimenting), and it will be available more broadly this summer. For AI founders, Mariner signals that we’re moving beyond chatbots. We’re heading into an era where you can offer your users an AI that gets things done, handling the boring or complex steps automatically. It’s early days — many of these capabilities are just rolling out in preview — but the direction is clear. If you’ve been sketching ideas for an AI that automates workflows or online tasks, now’s the time to pay attention, because the infrastructure to build “agents that actually work” is finally emerging.

Conclusion & Call to Action

Watching Google I/O 2025 felt like witnessing the AI toolkit evolve in real time. As an AI founder, I don’t just see new features — I see doors opening. A model that can reason more deeply means our applications can tackle thornier problems. AI coding assistants becoming mainstream (and affordable) means small teams can achieve big things with less friction. An autonomous coding agent means progress can continue even when we log off for the night. A smarter app-building studio means ideas can be tested and launched faster than ever. And an agent infrastructure means those ideas can be more than just smart — they can be action-oriented, truly helpful in the real world.

In the end, what Google I/O 2025 really means for us as builders is acceleration. The mundane is getting automated; the once-impossible is getting within reach. Our role is shifting toward guiding these powerful tools — being the visionaries and architects, while the AI takes on more of the heavy lifting. It’s an exciting (and maybe slightly daunting) time to be creating. But we don’t have to navigate it alone.

If you’re as energized by these developments as I am (or even cautiously intrigued), let’s keep the conversation going. I’m Dr. Hernani Costa, an AI CxO Strategist and fellow builder who loves exploring how cutting-edge tech can solve real problems. Feel free to reach out with your thoughts or questions. For a deeper dive with more examples and my personal analysis, be sure to check out my articles on Medium as I go into even more detail there, and I’d love to hear your take! 

• What Google I/O 2025 Really Means for AI Founders. 

• Beyond the Screen: Google’s AI Hardware Horizon and Your Next Platform.

• The AI Creative Suite: Unleashing Hollywood-Level Magic for Your Startup.

• The AI-First Blueprint: Google’s Grand Strategy and Your Startup’s Place.

Until tomorrow,
Dr. Hernani Costa @ First AI Movers