Google's AI Mode can book reservations for you... kind of

Google Search's AI Mode can now help you book restaurant reservations, or at least get you to the booking page.

On Thursday, the tech giant announced that its AI Mode has new "new agentic capabilities," including helping users book restaurant reservations, with more to come. AI mode is already available in the U.S., the UK, and India, and Google said it's now expanding to more than 180 countries and territories, though only in English, for now.

While some outlets have reported that "Google Search’s new AI Mode can now book reservations for you," that's not quite true yet.

When you're in AI Mode on Google Search, you can describe the kind of dinner reservation you're looking for, including party size, dietary restrictions, date, time, cuisine, etc., and Google's underlying AI models will fan out across the internet and create a list of restaurants with available reservations that fit your criteria. When you've found a reservation that works, AI Mode will take you to the booking page.

The ability to streamline reservations in AI Mode soft-launched in Labs, Google's testing ground for new AI features, and it's only available to AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. However, it's a sign that Google is working on launching more widespread agentic features soon. The announcement said users will soon be able to book event tickets and make local service appointments. Google is working with partners like OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, and Booksy to help curate these recommendations.

The agentic part of this new feature, meaning the part of the feature that uses advanced AI models to take action on your behalf, is the research element. The feature still won't do the actual booking for you. Users will have to manually confirm the booking in a third-party tool like Resy.

Of course, you could just go to Resy or OpenTable and search for reservations that way, but this feature searches across all different platforms and the entire web, and pulls up the reservation times.

The advent of the agentic web promises to automate tedious tasks and research, offloading it to our personalized AI assistants. If AI tools can deliver on this promise, the technology could restructure how we interact with the internet. This is an early glimmer of how agentic AI is taking shape online.

If you're a Google AI Ultra subscriber for $250 a month, you can try agentic reservation booking in Search Labs by clicking on "Agentic capabilities in AI Mode."