Sundar Pichai tells Google employees to gear up for challenging 2025

Facing increased competition, Google will introduce a number of AI features in the first half of the year

By Arun Kumar

With search giant Google facing increased competition and scrutiny across the world, Indian American CEO Sundar Pichai has warned employees about a challenging year ahead as the company contends with regulatory hurdles and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.

“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai told employees at a 2025 strategy meeting on Dec 18, CNBC reported citing an audio obtained by it. Some employees attended the meeting in person at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, and others tuned in virtually.

READ: Google sues Indian engineer for leaking Pixel trade secrets (November 27th, 2024) 

“I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high,” he was quoted as saying. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of this technology and solve real user problems.”

“It’s not lost on me that we are facing scrutiny across the world,” Pichai said. “It comes with our size and success. It’s part of a broader trend where tech is now impacting society at scale. So more than ever, through this moment, we have to make sure we don’t get distracted.”

A Google spokesperson declined to comment, according to CNBC.

Faced with increased competition from generative AI, Google is investing heavily to try and stay on top, principally through Gemini, its AI model. The Gemini app gives users access to a number of tools, including Google’s chatbot.

Pichai said “building big, new business” is a top priority. That includes the Gemini app, which executives said they see as Google’s next app to reach half a billion users. The company currently has 15 apps that have hit that mark.

“With the Gemini app, there is strong momentum, particularly over the last few months,” Pichai said. “But we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well.”

“Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” Pichai later added. At the meeting, Pichai showed a chart 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’ll be state of the art.”

He acknowledged that Google has had to play catch-up. “In history, you don’t always need to be first but you have to execute well and really be the best in class as a product,” he said. “I think that’s what 2025 is all about.”

Asked about Google’s plans to combat ChatGPT which “is becoming synonymous to AI the same way Google is to search,” Pichai turned to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis for an answer.

Hassabis said that teams are going to “turbocharge” the Gemini app and that the company has seen progress in the number of users since launching the app in February. He said, “the products themselves are going to evolve massively over the next year or two.”

Hassabis described a vision for a universal assistant that “can seamlessly operate over any domain, any modality or any device.”

Project Astra, Google’s experimental version of a universal assistant that the company announced in May, will be updated in the first half of the year.

Throughout the meeting, Pichai kept reminding employees of the need to “stay scrappy.” Google has gone through an extensive phase of cost cutting that included eliminating about 6% of its workforce in 2023 and a continued focus on efficiency.

As of the end of the third quarter, Alphabet had 181,269 employees, down about 5% from the end of 2022. At one point, Pichai referenced Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who started the company 26 years ago, long before cloud computing or AI tools existed.

“In early Google days, you look at how the founders built our data centers, they were really really scrappy in every decision they made,” Pichai said. “Often, constraints lead to creativity. Not all problems are always solved by headcount.”