Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, January 22, 2020.
Fabrice COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images
CEO of Google Sundar Pichai told employees last week that “the stakes are high” for 2025, as the company faces increased competition and regulatory hurdles and grapples with rapid advances in artificial intelligence.
At a 2025 strategy meeting on Dec. 18, Pichai and other Google executives, sporting ugly holiday sweaters, fired up the coming year, mostly in terms of what’s to come in AI, according to an audio recording obtained by CNBC.
“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai said. “I think it’s really important that we internalize the urgency of this moment and we need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of this technology and solving real user problems.”
Some employees attended the meeting in person at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, while others listened virtually.
Pichai’s comments come after a year filled with some of the most beautiful intense pressure Google has experienced since going public two decades ago. While areas such as search ads and the cloud led to strong revenue growth, competition increased in Google’s core markets, and the company faced internal challenges including cultural clashes and concerns about Pichai’s vision for the future.
In addition, regulation is now more difficult than ever.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally holds a monopoly on the search market. In November, the Department of Justice requested that Google be forced to resign your Chrome internet browser unit. In a separate case, the DOJ accused the company of unlawfully dominating online ad technology. That trial ended in September and the judge’s decision is awaited.
In the same month, the British one guardian of the competition issued a statement of objections to Google’s ad technology practices, which the regulator provisionally found to be affecting competition in the UK
“I have not forgotten that we are facing worldwide surveillance,” Pichai said. “It comes with our size and success. It is part of a wider trend where technology is now having a major impact on society. So, more than ever, at this point, we have to be careful not to get distracted.”
A Google spokesman declined to comment.
Google search still has a dominant market share, but generative artificial intelligence has offered a variety of new ways to access information online and brought with it a host of new competitors.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched a hype cycle in late 2022, with investors including Microsoft since then they have valued the company at $157 billion. In July, OpenAI announced that it would launch a search engine own. Perplexity is also promoting its AI-powered search service and recently closed a $500 million funding round on Estimated $9 billion.
Google is investing heavily to try to stay on top, mostly through Gemini, its AI model. The Gemini app gives users access to a number of tools, including Google’s chatbot.
Pichai said “building a big, new business” is a top priority. That includes the Gemini app, which executives said they see as the next Google app to reach half a billion users. The company currently has 15 apps that have achieved that mark.
“There is strong momentum with the Gemini app, especially in the last few months,” Pichai said. “But we still have work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leading position there as well.”
“Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” Pichai added later.
“You don’t always have to be the first”
At the meeting, Pichai showed a graph of large language models, with Gemini 1.5 leading OpenAI’s GPT and other competitors.
“I expect some back and forth” in 2025, Pichai said. “I think we’re going to be top notch.”
He admitted that Google had to play castchup.
“In history, you don’t always have to be first, but you have to be good and really be best in class as a product,” he said. “I think that’s what 2025 is all about.”
Executives answered questions submitted by employees through Google’s internal system. One comment read aloud by Pichai suggested that ChatGPT “is becoming synonymous with AI in the same way that Google search is,” with the questioner asking, “What is our plan to combat that in the coming year? Or do we not focus as much on consumers you face LLM?”
For an answer, Pichai reached out to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, who said the teams will “turbocharge” the Gemini app and that the company has seen an increase in user numbers since the app launched in February. He said that “the products themselves are going to evolve massively over the next year or two.”
Hassabis described a vision of a universal assistant that “can work seamlessly in any domain, any modality or any device.”
Project Astra, Google’s experimental version of the universal assistant published by the company in May, will be updated in the first half of the year.
Another employee question asked whether Google would be able to scale AI products without charging $200 a month “like other companies.”
“We don’t have any plans for this type of subscription right now,” Hassabis replied, adding that he thinks the $20 monthly fee for Gemini Advanced is a good value. “I wouldn’t necessarily say never, but there are no plans for that right now.”
Towards the end of the meeting, Google welcomed Josh Woodward, head of Google Labs, to the stage. He took the microphone as Zombie Nation’s “Kernkraft 400” played loudly in the background.
“I’m going to try to do six demos in eight minutes,” said Woodward, who is known for his high energy level.
Woodward began by showing Jules, a coding assistant who is in the trusted tester program. He said, “That’s where the future of software development is going.”
Woodward then moved on to AI note-taking product NotebookLM, which featured a number of updates in 2024, including a podcasting tool. Woodward demonstrated how the company is testing a new feature that allows a user to “invite” a podcast.
He then moved on to Project Mariner, Chrome’s AI-powered multitasking extension. Woodward asked to add the best restaurants from Tripadvisor in the Maps application. After a short break, the demonstration worked successfully, which caused applause from the employees present.
During the meeting, Pichai kept reminding employees of the need to “stay scrappy.” Google went through an extensive cost-cutting phase that included eliminating about 6% of its workforce in 2023 and continuing to focus on efficiency.
At the end of the third quarter, Alphabet had 181,269 employees, a decrease of about 5% compared to the end of 2022.
At one point, Pichai mentioned the founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brinwho started the company 26 years ago, long before cloud computing or AI tools existed.
“In the early days of Google, if you look at how the founders built our data centers, they were really unsuccessful in every decision they made,” Pichai said. “Often limitations lead to creativity. Not all problems are always solved by the number of employees.”
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