Research@ 2026: 10 ways we're amplifying human ingenuity

We are living through a golden age of research and scientific discovery. For the scientists and researchers at Google Research, the opportunity extends beyond pioneering breakthroughs. We’re also building and sharing robust tools that empower the global ecosystem. AI acts as an amplifier of human ingenuity, creating the conditions for curiosity and rigorous inquiry to flourish.

Today, at our Research@ event in Mountain View, we are demonstrating how we put never-before-possible insights and capabilities into the hands of doctors, scientists, developers, public health officials, and others.

Here are 10 highlights:

1. Google Earth AI enables planetary intelligence for organizations and society

Addressing global challenges requires accurate, real-world planetary intelligence. With Google Earth AI, it becomes possible to forecast public health threats, accelerate clean energy investments, provide businesses with foresight, and more. Today, we’re expanding early access and inviting partners to explore three new ways to access Google Earth AI’s new, experimental capabilities:

• Conducting deeper geospatial analysis as part of an early access experimental feature in Google Earth.
• Generating risk assessments and forecasting different scenarios via our planetary prediction engine.
• Integrating our Geospatial Reasoning agent skills directly into custom workflows via an experimental agent-to-agent API, provides developers with programmatic access to core features like satellite imagery parsing, routing and demographic embeddings.

To further support social impact efforts, Google.org is providing $10 million in funding to organizations working on crisis resilience and public health. This includes $2 million to The Milken Institute to unlock infrastructure bottlenecks for affordable housing, clean energy, broadband, safe water systems, and other essential infrastructure.