At Google’s developer conference, which is being held near its Mountain View, California, headquarters this week, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai started his keynote by emphasizing the remarkable reach of Google’s services. Thirteen have more than a billion users, he said, and five of them have more than 3 billion.
This enormous scale is what gives the Alphabet Inc. unit its obvious and massive competitive advantage in consumer AI. Its flagship apps not only attract a lot of people, they attract a lot of personal and real-world data — information that can be combined in ways competitors can’t match.
Yet as the I/O keynote flew past the hour-and-a-half mark on Tuesday, it became clear Google faces an issue in rolling out AI to all those services. Hearing the latest announcements was like sitting in a wind tunnel. The danger that consumers will be left overwhelmed, and grow more resistant as a result, is real. In trying to reinvent Google’s services for AI, there’s such a thing as doing way too much way too quickly.
Google Search is changing in what the company is calling the biggest overhaul of its search box interface in 25 years. Certain queries will no longer return the traditional list of links but an “interactive experience” built with AI, queries that can then be engaged with further through discussion or even mini apps — perfect if you want to “wrap your mind around astrophysics,” Google suggested in a blog post. Or you could “ask Search to build you a custom fitness tracker.” You can also create “information agents” to search on your behalf, alerting you to new information at all hours.
The crux of it is this: The days when Google offered up only a list of links based on a query now seem long behind us. We’re reaching the point where Google is no longer interested in having its users leave its web properties for anything.
It doesn’t stop there. In Gmail, a new Gmail Live feature will allow users to talk to their inboxes. Docs Live, in Google Docs, will now allow you to talk through your ideas as you formulate a draft.
Agents were a big theme of the I/O keynote, with Google also launching Gemini Spark, a take on the popular open source OpenClaw bot, which can carry out general purpose tasks across several Google apps. A new version of the Mac app can carry out agent tasks, too. Other announcements included updates to Google Stitch, for making websites, and new agent offerings within coding app Google Antigravity. Google Pics will use AI prompts to more precisely edit pictures (but shouldn’t be confused with Google Photos). Google Flow and Google Flow Music are for creating video, images and audio.
If this is all starting to feel a little dizzying, don’t blame yourself. Google went from being too slow to ship AI products — causing a mini crisis when ChatGPT hit the scene — to now not knowing when to slow down. The company has long had a history of messy branding — think of the dizzying array of video and messaging apps it launched and then killed over the years — and AI is taking this to a new level.
I believe many consumers will be turned off by a bewildering array of AI tools with overlapping functionality and confusing pricing — particularly when a majority regard AI with suspicion. Google should learn from Microsoft Corp.’s experiences in shoveling its Copilot AI into every possible corner of its office software, which both frustrated users and attracted regulatory scrutiny.
Alphabet’s share price was down just more than 2% for the day, a sign investors were less than enamored by what was shown on stage, or maybe just the lack of clear headline moment. I’m still bullish on Google’s positioning in the AI race: It has the engineering expertise, the money, the hardware and, as mentioned, the customer base. What it seems to lack is focus. It’s clear the many divisions of Google are working overtime to incorporate AI into their products. Less evident is much an effort to integrate their products with one another.
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