Did Google's Workspace Redesign Make Its Icons Easier for AI to See?

Google's 2026 Workspace icon redesign didn't just improve human usability—it also improved machine perception. By comparing old and new icons across OpenCLIP, SigLIP, and DINOv2, I found that the redesigned icons are consistently more separated in embedding space. The biggest gains came from Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms, which were previously clustered together due to nearly identical shapes and colors. As software agents increasingly rely on vision rather than DOM access, embedding separabil...