Google CEO Pichai tells employees “risks are high” heading into 2025

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last week that the company has “higher stakes” for 2025 as the company faces rising competitive and regulatory hurdles and deals with rapid advances in artificial intelligence. “It’s expensive,” he told employees.

At a Dec. 18 2025 strategy meeting, Pichai and other Google leaders donned tacky holiday sweaters to get excited about next year, especially about future developments in AI, according to audio obtained by CNBC. There was a lot of excitement related to this.

“I think 2025 is going to be a critical year,” Pichai said. “I think it’s really important to recognize the urgency of this moment, and we need to act faster as a company. The stakes are high and this is a disruptive moment. In 2025, we We need to be relentlessly focused on maximizing the technology and its benefits by solving real problems for our users.”

Some employees attended the meeting in person at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, while others participated virtually.

Pichai’s comments come after one of the most intense and pressure-filled years Google has experienced since going public two decades ago. While areas such as search advertising and cloud delivered strong revenue growth, competition in Google’s core markets increased and the company faced internal challenges, including culture clashes and concerns about Mr. Pichai’s vision for the future.

Additionally, regulations have become more stringent than ever before.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally holds a monopoly in the search market. In November, the Justice Department asked Google to force it to sell its Chrome internet browser division. In a separate lawsuit, the Justice Department accused the company of illegally controlling online advertising technology. The trial concluded in September and is awaiting the judge’s decision.

In the same month, the UK competition watchdog raised objections to Google’s ad tech practices, which the regulator provisionally found were affecting competition in the UK.

“I am not forgetting that we are under scrutiny around the world,” Pichai said. “It comes with our scale and success. It’s part of a broader trend where technology is having a massive impact on society. So through this moment, more than ever, we’re You have to avoid distractions.”

A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

Google’s search business still commands a commanding market share, but generative AI is offering all sorts of new ways for people to access online information, bringing in many new competitors. .

OpenAI’s ChatGPT begins hype cycle in late 2022, with the following investors microsoft Since then, the company’s valuation has reached $157 billion. OpenAI announced in July that it would launch its own search engine. Perplexity also promotes AI-powered search services and recently closed a $500 million funding round at a $9 billion valuation.

Google is investing heavily to stay on top, primarily through its AI model, Gemini. The Gemini app gives users access to a variety of tools, including Google’s chatbot.

Pichai said his top priority is “building a big new business.” That includes the Gemini app, which executives said they believe could be Google’s next app to reach 500 million users. The company currently has 15 apps that have achieved that goal.

“We’ve seen strong momentum especially in recent months when it comes to the Gemini app,” Pichai said. “But we have some work to do to close that gap by 2025 and establish ourselves as a leader there as well.”

“Gemini’s expansion on the consumer side will be the biggest focus next year,” Pichai later added.

At the conference, Pichai showed a diagram of the large-scale language model that Gemini 1.5 will lead over OpenAI’s GPT and other competitors.

“We expect there to be some ups and downs” in 2025, Pichai said. “I think we’re going to be cutting edge.”

He acknowledged that Google needs to play catch-up.

“You don’t always have to be first in history, but you have to execute well and really be best-in-class as a product,” he said. “I think that’s what 2025 is all about.”

Management accepted questions submitted by employees through Google’s internal systems. One comment Pichai read out suggested that ChatGPT is “becoming as synonymous with AI as Google search,” and asked, “What are your plans to compete with this next year? Or are they less focused on the consumer?” Are you facing an LLM? ”

For answers, Pichai turned to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. He said the team intends to “turbocharge” the Gemini app, and the company has seen an increase in user numbers since releasing the app in February. “The product itself will evolve significantly over the next year or two,” he said.

Hassabis described his vision for a universal assistant that “can work seamlessly in any domain, in any modality, and on any device.”

Project Astra, an experimental version of Google’s universal assistant that Google announced in May, is scheduled to be updated in the first half of this year.

Another employee’s question asked if Google could scale its AI products without charging $200 a month “like other companies.”

“We don’t have any plans for this type of subscription level at this time,” Hassabis replied, adding that he believes Gemini Advanced’s $20 monthly fee is good value. “I’m not saying never, but there are no plans at this time.”

Towards the end of the conference, Google welcomed Josh Woodward, director of Google Labs, to the stage. He grabbed the microphone as Zombie Nation’s song “Kernkraft 400” blared in the background.

“I’m going to do six demos in eight minutes,” said Woodward, who is known for his high energy level.

Woodward began by introducing Jules, a coding assistant in the Trusted Testers program. “That’s where the future of software development is headed,” he said.

Woodward then moved to the AI ​​note-taking product NotebookLM, which received a series of updates in 2024 including a podcasting tool. Woodward demonstrated how the company is experimenting with a new feature that allows users to “phone in” podcasts.

I then moved on to Project Mariner, an AI-powered multitasking Chrome extension. Mr. Woodward asked the company to add the following top restaurants: TripAdvisor to the map app. After a short pause, the demo worked fine and the employees in attendance erupted in applause.

Throughout the meeting, Pichai continued to remind employees of the need to “remain serious.” Google has undergone extensive cost-cutting steps, including cutting about 6% of its workforce in 2023 and continuing to focus on efficiency.

Alphabet had 181,269 employees at the end of the third quarter, down about 5% from the end of 2022.

At one point, Pichai mentioned Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded the company 26 years ago, long before cloud computing and AI tools existed.

“If you look at how Google’s founders built our data centers in the early days of Google, they were very careful about every decision they made,” Pichai said. . “Constraints often lead to creativity. Not all problems are always solved by numbers.”

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