Key Points
- Google executives threw employees a 2025 strategy session last week, prepping for a year of more competition, regulatory challenges and AI.
- CEO Sundar Pichai, Google’s A.I. features are coming in the first half of the year.
- And that it would be an uneasy year, too, since “we are under scrutiny worldwide”.
As Google CEO Sundar Pichai told his employees last week, “the stakes are high” in 2025, with new competition and regulatory challenges, and the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence.
During a 2025 strategy meeting on Dec. 18, Pichai and other Google executives, in dingy Christmas sweaters, cockeyed about the next 12 months, especially when it came to AI, according to the audio obtained by CNBC.
“I think 2025 will be big,” Pichai said. “I just think it’s really important to remember this is an urgent time and we have to move quicker as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. “To get the most out of this technology and address real user issues we will have to be 100% onsite in 2025.”’” He spoke.
There were workers who turned up to the meeting in person at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California, and others who listened online.
Pichai’s remarks come after a year of some of the most bruising pressure Google has faced since going public 20 years ago. Ads such as search ads and cloud drove healthy revenue, competition intensified in Google’s core markets, and the company grappled with in-house problems such as culture wars and doubts about Pichai’s future plans.
And regulation is swollen with more pressure than ever before.
A federal judge ruled in August that Google illegally has a search market monopoly. The Justice Department demanded Google divest its Chrome internet browser business last November. Another case – filed by the DOJ – had the company violating US laws against online ad technology. That trial concluded in September and has not yet been decided by a judge.
That same month, Britain’s competition regulator put out a notice of objections to Google’s ad tech behaviour that the regulator in its interim findings is affecting competition in the UK.
I mean I don’t forget that the world is watching us,’ Pichai said. ‘It’s part of our size and success. And that’s part of a more general trend where tech is starting to affect society in mass. This is, so now, more than ever, that we are to not get distracted.”
A Google spokesperson didn’t respond.
Google’s search arm remains the market leader, but generative AI has presented people with a whole new menu of options for getting online information, and it has introduced a whole host of new rivals.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT entered the hype race at the end of 2022, and Wall Street names such as Microsoft have pushed the company to a $157 billion valuation. Back in July, OpenAI said it was going to create its own search engine. Perplexity is also advertising their AI-enabled search engine and just closed a $500 million financing round with a $9 billion valuation.
Google is spending huge amounts of money to keep up, mainly through Gemini, its AI model. Gemini’s app integrates with a bunch of other tools such as Google’s chatbot.
“Big, new business building,” said Pichai. That’s the Gemini app, which CEOs expect Google’s next 50 million-user app. The company has 15 apps currently on the verge of that mark.
‘There is a lot of movement with the Gemini app, especially in recent months,’ Pichai said. ‘But we still have a lot of work to do in 2025 to get back in line and establish leadership there too.
Next year will be all about scaling Gemini on the consumer side,’ Pichai went on to say.
‘Don’t always have to be first’
Pichai presented a list of the models for large languages at the meeting: Gemini 1.5 is first, followed by OpenAI’s GPT, and others.
“There will be a bit of back and forth” in 2025, Pichai added. “I reckon we’ll be cutting edge”.
Google has played catch-up, he conceded.
‘You don’t always have to be first; you’ve got to do it well and you have to be top of the class as a product in history,’ he said. I think that’s 2025.” “Yeah.
Chief executives answered employees’ questions submitted by Google’s internal system. One Pichai read aloud response was that ChatGPT “is being treated as if it is AI as Google is for search” with the reader asking: “How are we going to fight this in the coming year? Or is it not as consumer-facing LLM that we’re after?”.
The solution, Pichai asked DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis: We’re going to “turbocharge” the Gemini app and have made some gains with number of users since we released the app in February. “The products themselves,” he added, “are going to change by a hundredfold in the next year or two”.
Hassabis had visions of a universal assistant that ‘could seamlessly operate in any field, any mode or any machine’.
Google’s first — Project Astra, the beta of a universal assistant it launched in May — will be updated in the first half of the year.
A second employee issue – will Google scale AI products without charging $200 per month “like everyone else?”
“We haven’t actually considered that kind of subscription yet,” Hassabis replied, and he agrees that Gemini advanced is worth the $20 a month cost. ‘It wouldn’t be forever but they’re not doing it now.
At the end of the meeting, Google brought on stage Google Labs head Josh Woodward. He took the microphone as the Zombie Nation song “Kernkraft 400” was on loud.
“I’m going to try to do six demos in eight minutes,” Woodward said, a boisterous guy.
Woodward started by demonstrating Jules, a coding buddy on a trusted tester’s programme. He told me: “That’s where the future of software development is”.
Then Woodward turned to AI note-taking software NotebookLM, which was updated annually in 2024 with a podcasting component. Woodward shared a new experiment that the company is conducting, where the user could “call in” to a podcast.
Then he got on to Project Mariner, an AI-driven multitasking Chrome extension. Woodward instructed it to show the best Tripadvisor restaurants on Maps. The demo worked, but after a short hiatus, employees who had participated were thundering.
At different points during the meeting, Pichai was reminded by workers to “stay scrappy.” Google has undergone a big cost-cutting drive where about 6% of their employees were eliminated in 2023 and efficiency was never far behind.
Alphabet has 181,269 employees as of the third quarter end (down about 5% compared to 2022).
At one point, Pichai drew on Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who created Google 26 years ago, decades before there were cloud computing or AI.
“You go to early Google, you look at the founders when they constructed our data centers, they were really scrappy about everything,” Pichai said. “Often, constraints lead to creativity. The solution to a problem is not always a matter of number.”
